CAMEO is the physical awareness (PA) component of a larger effort to develop an enduring personalized cognitive assistant that is capable of helping humans handle the many daily business/personal activities that they engage in. This larger project, CALO (Cognitive Agent that Learns and Organizes), is an effort to build a personalized omnipresent computational resource that will be able to handle routine tasks/events, anticipate predictable user needs and prepare for them appropriately, and assist the user in handling unexpected events. Transcribing events from a formal meeting setting (such as who spoke and what was discussed) into a digital form that can be searched and analyzed is a fairly tedious task for a human to do. Systems such as optical character recognition (OCR) and voice-to-text converters speed up the transfer of analog (written and spoken) data into a digital form that can be more easily indexed and manipulated. However, most of these tools are relegated to passive data entry roles where relevant information has already been identified so that it can be scanned or read aloud into a machine. Automatic transcription agents in the near future will be far more interactive and will be able to listen to groups of people talking at a meeting and be able to record (with the permission of the attendees) the spoken, written, and gestured communication. In order to effectively interact with humans in a natural fashion, such an intelligent agent must have a robust physical awareness system with which it can sense humans as they perform tasks in the real world. The Camera Assisted Meeting Event Observer (CAMEO), is a sensory system designed to provide an electronic agent with physical awareness of the real world. CAMEO consists of a set of five cameras oriented in such a way as to capture a panoramic video stream of the world. Instead of instrumenting meeting rooms with large numbers of calibrated cameras, CAMEO is intended to be used more like a speaker phone for a conference call. That is, a CAMEO device will be brought into a meeting and simply placed in the center of the room without requiring special calibration. As such, CAMEO is designed to be used in environments where those who are participating in the meetings agree to and welcome the use of such an electronic assistant. Click here for more information about the CALO project.