What if you could capture every waking moment of your entire life, store it on your computer and then recall digital snapshots of everything you’ve seen and heard with just a quick search?
Renowned computer scientist Gordon Bell, head of Microsoft’s Media Presence Research Group and founder of the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley, thinks he might be able to do just that.
He calls it a “surrogate memory,” and what he considers an early version of it even has an official name — MyLifeBits. “The goal is to live as much of life as possible versus spending time maintaining our memory system,” Bell explains.
Perfect surrogate memory would be supplemental to, but ultimately as good as, your original memory. It could let you listen to every conversation you had when you were 21 or find that photograph of the obscure date you had on summer vacation. As Bell says, it would “supplement (and sometimes supplant) other information-processing systems, including people.”
MyLifeBits isn’t quite there yet, but Bell’s nevertheless “gone paperless” for the past decade as part of the project, keeping a detailed, digitized diary that documents his life with photographs, letters and voice recordings.
So that he doesn’t miss out on important daily events, Bell wears a SenseCam, developed by Microsoft Research, that takes pictures whenever it detects he may want a photograph.
The camera’s infrared sensor picks up on body heat and takes snapshots of anyone else in the room, adjusting itself as available light changes.
Not only does MyLifeBits record your life’s digital information, but the software, developed by Bell’s researchers Jim Gemmell and Roger Lueder, also can help you retrieve it.
“MyLifeBits is a system aimed at capturing cyber-content in the course of daily life with the goal of being able to utilize it in various ways at work, in our personal life — e.g. finances, family, health and for our future memory,” Bell says.
Simply enter a keyword such as “pet,” for example, and the search engine will find all available information on your childhood puppy. It also can run more intricate searches, allowing you to cross-reference all associations linked to certain people or places.
If you’re having difficulty remembering where you were and who you were with on a certain day, MyLifeBits would remind you.
Bell says MyLifeBits could have another important benefit: It may actually improve your real memory. According to Bell, being reminded of someone in a photograph or screensaver strengthens our recollections.
But since all this is digitally recorded, what if hackers find it? Couldn’t MyLifeBits be a threat to privacy and a boon to identity thieves? Bell doesn’t seem overly concerned.
An even bigger hurdle for the project is cost-efficiency. The Microsoft team predicts that by 2010, a 1-terabyte (1,000-gigabyte) hard drive will cost less than $300.
That could easily hold all text documents, voice files and photographs of a person’s complete life experience — but if it came to video, it would be only enough for four hours per day for an entire year.
We rely on our hard drives for saving our music, photographs, e-mails and videos — so perhaps life-logging software and memory prosthetics are simply the next stage in the evolution of our relationship to the computer. More at FoxNews.
MyLifeBits Project
MyLifeBits is a lifetime store of everything. It is the fulfillment of Vannevar Bush’s 1945 Memex vision including full-text search, text & audio annotations, and hyperlinks. There are two parts to MyLifeBits: an experiment in lifetime storage, and a software research effort.
The experiment: Gordon Bell has captured a lifetime’s worth of articles, books, cards, CDs, letters, memos, papers, photos, pictures, presentations, home movies, videotaped lectures, and voice recordings and stored them digitally. He is now paperless, and is beginning to capture phone calls, IM transcripts, television, and radio.
The software research: Jim Gemmell and Roger Lueder have developed the MyLifeBits software, which leverages SQL server to support: hyperlinks, annotations, reports, saved queries, pivoting, clustering, and fast search. MyLifeBits is designed to make annotation easy, including gang annotation on right click, voice annotation, and web browser integration. It includes tools to record web pages, IM transcripts, radio and television. The MyLifeBits screensaver supports annotation and rating. We are beginning to explore features such as document similarity ranking and faceted classification. We have collaborated with the WWMX team to get a mapped UI, and with the SenseCam team to digest and display SenseCam output.
Support for academic research: Our team helped administer the Microsoft Research Digital Memories (Memex) request for proposals. Winners are now posted. We also helped establish the ACM CARPE Workshops: CARPE 2004 CARPE 2005 CARPE 2006
NEW! See our on-line virtual demo
NEW YORK - Police have found a way to help save the planet and perhaps sneak up on bad guys at the same time: an all-electric, ultra-quiet scooter, Newsday reports.
Hsinchu, Taiwan, - (October 18, 2007) — AU Optronics Corp. today unveiled breakthrough technologies for mobile device applications, including two kinds of in-cell multi-touch panel technologies and the world’s thinnest 1.9-inch mobile device panel of 0.69mm.
