Horvitz wanted to use his research in memory landmarks to help people to find what they are looking for within their growing personal stores of information. He and his team developed a rich timeline of different types of landmarks that Horvitz refers to as a “memory backbone” for navigating content. They combined the predictive models for calendar events and images and added a user’s computer activities, such as files created or edited and Web pages visited. They also added public news events. They organized the results into a timeline browser they call LifeBrowser. The LifeBrowser interface allows you to search your memories just as you can search the Internet. You can access a news event on the timeline such as “Seattle Earthquake,” or personal events, such as “Travel to DC” or “Group Off-site,” and view emails that you sent or received, documents that you worked on, and Web sites that you visited at these times. A memorability slider allows users to control the detail displayed in the memory backbone. You can display just a few ‘most memorable’ events or include a larger number of events, some of which will fall into the ‘less memorable’ category.

bayesian models to help your recollection. ship it, microsoft.