A long-term personal agent program, executable as network service and/or on one or more user computing devices and related method for identifying opportunities and making recommendations on behalf of one or more users, are disclosed herein. In one example, the personal agent program includes a monitoring engine configured to monitor and interpret a user's activities over time with a plurality of sensing and logging methodologies according to user authorization, the use of statistical methods for learning to understand a user's goals and behavioral patterns from data, and the use of procedures for computing the expected value of information guiding sensing and logging in different contexts. The personal agent further may include a recommendation methodology configured to make suggestions and to take actions on behalf of the user, in the present moment as well as for future times, based on inferences about user goals and opportunities in the world.