Reconnaissance Agents

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Reconnaissance Agents
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Henry Lieberman

• MIT Media Lab
• Home Page
• Software Agents
• End-User Programming
• Common Sense

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Library Assistant Analogy
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Reconnaissance Agent
Information Sources
Desktop History Bookmarks Usage
suggestions
User Profile
Open Documents
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Integrate information retrieval in desktop
applications

• As user writes, browses, creates
• Zero-input interface
• No context switch to search
• Impromptu information discovery

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Letizia

• Local Reconnaissance
• As user looks at document, use idle time to crawl
  and choose best link
• Link not just one degree away the neighborhood
  of the page
• Letizia Demo (film clip)

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Powerscout

• Global Reconnaissance
• Semantic Neighborhood of page
• Concept Browsing
• the idea of browsing links not specified by a
  document's author, but nonetheless semantically
  relevant to the document being viewed. This
  auxiliary set of links... might not even have
  existed when the page was created

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Powerscout Profiles

• Each of us wears different hats during the day.
  Hat Profile.
• Profile is a set of ordered terms along with a
  notebook pages, notes, searches.
• One profile is the current profile
• user can Add page to profile

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Powerscout Process

• Using terms from page and current profile, send
  complex query to search engine.
• If few results, relax constraints and send less
  keywords.
• and/or combinations
• User can view what the system is doing and edit.

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Similar Systems

• Margin Notes
• Breaks document down into sections
• Sends separate queries for each section, listing
  results in margins.
• Also considered desktop. Rhodes coined term
  remembrance agent.
• Watson

Bradley Rhodes