Software aims to put your life on a disk

[Guest guest]

Software aims to put your life on a disk

http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99993084

 

 

19:00 20 November 02

 

Exclusive from New Scientist Print Edition

 

Engineers are working on software to load every photo you take, every letter

you write - in fact your every memory and experience - into a surrogate

brain that never forgets anything, New Scientist can reveal

 

It is part of a curious venture dubbed the MyLifeBits project, in which

engineers at Microsoft's Media Presence lab in San Francisco are aiming to

build multimedia databases that chronicle people's life events and make them

searchable. " 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 simply

forget stuff. Much better, says the firm, to junk such unreliable

interpretations and instead build a faithful memory on that most reliable of

entities, the PC.

 

Bell and his colleagues developed MyLifeBits as a surrogate brain to solve

what they call the " giant shoebox problem " . " In a giant shoebox full of

photos, it's hard to find what you are looking for, " says Microsoft's Jim

Gemmell. Add to this the reels of home movies, videotapes, bundles of

letters and documents we file away, and remembering what we have, let alone

finding it, becomes a major headache.

 

 

Logging life

 

 

By the time he speaks at December's Association for Computing Machinery

Multimedia conference in Juan Les Pins, France, Bell says he will have

logged everything he possibly can onto his MyLifeBits database.

 

Apart from official documents like his passport, he will post everything

from letters and photos to home videos and work documents. All his email is

automatically saved on the system, as is anything he reads or buys online.

He has also started recording phone conversations and meetings to store as

audio files. The privacy and corporate security risks are clear.

 

Of course the system takes up a huge amount of memory. But Bell's group

calculates that within five years, a 1000-gigabyte hard drive will cost less

than $300 - and that is enough to store four hours of video every day for a

year.

 

Each media file saved in MyLifeBits can be tagged with a written or spoken

commentary and linked to other files. Spoken annotations are also converted

into text, so the speech is searchable, too.

 

To recall a period in his past, Bell just types in the dates he is

interested in. MyLifeBits then calls up a timeline of phone and email

conversations, 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 a

chronological set of files describing when you both did things together, for

instance.

 

 

Meet the ancestors

 

 

Although MyLifeBits is essentially a large database, it could gradually

become a repository for many of our experiences. Now that many mobile

devices contain photomessaging cameras, you could save everyday events onto

the system.

 

" Users will eventually be able to keep every document they read, every

picture they view, all the audio they hear and a good portion of what they

see, " says Gemmell.

 

Bell believes that for some people, especially those with memory problems,

MyLifeBits will become a surrogate memory that is able to recall past

experiences in a way not possible with the familiar but disparate records

like photo albums and scrapbooks. " You'll begin to rely on it more and

more, " he believes.

 

A really accurate, searchable store of events could also help us preserve

our experiences more vividly for posterity. Doug de Groot, who works on

computer-generated beings called avatars and other types of digital " life "

at Leiden University in the Netherlands, says Bell's system could eventually

form the basis for " meet the ancestor " style educational tools, where people

will quiz their ancestors on what happened in their lifetimes.

 

A system like MyLifeBits was first suggested in 1945, when presidential

technology adviser Vannevar Bush hatched the then farsighted idea of an

infinite personal archive based on the emerging digital computer. His ideas

also inspired the internet archive website.

 

 

Ian Sample

 

 

 

 

 

********

You can help us make a difference.

Click here for details:

http://changingplanet.supremalex.org/help.htm

 

Changing Planet News - Where Ethics, Science and Spirituality Blend

 

COLLECTIVE 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.org

 

If the article you want is cut short,

changingplanet/messages