The Remembrance Agent
Because serendipity is too important to be left to chance...

What is the Remembrance Agent?

The Remembrance Agent (Remem) is an Emacs plug-in that watches over your shoulder and suggests information relevant to what you're reading or writing. While search engines help with direct recall, Remem is a tool for associative memory. Suggested documents are displayed in a buffer at the bottom of your Emacs window, and are updated every few seconds based on the last hundred or so words surrounding the cursor. Documents are pulled from your own text documents, and Remem's internal indexer can parse email archives, HTML, LaTex and plain-text documents. It runs under most Unix systems (and maybe even properly souped-up Mac or Windows) and both Emacs and XEmacs.

Sign up for future announcements

To receive announcements of upcoming releases, please send mail to remem-announce-request@remem.org.

Download Current Release (2.12)

Below is the source for version 2.12 release of Remem (tarred and gzipped). It should compile on any Unix platform including Mac OSX (let me know if it doesn't), but you'll need Emacs-20 or XEmacs-20 to run the front-end. I've heard it also compiles on various flavors of Windows using Cygwin, though there are still issues with getting the front end and back end talking to each other. I've also included RPMs and Debian packages for version 2.11, which is functionally identical to 2.12 since the only changes were for compiling on the Mac.

Changed from v. 2.11

Made a few changes so Savant will compile on OS-X:

Removed the include of malloc.h in dateyacc.c, since OSX has trouble finding it and we don't seem to need it anyway.
Added /sw/include to configure.in and /sw/lib to main/Makefile.am so OSX can find the PCRE libraries when they are installed using Fink.
Ran the following command: "cd remem-2.12; automake --add-missing -c; autoreconf" to update the "missing" script to a later version.

Known bugs/issues

ra-index and ra-retrieve now work under Windows, but there's still trouble with Emacs and remem.el communicating with the ra-retrieve process, at least in XP and NT. Thanks to you guys, this is getting close.
Dates are not currently indexed, so a mouseover-query on a date doesn't produce any suggestions.
No machine learning for different field weights
Doesn't handle gzipped files
Requires GNU make, at least on some platforms, to compile.

See the historical ChangeLog for links to previous versions

Papers on the Remembrance Agent:

Using Physical Context for Just-in-Time Information Retrieval, Bradley Rhodes, IEEE Transactions on Computers, Vol 52, No. 8, August 2003 pp. 1011-1014.
Just-in-time information retrieval agents, Bradley Rhodes and Pattie Maes, IBM Systems Journal special issue on the MIT Media Laboratory, Vol 39, Nos. 3 and 4, 2000 pp. 685-704.
Just-In-Time Information Retrieval. Bradley J. Rhodes. Ph.D. Dissertation, MIT Media Lab, May 2000. Also available in PDF
Margin Notes: Building a Contextually Aware Associative Memory (html), Bradley J. Rhodes, to appear in The Proceedings of the International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI '00), New Orleans, LA, January 9-12, 2000.
The Wearable Remembrance Agent: A system for augmented memory (html) , Bradley Rhodes, in Personal Technologies Journal Special Issue on Wearable Computing , Personal Technologies (1997) 1:218-224.
See also the earlier version from The Proceedings of The First International Symposium on Wearable Computers (ISWC '97), Cambridge, Mass, October 1997, pp. 123-128.
The Remembrance Agent: A continuously running automated information retrieval system, Bradley Rhodes and Thad Starner, The Proceedings of The First International Conference on The Practical Application of Intelligent Agents and Multi Agent Technology (PAAM '96), London, UK, April 1996, pp. 487-495.

RA License info

As of version 2.09, the RA is released under the GNU General Public License (GPL). For commercial licensing under other terms, please consult the MIT Technology Licensing Office. If you have other questions, feel free to email me at rhodes@remem.org.

The RA is maintained by Bradley Rhodes (rhodes@remem.org). Let me know what you think, and as usual please send all bug reports, suggestions, and comments to ra-bugs@remem.org.

Thanks, and watch here for future releases! -- Brad

Last modified: Mon Feb 16 19:36:12 PST 2004

The Remembrance Agent Because serendipity is too important to be left to chance...