Wearable Agents

1536-1268/02/$17.00 © 2002 IEEE F orty years ago, when batch processing was still the only common way of communicating with computers, Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider described a concept he called interactive computing. In time, Licklider would support research toward this goal by heading ARPA’s new Information Processing Technical Office and, later, directing MIT’s Project MAC. His reach was broad; M. Mitchell Waldrop’s book The Dream Machine credits his ARPA funding program as the beginning of computer science graduate study as we know it today.1 Although Licklider’s ARPA researchers would go on to invent multitasking, hypertext, the mouse, the Internet, and many other mechanisms, Licklider’s original goal was what he called “man–computer symbiosis,” a concept he described in a 1960 paper by that name.2