[tt] Gordon Bell's LifeBits project (like Martine's LifeNaut.com)

[Hughes, James J.]

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,311727,00.html

Don't Forget to Back Up Your Brain

Friday, November 16, 2007

By Corinna Underwood

As any Baby Boomer will tell you, Americans have more information to
cram into their memories than ever. Yet, as we age, our capacity for
recall grows weaker.

But 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.

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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.

And just how much data is needed on a day-to-day basis?

"All the bits that we can that will likely have value for our memory in
the near and long-term future, a few bits just for the hell of it," Bell
says. "We end up with more bits because we need them for relationships."

Still, is recalling every single detail of an entire lifetime too much?
How can anyone guess what's going to be important 20 years from now?

"It is impossible to know what will be required in the future," says
Bell. "Furthermore, recording everything allows one item to be used to
find another item that may have been created at the same time."

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.

We constantly are reminded of other events when we delve into our past
to find snippets for which we are looking. This reinforces a whole host
of links to other memories we otherwise may have forgotten.

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.

"MLB introduces no new problems that aren't present in modern computer
systems," he said, "except that we present a larger cross-section that
makes all the content potentially more valuable."

Additional passwords are being built into the most sensitive documents,
he explains.

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.

On a somewhat smaller level, Sunil Vemuri, co-founder and chief product
officer of Hyderabad, India-based QTech, Inc., has been working to
develop a "memory prosthesis" that can help people with common,
day-to-day memory problems.

QTech's "reQall" service provides a toll-free number that allows clients
to use any phone to record reminders of events, appointments or thoughts
as and when needed.

It then saves and organizes the recordings and sends daily reminders as
needed.

"ReQall is meant for anyone who forgets, for anyone with a day-to-day
memory problem," Vemuri says. "The aim of reQall is to provide a
long-term service that is available to everyone right now."

Vemuri sees great growth potential for reQall. He wants his team to
refine the service to suit users' individual memory needs, whether that
involves helping patients remember doctors' appointments, friends
remember birthdays or even journalists remember specific quotes.

More ambitious is Vemuri's "What Was I Thinking," a project he worked on
while a graduate student at MIT.

That centered around software running on a Compaq iPaq personal digital
assistant, similar to a Palm Pilot, which then synced to PCs running Mac
OS X, Windows or Linux. It was capable of recording data and using a
number of search tools to help the user find forgotten memories, using a
range of built-in triggers.

"Many things can serve as good memory triggers: the smell or taste of
homemade cooking, the smile on a child's face, a good joke, the roar of
the crowd when your sports team scores, etc," Vemuri explained on his
MIT Web page.

"In our case, the device records audio from conversations and
happenings, analyzes and indexes the audio in an attempt to identify the
best memory triggers, and provides a suite of retrieval tools to help
the wearer access memories when a forgetting incident occurs."

The device's retrieval tools included an analysis of audio recordings to
determine if conversations were heated, calm or humorous and a
transcription of audio files to text files by means of a
speech-recognition program.

In this way, the text files could be searched for specific words or
speech patterns that can trigger those elusive memories.

In the future, some variation on these memory prostheses could change
our lives on many levels, from settling a squabble over last week's
football scores to assisting an elderly patient remember if she has
taken her medication.

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.