Reconnaissance Agents
Henry Lieberman
• MIT Media Lab
• Home Page
• Software Agents
• End-User
Programming
• Common Sense
Library Assistant Analogy
Reconnaissance Agent
Desktop
Information Sources
History
Bookmarks
Usage
User Profile
Open Documents
suggestions
Integrate information retrieval in
desktop applications
• As user writes, browses, creates
• Zero-input interface
• No context switch to search
• Impromptu information discovery
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)
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”
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”
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.
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