Subject: Viridian Note 00014: Remembrance Agents Key concepts: MIT Media Lab, Remembrance Agents, just-in- time information; context-aware applications; history-rich digital objects; link criticism Attention Conservation Notice: it's a way-cool, thought- provoking rap about some digital vaporware that doesn't actually exist in the marketplace Links: http://www.media.mit.edu/~rhodes/RA http://www.bespoke.org/viridian/ http://www.thehub.com.au/~mitch/V-Notes/ViridianIndex.html http://www.well.com/conf/mirrorshades/links.html Entries in the "Big Mike" Viridian Design Contest: http://www.pinknoiz.com/graphics/bigmike.gif http://www.spaceways.de/BigMike/Mike.html From: wex@media.mit.edu^* (Alan Wexelblat) X-NSA: radar terrorist supercomputer Qaddafi SEAL Team 6 Regarding Note 00012 and the link to: http://www.media.mit.edu/~rhodes/RA I figure I should comment on this one, since Brad Rhodes works in the office next to me. RA is the Remembrance Agent, an implementation of a class of software agents with interesting ideas/properties. The Remembrance Agent works as a form of computerized associative memory, a non-conventional information retrieval agent. The Remembrance Agent is long-lived, background-operating, and watches your current context. One of our Media Lab sponsors, British Telecom, has adapted it to work on PCs with Microsoft Word. In the version on the Web, it's an Emacs editor buffer in which you might be reading email, writing a paper, or whatever. The principle is the same. As you work, the Remembrace Agent watches your context and uses keywords extracted from that context (the current paragraph, the last page you read, etc.) to make queries against a database of information you've given it. This database could be your personal email files, the Science Citation Index, the CIA World Fact Book, etc. If there are any interesting hits from these queries, a small summary of them (usually 1 line) is shown in a separate window. You can ignore this window and keep working, or if something catches your eye, you can click on it to get the full text of the Remembrance hit. Another Remembrance Agent (not yet publicly released) is called Margin Notes. It operates as a Web proxy server. It annotates Web pages for you on the fly with potentially appropriate hits from your databases. These annotations are contained in small boxes placed on the right of the Web page, simulating the effect of "notes in the margin" of a paper-based book. Key phrases to remember for this work and other work in our group (including my own Footprints tools) are: just-in-time information; context-aware applications; history-rich digital objects. My own work on digital interaction history relates to the "Avoid the Timeless, Embrace Decay" idea. In a digital context, I believe it's erroneous to state that "History Accumulates." Draw your own connections. (((bruces remarks: thank you, I will. In the next century it will be a self-evident truism that cyberspace rots. Software decays in an unconventional, nonphysical way, but it definitely decays and the social, commercial and technical consequences will become more and more painful and obvious with each passing year. Tools that emphasize software decay and digital historicality are of intense Viridian interest. A software agent that partially automates human historical awareness would be a particular Viridian darling == if it were ever out of beta.))) Alan Wexelblat MIT Media Lab - Intelligent Agents Group http://wex.www.media.mit.edu/people/wex/