This article contains an interview with Timeful CEO Jacob Bank and chairman Yoav Shoham.

A behavioral scientist, artificial intelligence professor, and Stanford PhD candidate in machine learning walk into an office. The result, strangely enough, is yet a to-do and calendar app. But it's no joke.

These three smart, uniquely qualified people--noted economist Dan Ariely, professor Yoav Shoham, and CEO Jacob Bank--arent in love with to-do apps. But with their app Timeful, theyre trying to solve an acutely modern human problem using the types of tools people are already used to.

We built many things that looked very different from a calendar and a to-do list, but what we found over and over again is that its hard to affect behavior change if youre not in the environment, says CEO Jacob Bank. Its very hard to get people to go to another place that adds functionality on top of a set of tools that theyre already accustomed to--like the calendar and to-do list. We eventually realized that to have an impact we had to leverage some of the familiarities of the current tools.

Timeful uses what the teams calls the "Intention Genome" and "Intention Rank" to algorithmically assist in scheduling a persons day. The names were inspired by Pandoras Music Genome and Googles Page Rank, respectively. The Intention Genome breaks down user behavior to better categorize it and the Intention Rank helps to determine the best place to schedule items throughout the day.

The Timeful app is essentially just a backdrop for the companys algorithmic magic. Sure, it looks like a smart to-do list and calendar, but thats the sleight of hand. Its real trick is trying to make people more mindful of their time and form better habits.

We needed a single starting point to demonstrate how algorithms and behavioral science can help people manage their time, and thats really around scheduling flexible things and getting them onto your calendar, explains Bank. Everything about the current app is about inputting the flexible things you need to do and well help you get them on your schedule. Everything that doesnt directly feed into that goal was cut from the app.

In addition to normal meetings and appointments users are encouraged to add things like drink water, walk, study, or a host of other positive tasks. These are all things that vie for a person's valuable time, but usually arent scheduled for specific times. The learning algorithm looks at the person's day and will suggest a time accordingly and let the user confirm or deny the suggestion as well as move it to a different time.

The app will learn from all the different interactions a user makes and decide when they are most productive. It makes sense to do the important and critical tasks when a person is at their most productive and scheduling mindless tasks for other times. As part of the settings theres a slider which allows the user to control how often scheduling suggestions are made.

Smart calendar apps arent new. Tempo and Mynd for example have been around for a while. Tempo includes clever features to connect with contacts, displaying drive times, and other social interactions. Mynd is a fairly similar to Timeful in the sense that both are trying to actively learn about the user. But Mynd includes a few more surface level features that go beyond scheduling a persons day.

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This Could Be The Last Calendar App You Ever Install

Craig Berridge, a behavioral neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is comfortable with the scrutiny given animal research on campus.

Animal research is a heavily regulated and overseen process, says Berridge, who studies the brain mechanisms of rats. And I think everyone who does animal research feels theyre balancing the need for and desire to alleviate human suffering and to minimize animal suffering.

Berridge is the chairman of the College of Letters and Science committee that oversees animal research. There are five such bodies, known as Institutional Animal Care and Use Committees, or IACUCs. Experiments are also vetted by funding agencies such as the National Institutes of Health.

These committees were mandated by a1985 amendment to thefederal Animal Welfare Act in the wake ofrevelations about the scandalously grisly laboratory conditions of a colony of rhesus monkeys in Silver Spring, Maryland.

Its a committee with a very explicitly identified purpose, Berridge says. Its a committee that satisfies federal rules, federal laws, and those laws prescribe what were supposed to do.

But others are skeptical that the animal researchers who dominate the IACUCs are capable of rigorously evaluating the ethics of the work on which their livelihoods and careers are built.

These are technocrats, says Rick Marolt, a local critic of animal experimentation. They live in a culture of animal experimentation.

The committees are primarily composed of animal researchers, although they are required to include at least one public member. They have the ability to reject studies or require changes. Usually, committees approve experimental protocols unanimously after requesting revisions.

Since 2004, around 12,000 protocol submissions have been made to the UWs five campus IACUCs, a somewhat duplicative number since many were submitted multiple times, says Eric Sandgren, director of the Research Animal Resources Center. Eighteen of those protocols drew dissenting votes, nine were denied outright, and an unknown number of protocols were simply withdrawn, he says.

Sandgrennotes that the committees almost always ask for protocol revisions. I do not believe it is a criticism of our system that IACUCs are willing to work with investigators until a protocol finally receives approval.

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UW animal research oversight committees strive for consensus