Total Recall by Gemmell| Jim

Author:Gemmell| Jim [Gemmell, Jim:]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: DUTTON ADULT
Published: 2009-09-17T04:00:00+00:00

AUTOMATIC SUMMARIZATION

With today’s technology, your e-memories would be a mixed blessing for your heirs. They would have the benefit of more knowledge about you, but it would come to them as an enormous, daunting mess. Your heirs may enjoy looking at random photos, or searching for e-mails containing the names of presidents in order to read some of your political perspectives, but they will likely miss the most important and interesting bits, and may be too intimidated to spend much time with your e-memories.

I felt this way about my own early scanned collection, and it was my frustrated eruption of “It’s just bits!” that galvanized Jim Gemmell into action and got us started on MyLifeBits. Thankfully, our prototyping work has assured me that things will get much better.

We will see the evolution of software that will reduce the chores involved in making one’s life bits worthwhile to others. It will help to develop tools to make storytelling and human arrangement easier. But fully automatic approaches are even more important. Some of this we get quite readily just by storing more information together. For example, your e-mails, calendar entries, Web-page visits, and digital photos all have time stamps that readily lend themselves to time line displays.

Time lines are a really compelling way to visualize your life, and software can help automatically produce digestible time lines. Our colleague Eric Horvitz and his research team have done some very promising work in predicting which events people will consider to be significant “memory landmarks.” This allows the best material to be put on a time line, and the less interesting material hidden away until it is asked for. Eric demonstrated the software to a reporter, starting with pictures of his wife and son:“What’s cool—I love this feature—I can say, ‘Go to July Fourth,’ and it’s making guesses about the things I am likely to remember, to use memory landmarks, and it jumped right to this place,” he said. The screen showed several images—a small-town parade, and his wife and son among figures at a cookout, from July 4, 2005. Responding to his request, “the computer brought up its best guess.”

“It comes to understand your mind, how you organize your memories, by what you choose. It learns to become like you, to help you be a better you.”

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