SEER is part of the larger Travler research project, which is developing distributed and mobile filing environments for 21st-century computers.
SEER observes the user's references to files and feeds these to a special correlator process. The correlator uses this information to infer relationships between various pairs of files, and encodes these as distance estimates. These estimates are then fed to a cache manager, which uses them (along with other information, such as directory membership) to discover which projects are of interest to the user, and which files are members of those projects. The cache manager then uses a replication substrate such as Ficus to store copies of important files on the mobile machine so that they will be available at disconnection. All of this is done dynamically so that the portable computer will always have the files needed by the user.