Cognitive Assistants are a relatively new concept, advancing the Cognitive Orthotics concept that focuses on direct assistance to people with cognitive or physical disabilities and expanding the area to include complex platforms that include sensors, actuators, interfaces, monitoring abilities, and decision processes. CA is an area containing technologies such as personalized intelligent assistants, multi-agent systems, robotics, e-health applications, and others. This keynote will present several advances made in the area of CA from the point of view of intelligent agents.