Most people wouldn't want a message from work disrupting their day at the beach. But Eric Horvitz was so happy when it happened to him that he took out a camera and captured the moment in a photo.

The e-mail message had been singled out and sent to the Microsoft senior researcher's mobile phone by a special program that he and others in his group developed.

The program examined the message's contents, determined its importance and decided it warranted interrupting him during a family outing on Whidbey Island. The moment perfectly illustrated Horvitz's long-term vision for technology in the information age -- as something to augment and assist people, not overwhelm them.

In fact, Horvitz did consider the message urgent, and he was able to respond quickly, without being burdened by any of the more routine matters that remained in his in box, awaiting his return from vacation.

"These technologies can actually work on your behalf to say, 'Relax, you don't need to see everything. If something can't wait until later, I'll let you know,' " he said. "I didn't need to be personally anxious and check all the time."

The prototype is one of the ongoing projects in Microsoft Research's Adaptive Systems and Interaction group, which Horvitz manages. The 14-person group is working on software that senses the world around it and learns from experience to adjust to situations and to reason in real time.

The projects are examples of artificial intelligence -- using technology to perform tasks that would otherwise require human perception and reasoning.

"I see something very big happening to humanity in terms of a new relationship with technology over the next 100 years," Horvitz said, predicting a future when "companion software" works in conjunction with human life in a way that could be considered "intelligent or humanlike."

Along the way, there are also plenty of practical applications for the technology that's emerging. The system that sent the urgent message to Horvitz's phone is an extension of a project known as "Priorities." The technology analyzes incoming messages, weighing their importance against what the recipient is doing at any given moment to decide whether to pass them along immediately or wait until a better time.

The message for Horvitz was from a journal editor who hadn't received an abstract the Microsoft researcher had sent her. Examining the message, the system considered a long list of factors, including Horvitz's relationship to the sender, the length of the message, key phrases, dates and times mentioned in the text, whether the message was written in past or present tense and whether it included questions.

"The system knew what I was doing," Horvitz said. "It knew that I was off with the kids having a good time, yet it did the cost-benefit analysis and it forwarded a single message to me."

The project reflects a consistent theme running through much of the work by Horvitz and others in the group -- making technology more sensitive to situations and settings to determine whether, when and how to get someone's attention.

Other projects along those lines include "Bestcom," a system that determines the best method of communication between two people at any particular moment, based on their preferences for different situations. The system has been deployed internally at Microsoft, and some of the more basic message and call-routing principles are evident in a new telephony product, dubbed "Istanbul," from Microsoft's Real-Time Collaboration Business Unit.

Some of the more advanced technologies developed by the Adaptive Systems and Interaction research group, such as the ability to predict when someone will be available, haven't yet made their way into Microsoft products, but they show the direction the company is headed.

Another project from the group appears to be on a faster track toward public availability. Known as JamBayes, the system shows traffic conditions in the Seattle region and predicts upcoming conditions based on an underlying statistical model that analyzes a long list of factors, including weather, the day of week and sports schedules.

The system, which works on mobile phones through a program called SmartPhlow, is used by about 2,000 Microsoft employees. Horvitz said Microsoft has been talking with others interested in licensing the technology and deploying it nationally.

The ability to move its technology into products gives Microsoft Research a relatively unique position in the artificial intelligence field, said Jim Hendler, a computer science professor at the University of Maryland specializing in artificial intelligence.

One measure of progress in artificial intelligence is "whether the stuff can really work when you try to put it in practice," he said. "Microsoft can influence that better than anyone else, because when they put something in practice it can get used not by one or two people but by millions."

Horvitz, 46, said he has been "fascinated with the possibility that there's a deep scientific explanation for our minds, our subjective experience" since he was growing up in Illinois and New York.

Horvitz went to Stanford University, where he received a doctorate and a medical degree. He and two others from Stanford, Jack Breese and David Heckerman, were recruited by Microsoft in 1993 from a startup company they had formed.

Breese, now a Microsoft Research director, described Horvitz as an "idea machine."

As a kindergartner, Horvitz took apart a flashlight and figured out how to mimic it with a battery, wire and bulb. The next year, he made a robot out of a peanut can, springs and clay, on the notion that he also might be able to replicate human life.

"I wasn't wise enough back then to know how much harder it would be than lighting up a light bulb with a flashlight battery," he recalled.

But in many ways, he is still going after the same goal today.

"Pursuing the foundations of mind ... and getting some answers will have deep implications for understanding ourselves -- humanity, psychology -- as well as for building these systems that can really enhance our lives on earth," Horvitz said.

"In the meantime," he added, "we get to do cool demos."