TechMan: Want a record of your whole brilliant life?
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Ever think what it would be like to have a record of your entire life -- everything you wrote, watched, heard, e-mailed, spoke?
It sounds daunting and maybe a little absurd, but Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell at Microsoft are working on it. Their MyLifeBits project is composed of two parts: software to retrieve captured materials and an effort to completely document the life of Mr. Bell.
TechMan heard Mr. Bell speak about the project at the opening of the Seagate Research Center in the Strip District. The research center is gone, but the idea lives on. Mr. Bell and Mr. Gemmell have written a book about the project called "Total Recall."
Before coming to Microsoft in 1995, Mr. Bell already had a distinguished career that included teaching computer science at Carnegie Mellon University and helping to design the PDP and VAX line of computers for the Digital Equipment Corp. He also co-founded the Computer History Museum.
He freely admits that he stands on the shoulders of Vannevar Bush with this idea. Mr. Bush was in effect the first presidential science adviser. In 1945, he wrote an article in the Atlantic Monthly magazine proposing a machine called a memex that could record knowledge and allow its retrieval. The idea foreshadowed the World Wide Web.
To build a modern-day memex, you need devices to record the information. For information in digital form -- which is increasingly all information -- the hardware is out there. For recording things in the analog world, scanning technology has advanced to allow fast input of written and printed materials.
But how do we record things we see and hear each day? Microsoft has developed the SenseCam, a device containing a camera and embedded sensors worn around a user's neck that automatically takes a series of thousands of still images and records ambient light levels, temperature and movement.
Researchers at CMU have used the SenseCam to allow elderly people to review their experiences during the day as a way of aiding short-term memory.
First Published May 2, 2010 12:00 am
