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| Remembrance Agent Augments Human Memory |
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posted by Editor on Thursday August 22, @03:33PM
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Remembrance Agents (RAs) are applications that watch over a user's shoulder and suggest information relevant to the current situation. This RA program developed at MIT tries to augment human memory by displaying a list of documents that might be relevant to the user's current context. Unlike most information retrieval systems, the RA runs continuously without user intervention. Its unobtrusive interface allows a user to pursue or ignore the RA's suggestions as desired. The application is broken into two parts. A front end continuously watches what the user types and reads, and sends this information to the back end. The back end finds old email, notes files, and on-line documents which are somehow relevant to the user's context. This information is then displayed by the front end in a way which doesn't distract from the user's primary task. The front-end runs in elisp under Emacs-19, a text editor for UNIX and Linux which can also be used for applications such as email, netnews, and web access. The GPL code can be downloaded here, and here is a screenshot.
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Somehow I find it hard to believe that anything along these lines could even resemble unobtrusive. In my experience, anything that doesn't require me to specifically ask for its help is inherently annoying. I mean, as you type, this thing is going to change constantly, the overriding visual effect of which is that it's going to be perceived as blinking. I do not like blinking. I abhor blinking. The worst website I ever saw was one with a blinking red background. Blinking is bad in anything except turn signals and smoke alarms. It runs a close second to beeping and speed bumps in my personal galaxy of annoying things whose inventors should never have been born.
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by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 23, @03:20PM EST (#4)
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This isn't like the Microsoft Office agent ("You appear to be writing a letter, would you like to:" etc.) trying to predict what you're doing or about to do. It's more of a clever filing cabinet which produces and presents references to information which may be associated with the *current* (again, non-predictive) activity.
In that sense it doesn't have to know what you want - it just tries to expand avaialable resources for what you're already doing.
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