[darpa] HEADLINE: This is your life--in bits

[Bill Ballard <bill.ballard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

U.S. News & World Report

June 23, 2003

HEADLINE: This is your life--in bits

BYLINE: By Janet Rae-Dupree

HIGHLIGHT:
Digital memory aids could capture and recall everything you experience

BODY:
You're at a cocktail party where you spot a familiar and very 
important-looking guy whose name and business connections are right on the 
tip of your tongue-but not tripping off it. Who is he? When did you last 
speak with him? He's headed your way. Uh-oh. Luckily, your memory 
prosthesis--a computer that monitors and remembers everything you do or 
experience--is ready to whisper his name in your ear.

No, you 50-somethings worried about memory lapses can't buy anything like 
it yet. But work is underway to get computers to capture human life and 
remember it as people do--recalling bits of experience that are linked by a 
common time or place or person. At Microsoft Research, computing pioneer 
Gordon Bell has stockpiled all the printed and digital detritus of his 68 
years of life; now he's developing tools to turn this computerized shoebox 
into a memory aid. And the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects 
Agency wants to combine sensors, cameras, bugging devices, and wearable 
computers to capture a comprehensive, searchable database of an individual 
human life. DARPA hopes that the project, called LifeLog, will yield clues 
about how to make robots more humanlike, but it is also aiming for "a 
powerful automated multimedia diary and scrapbook," according to a project 
description.

Life size. A lifetime's experience will soon fit easily on an ordinary hard 
drive. Bell's project at Microsoft's Bay Area Research Center in San 
Francisco, for example, so far has filled just 30 gigabytes--a fraction of 
the terabyte (1,000 gigabytes) of storage capacity that hard disks are 
expected to have within five years. Called MyLifeBits, the project began 
about four years ago when Bell and his research partner Jim Gemmell were 
studying future technologies for telecommuting. Working from remote 
offices, they felt handicapped by their lack of access to files, documents, 
and books back at the main laboratory. "We started to look at E-paper and 
the paperless office, and then scanning became an obsession," Gemmell says. 
With an assistant, the pair set about scanning all of Bell's old papers and 
photographs as well as articles and books he had read. They also wrote 
software to capture a copy of every message and document that crossed his 
computer screen and every voice mail he received, and they recently began 
recording all of Bell's phone calls and any television he watches.

But after three years of digitizing Bell's life, the research team realized 
they were creating an unwieldy "write-once-read-never" database. So they 
began writing software to mimic the way the human mind recalls things. Now 
the system can play back a phone conversation while simultaneously 
displaying any Web pages Bell was viewing at that time plus E-mails and 
documents relevant to the conversation. "Your mind works by association," 
notes Rick Rashid, a senior vice president at Microsoft and head of its 
research division. "People recall information in part by remembering where 
they were, what else was happening, and who they were with."

Eventually, Rashid believes, people will begin using this "add-on personal 
memory" to order up instant audio replays--digital double takes, if you 
will-- during their daily lives. Years after the material was collected, 
such a database could be used to refresh a failing memory, revive a stalled 
project, or educate future generations about what today's lives were like. 
Microsoft plans to weave the computer-based portions of the MyLifeBits 
project into a software product, possibly as early as 2008. "It will be in 
the operating system, gathering data as you work," says Gemmell.

DARPA's LifeLog would pick up from there. The project is aiming for port- 
able sensors that would record daily life in exhaustive detail and data 
processors that would search for patterns and sift for information likely 
to prove useful later on. Bell speculates that LifeLog's first 
beneficiaries might be high-level military officers trying to keep track of 
multiple projects unfolding at the same time in many parts of the world.

A practical, powerful, consumer version could be decades off. And the very 
idea may seem unpalatable: Who wants a computer watching your every move? 
Retired IBM Fellow Dave Thompson coined the term "memory prosthesis," and 
he wouldn't mind. "I've observed the captains of industry and they have 
handlers who prompt them about you as you go to shake hands," he says. "Why 
should the rich people have all the fun?"