Customizing multimedia information access

We consider research questions in the design and analysis of customizable agents that capture, access, and retrieve heterogeneous, distributed, multimedia information. By agents we mean autonomous decision-making programs that are transportable across the Internet; by customizable we mean programs that evolve automatically with changes in the information landscape, as well as programs that can be easily modified and assembled by users, according to their tasks. The transportable, customizable agent paradigm is well suited for distributed processing of heterogeneous data for the following reasons.