The ideal computer software program would present us with news that relates to our personal experiences. Augmented news expands on the content and makes remote news relevant. Data hiding, a form of steganography, embeds data into digital media for the purpose of identification, annotation or copyright protection. The more the system knows about the user, the better able it is to make sense of the ambiguities and inconsistencies inherent in human communication. Our work in user-modeling involves the full exploitation of the user's computational environment so that information can be integrated to construct dynamic, individual, user models that change over time as the user changes and the system learns more about the user.
People have notoriously bad memories.
We forget where we left our keys, people's names, and simple directions. Computers, on the other hand, almost never forget the information they store. The goal of agent marketplaces for buying and selling is to help realize a fundamental transformation in the way people transact goods from requiring constant monitoring and effort, to a system where a software agent does most of the work on the user's behalf. A user wanting to buy or sell a good creates an agent, gives it some strategic direction, and sends it off to the agent market place. Such introductions can automatically form interest groups and coalitions, and can be used to locate someone knowledgeable in a particular area.