Software aims to put your life on a disk

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Software aims to put your life on a diskhttp://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns9999308419:00 20 November 02Exclusive from New Scientist Print EditionEngineers are working on software to load every photo you take, every letteryou write - in fact your every memory and experience - into a surrogatebrain that never forgets anything, New Scientist can revealIt is part of a curious venture dubbed the MyLifeBits project, in whichengineers at Microsoft's Media Presence lab in San Francisco are aiming tobuild multimedia databases that chronicle people's life events and make themsearchable. "Imagine being able to run a Google-like search on your life,"says Gordon Bell, one of the developers.The motivation? Microsoft argues that our memories often deceive us:experiences get exaggerated, we muddle the timing of events and simplyforget stuff. Much better, says the firm, to junk such unreliableinterpretations and instead build a faithful memory on that most reliable ofentities, the PC.Bell and his colleagues developed MyLifeBits as a surrogate brain to solvewhat they call the "giant shoebox problem". "In a giant shoebox full ofphotos, it's hard to find what you are looking for," says Microsoft's JimGemmell. Add to this the reels of home movies, videotapes, bundles ofletters and documents we file away, and remembering what we have, let alonefinding it, becomes a major headache.Logging lifeBy the time he speaks at December's Association for Computing MachineryMultimedia conference in Juan Les Pins, France, Bell says he will havelogged everything he possibly can onto his MyLifeBits database.Apart from official documents like his passport, he will post everythingfrom letters and photos to home videos and work documents. All his email isautomatically saved on the system, as is anything he reads or buys online.He has also started recording phone conversations and meetings to store asaudio files. The privacy and corporate security risks are clear.Of course the system takes up a huge amount of memory. But Bell's groupcalculates that within five years, a 1000-gigabyte hard drive will cost lessthan $300 - and that is enough to store four hours of video every day for ayear.Each media file saved in MyLifeBits can be tagged with a written or spokencommentary and linked to other files. Spoken annotations are also convertedinto text, so the speech is searchable, too.To recall a period in his past, Bell just types in the dates he isinterested in. MyLifeBits then calls up a timeline of phone and emailconversations, things he has read and any images he recorded.The system can also be used to build narratives involving other people,events or places. Searching for the name of a friend would bring together achronological set of files describing when you both did things together, forinstance.Meet the ancestorsAlthough MyLifeBits is essentially a large database, it could graduallybecome a repository for many of our experiences. Now that many mobiledevices contain photomessaging cameras, you could save everyday events ontothe system."Users will eventually be able to keep every document they read, everypicture they view, all the audio they hear and a good portion of what theysee," says Gemmell.Bell believes that for some people, especially those with memory problems,MyLifeBits will become a surrogate memory that is able to recall pastexperiences in a way not possible with the familiar but disparate recordslike photo albums and scrapbooks. "You'll begin to rely on it more andmore," he believes.A really accurate, searchable store of events could also help us preserveour experiences more vividly for posterity. Doug de Groot, who works oncomputer-generated beings called avatars and other types of digital "life"at Leiden University in the Netherlands, says Bell's system could eventuallyform the basis for "meet the ancestor" style educational tools, where peoplewill quiz their ancestors on what happened in their lifetimes.A system like MyLifeBits was first suggested in 1945, when presidentialtechnology adviser Vannevar Bush hatched the then farsighted idea of aninfinite personal archive based on the emerging digital computer. His ideasalso inspired the internet archive website.Ian Sample********You can help us make a difference. Click here for details:http://changingplanet.supremalex.org/help.htmChanging Planet News - Where Ethics, Science and Spirituality BlendCOLLECTIVE CONSCIOUSNESS PROJECT: If this email sparked emotions in you, positive or negative, please pray, meditate, visualize or concentrate on the best possible outcome for Humanity and Earth for AT LEAST 10 seconds. On the web at http://changingplanet.supremalex.orgIf the article you want is cut short, changingplanet/messages