Challenges in Using Lifetime Personal Information Stores based on MyLifeBits

1. Challenges in UsingLifetime Personal Information Storesbased on MyLifeBits Gordon Bell, Jim Gemmell, Roger LuederSIGIRUniversity of Sheffield, July 26, 2004

2. “I have watched as hundreds of millions of dollars have been invested to re-invent the wheel - often badly.” -Marcia Bates

3. 1TB gives you 65+ years of: 100 email messages a day (5KB each) 100 web pages day (50KB each) 5 scanned pages a day (100KB each) 1 book every 10 days (1 MB each) 10 photos per day (400 KB JPEG each) 8 hours per day of sound - e.g. telephone,voice annotations, and meeting recordings (8 Kb/s) 1 new music CD every 10 days (45 min each at 128 Kb/s) It will take you 5 years to fill up your 80 GB drive Want video? Buy more cheap drives (1 TB/year lets you record 4 hours/day of 1.5 Mb/s video) The 1 TB Life

4. Everything goes in a database • You need all the features of a database(Consistency, Indexing, Pivoting, Queries, Speed/scalability, Backup, replication) • If you don’t use one, you will find yourself creating one! • Files as blobs, also sync with file system for legacy apps SQL

5. SenseCam Telephone capture tool PocketPC transfer tool PocketRadio player TV capture tool GPS import & Map display Radio capture & EPG TV EPG download tool MAPI interface Legacy email client Browser tool Internet files Screen saver Legacy applications MyLifeBits Shell IM capture Voice annotation tool Text annotation tool Import files MyLifeBits Software MyLifeBits store database

6. MemexAs We May Think, Vannevar Bush, 1945 “A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility” • Full-text search, text & audio annotations, and hyperlinks

7. I am data

8. The guinea pig • Gordon Bell is digitizing his life • Has now scanned virtually all: • Books written (and read when possible) • Personal documents (correspondence including memos and email, bills, legal documents, papers written, …) • Photos • Posters, paintings, photo of things (artifacts, …medals, plaques) • Home movies and videos • CD collection • And, of course, all PC files • Now recording: phone, radio, TV (movies), web pages… conversations and meetings to come • Paperless throughout 2002. 12” scanned, 12’ discarded. • Only 30 GB!!!

9. Capture and encoding

10. I mean everything

11. 50+ year old newspaper clippings

12. 400 year old books

13. O(100s) tapes from videotape “black hole”

14. Personal LifeLog Applications Diary/Journal Self Tutor Mentor Advisor Meeting Prep Personal Assistant Babysitter Financial Manager Companion Caretaker Medical Manager Parole Officer Photo Album Assistant for Elderly Application used by: Pers Flight Recorder Autobiography Captain’s Log Conservator Biography Baby Book Trustee Obituary Personal Proxy Executor Others Application controlled by: Others Self

15. Why bother? ..some reasons • Technology creates an opportunity e.g. 1 TB disks • Technology creates a need e.g. jpg • It will decay or disappear if you don’t save it • To eliminate physical storage (paper, CDs…) • It costs more (in time) to delete than it costs to store • The mantra of the squirrel: “I may need it some day.” • For posterity and nostalgia: “Maybe others will want it.” • For memory enhancement & faster search(search your LifeBits rather than the web or your colleagues … a single source to look for “stuff I’ve seen”) • Let content analysis and data mining discover trends and correlations in our lives…that even we don’t know. • Aid to aging or failed memories

16. So you’ve got it – now what do you do with it? “A record if it is to be useful … must be continuously extended, it must be stored, and above all it must be consulted” “The difficulty seems to be, not so much that we publish unduly … but rather that publication has been extended far beyond our present ability to make real use of the record” - Vannevar Bush

17. Trying to use my life bits #1: Folders One item. One place. It worked for 1000s of years.

18. Library/file cab My docs and archive X- Employer Active Employer Library/file cab Project Employer Employer Self E Project E Business Invests, family $s, & Legal Project Employer S Library/file cab Library/file cab Library/file cab Library/file cab X-Employer Project Personal, including Medical Library/file cab Project Library/file cab Library/file cab Library/file cab Library/file cab <1995 Library/file cab

19. Freedom from hierarchy • c:\my documents\talks\MyLifeBits.pptID=location=organization=display string • Don’t make me invent unique names • Don’t make me file everything • Or let me pick multiple folders

20. “multiple categorization not only improves organization and retrieval times but also matches more closely with the way users naturally think about organizing their information” – Quan et al (MIT’s Haystack) MyLifeBits collection dialog Of course Aliases and Shortcuts can be used albeit painfully to file by time and/or event, subject, location, type.

21. Trying to use my life bits #2: Text annotations Making bits more valuable and retrievable.

22. “Its just bits until it is annotated”

23. Getting the user to tell a story is the ultimate in media value • A story is a “layout” in time and space • Most valuable content (by selection, and by being well annotated) • Stories must include links to any media they use (for future navigation/search – “transclusion”). • Cf: MovieMaker; Creative Memories PhotoAlbums We took him to lunch at our favorite Dim Sum place to say farewell Dapeng was an intern at BARC for the summer of 2000 At table L-R: Dapeng, Gordon, Tom, Jim, Don, Vicky, Patrick, Jim

24. Annotation like this… Voice Annotation

25. Annotation when you feel like it, how you feel like it • Screensaver is the killer app!

26. Trying to use my life bits #3: “I remember when…” The 1st or 2nd most important retrieval handle.

27. MyLifeBits time overlap

28. MyLifeBits on-the-fly time clustering

31. MSR Next Media Team

32. M Stewart Lifeline v2 Mark Stewart’s Lifeline Copyright Mark Stewart, 2004

34. Trying to use my life bits #4: Relationships (links) Using something near ‘it”, to find “it”.

35. Mark Stewart’s first page Copyright Mark Stewart, 2004

36. The Stew family tree Copyright Mark Stewart, 2004

37. PhotoFinder - Schneiderman and Kang

38. MyLifeBits Entities & Links Photo of Event Caller in Phone Call Annotates Transcludes

40. Trying to use my life bits #5: I remember where Just essential.

42. Trying to use my life bits #6: more meta-data (properties) I remember something about the content (understanding a person’s work)

44. Lederberg Finder page

45. Dublin core of a given item

46. Trying to use my life bits #7: classification Moving oward the ultimate time sink.

47. Is traditional classification required? …at OCLC there was unanimous agreement among faculty and participants that“access to electronic resources requires controlled vocabulary and classification”OCLC Institute, “Knowledge Access Management: Tools and Concepts for Next Generation Catalogers”, 17-19 November 1997, Dublin, Ohio.

48. www.alberteinstein.info

49. Professional Life: Organizations Administrivia Projects Library

50. Lederberg papers official reports Number of document segments