mable communication devices. The NIST work is based on the Session Initia- tion Protocol, a specification for call control on the Internet. NIST's open source implementation (NIST SIP) is a prototype that serves as a develop- ment guide and facilitates interoperability testing by early industry adopters of this technology. 2.10 COGNITIVE SOFTWARE: ANTICIPATING USER INTENT New "smart" software promises to fundamentally change the way people interact with computers, making it easier for users to express their intentions to an array of digital devices, including personal assistants and smart phones. The result could be machines that think and behave more like people. Over the past five years, a research team at the U.S. Department of Energy's Sandia National Laboratories has been developing cognitive machines that accurately infer user intent, remember past experiences, and allow users to call on simulated experts to help them analyze situations and make decisions. "In NUTS AND BITS-TELECOM HARDWARE, SOFTWARE, AND MORE the long term, the benefits from this effort are expected to include augment- ing human effectiveness and embedding these cognitive models into systems for better human-hardware interactions," says John Wagner, manager of Sandia's computational initiatives department. The work's initial goal was to create a "synthetic human"- program/ computer-that could think like a person. "We had the massive computers that could compute the large amounts of data, but software that could realistically model how people think and make decisions was missing," says Chris Forsythe, a Sandia cognitive psychologist who is leading the research. There were two significant problems with creating the original software. First, the software did not relate to how people actually make decisions. It fol- lowed logical processes, something people don't necessarily do. That's because humans often make decisions based on experiences and associative knowl- edge. Additionally, the model didn't take into account organic factors, such as 