Tag: mylifebits

Total history

Where total history comes to the layperson.

We’ve had agriculture for ~12 ka, towns for 10 ka, and writing for ~5 ka. But we’re still living in the dark ages leading up to the dawn of history. Don’t we have history already, you ask? Well actually, we don’t. We know much less about our ancestors than our descendants will know about us. Indeed, we’ve acquired bad behavioral habits – because we’re used to forgetting things over time. In fact, collectively we’re on the edge of losing the ability to forget.

2012-05-06: The transcribed Life. It may already be possible to have your smartphone record every sound it can pick up, and transcribe it continuously. What are the implications when you can search your words and those you interact with?
2013-11-23: Before and after. Meanwhile, someone taped 35 years of TV

Total history is something we haven’t experienced yet. I expect to live long enough to be lifelogging, but my first 40 or 50 years are going to be very poorly documented, mere gigabytes of text and audio to document decades of experience. What I can be fairly sure of is that our descendants’ relationship with their history is going to be very different from our own, because they will be able to see it with a level of depth and clarity that nobody has ever experienced before. Meet your descendants. They don’t know what it’s like to be involuntarily lost, don’t understand what we mean by the word “privacy”, and will have access (sooner or later) to a historical representation of our species that defies understanding. They live in a world where history has a sharply-drawn start line, and everything they individually do or say will sooner or later be visible to everyone who comes after them, forever.

2017-04-11: Truth

2023-02-24: Others are thinking about the implications, now with a LLM lens

Sooner or later, every single conversation I have will be recorded and transcribed and I’ll be able to look back at it later – details from a phone call with the bank, in the hardware store asking a question, someone mentions a book at the pub, an idea in a workshop. Ignoring the societal consequences for a sec lol ahem… how should the app to manage all that chatter work?

LifeBrowser

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.

Hosted lifebits

Although this notion of a hosted lifebits service seems inevitable in the long run, it’s not at all clear how we’ll get there. The need is not yet apparent to most people, though it will increasingly become apparent. The technical aspects are somewhat challenging, but the social and business aspects are even more challenging. In social terms, I think it’ll be hard to get people to decouple the idea of storage as a service from the idea of value-added services wrapped around storage.

articulate as always, this time on scenarios for owning your digital identity via reasonably guaranteed hosting of your lifebits (under your control)

Lifelogging, An Inevitability

Still the overriding concern is how to read, retrieve, and use this huge – and I mean huge – ocean of data that your life will generate. There’s one solution not normally offered in discussions of lifelogging that seems reasonable to me. 10 years ago computer scientist David Gelertner envisioned a new organizing metaphor for one’s growing cache of personal data. Instead of boxes and “windows” a lifelog should be centered on well, a life log, a timeline, chronological log of one’s life. “We’re going from an artificial information storage scheme to a far more natural one. The idea of a timeline, a chronology, a diary, a daily journal, or a scrapbook is so much older and so much more organic and ingrained in human culture and history than the idea of a file hierarchy.”

we have to finish jim gray’s work.
2007-03-04:

New systems may allow people to record everything they see and hear–and even things they cannot sense–and to store all these data in a personal digital archive

The state of lifelogging

Perfect Memory Man

an update on the mylifebits project. when are they productizing?

Gordon Bell will never forget what I look like. He’ll never forget what I sound like, either. Actually, he’ll never forget a single detail about me.

That’s because when I first met the 72-year-old computer scientist, he was recording my every move. He had a tiny bug-eyed camera around his neck, and a small audio recorder at his elbow. As we chatted about various topics — Australian jazz musicians, his futuristic cell phone, the Seattle area’s gorgeous weather — Bell’s gear quietly logged my every gesture and all my blathering small talk, snapping a picture every 60 seconds. Back at his office, his computer had carefully archived every document related to me: all the email I’d sent him, copies of my articles he’d read, pages he’d surfed on my blog.

Mylifebits

Gordon Bell is talking about the 1TB life. (side remark: i get google ads for a 1TB drive at $900). 1 TB gives you 65+ years of 100 emails a day, 100 web pages, 10 photos a day, 8 hours of audio, etc. why not store it?
mylifebits is about capturing this information in a database. You need the ACID properties of a database to manage this information.

mylifebits is about the automatic creation of metadata for rich media

Gordon talks of the need for accurate speech recognition and automatic transcription of audio, and image recognition to identify persons on photos. he scanned in all his old papers back from the 60s to the present. his team added more data capture over the years: browser history, phone conversations, GPS information over time.. Killer apps beyond search might be nostalgic screensaver, and eventually of course, the memex.

we feel good about putting our home movies in the database (and never look at them) compared to having them on tape (and never look at them) because we know we could. they are also looking at caloric intake vs output to plot health state.

why bother? 1) because we can 2) because we need to deal with digital media 3) it eliminates atoms (hello environment) 4) for business 5) preservation for historians 6) for the frail human mind
the storage structure behind mylifebits shares many of the winfs goals, of course: freedom from the folder structure, rich metadata, useful querying. gordon mentions timelines as a very useful ordering concept. spatial ordering by assigning photos with locations on a map could also become interesting. tagging with dublin core is mentioned, or personal taxonomies. “let me not go into this ontology hole” 🙂 gordon just mentioned deja view, a device attached to your glasses that records the last 30 s in short-term memory and allows you to commit interesting scenes to permanent storage.

to really do the metadata would take another lifetime. i hired an assistant.

sounds like an outsourcing opportunity to me.
alternative write up

moblogs are so 2003

hp always-on wearable cameramoblogs are just a glimpse into what is coming with always-on wearable cameras Mobile phones and PDAs with cameras are increasingly common; 16% of phones sold in 2003 had a camera in it, and last year camera phones actually out-sold other digital cameras. The bigger change will come from an entirely-new class of hardware — what I call the “personal memory assistant.” Both Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft have built test versions of wearable cameras designed to record the world around you as you go about your day. If you’ve seen or used a TiVo, imagine a TiVo for your day-to-day life. If you don’t think that’s revolutionary, consider that human memory is notoriously faulty; what happens when a person can have perfect recall?