Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything (33 page)

f. Other publications
papers and reports

g. People, references, recommendations, vitae

h. Archived company and organizational folders (X)

i) Digital Equipment Corp. . . .

ii) NSF

i. Archived calendars and correspondence (t)

j. Archived files (e.g., DEC WPS, e-mail)

3. My Books
books authored, books scanned

4. My Voice Conversations and Notes (telephone conversations are held in MyLifeBits database)

5. My Media, i.e., song collections from ripped CDs

6. My Videos including c. 1950s 8mm movies and lectures

Psychologists have identified “lifetime periods” as an important way that autobiographical memories work. Lifetime periods are thematic and include work or jobs, educational institutions, and relationships that exist over an extended period of time. These lifetime periods are an important part of my hierarchy, above.

Conway, M. A. 2005. “Memory and the Self.”
Journal of Memory and Language
53:594-628.

Conway, M. A., and C. W. Pleydell-Pearce. 2000. “The Construction of Autobiographical Memories in the Self-Memory System.”
Psychological Review
107, no. 2:261-68.

McNeely, I. F., and L. Wolverton. 2008.
Reinventing Knowledge: From Alexandria to the Internet.
New York: W. W. Norton and Company.

Hierarchies can be useful, but are sometimes too constricting. Many times you want to just access items by some attribute. For instance, you can probably access your e-mail by the attributes of date, subject, and sender, without designating that each of them occupies a particular level of a hierarchy. You can also see this when you shop at, say, Amazon, where you can sift cameras by brand and number of pixels. In the world of librarians, using attributes to organize things is called “faceted classification.” The Flamenco Search Interface project from the UC Berkeley School of Information has some good demos on faceted organization.

Flamenco Web page.
http://flamenco.berkeley.edu

Hearst, Marti A. “UIs for Faceted Navigation: Recent Advances and Remaining Open Problems, in the Workshop on Computer Interaction and Information Retrieval,” HCIR 2008, Redmond, Washington, October 2008.

For those of you interested in trying a start-up:

Bell, C. Gordon, and John E. McNamara. 1991.
High-Tech Ventures: The Guide for Entrepreneurial Success.
New York: Perseus Book Publishing.

Nesheim, John L. 2000.
High Tech Start Up, Revised and Updated: The Complete Handbook For Creating Successful New High Tech Companies
. New York: The Free Press.

10. THE FUTURE

Nathan Myhrvold said, “On the hardware side, I’m pretty confident there’ll be another twenty years at least, which is another factor of a million. A factor of a million reduces a year into thirty seconds. Twenty years from now, a computer will do in thirty seconds what one of today’s computers would take a year to do. So, for particularly big computational problems there’s no point in starting. You should wait, and then do it all in thirty seconds twenty years from now! That is the hardware side. The growth of software is certain, because it’s only limited by human imagination.”

Brand, Stewart. 1995. “The Physicist.”
Wired
(September)
.

Bell’s law:

Bell, G. 2008. “Bell’s Law for the Birth and Death of Computer Classes.”
Communications of the ACM
51 (1) (January): 86-94.

Sensors:

Warneke, Brett, Matt Last, Brian Liebowitz, and Kristofer S. J. Pister. 2001. “Smart Dust: Communicating with a Cubic-Millimeter.”
Computer
34: 44-51.

http://robotics.eecs.berkeley.edu/~pister/SmartDust/

http://ceng.usc.edu/~anrg/SensorNetBib.html

Zhao, Feng, and Leonidas Guibas. 2004.
Wireless Sensor Networks: An Information Processing Approach
. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann.

ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks.
http://tosn.acm.org

Sensors will be everywhere, and so will computational power. The ubiquitous and pervasive computing research communities are driving this forward. There are journals and magazines, including
IEEE Pervasive Computing,
Springer’s
Personal and Ubiquitous Computing,
and Elsevier’s
Pervasive and Mobile Computing
journal.

Weiser, Mark. 1991. “The computer for the 21st century.”
Scientific American
265, no. 3 (September): 94-104.

Ubiquitous computing conference Web site.
http://ubicomp.org

Pervasive conference Web site.
http://www.pervasive-conference.org

Pattie Maes’s lab at MIT, which previously did the Remembrance Agent work, has recently unveiled a system called “sixth sense” that includes a wearable projector and camera. Any surface becomes a possible computer display, and you control the system using hand gestures (your hands are tracked by the camera). A hand gesture takes a snapshot. A virtual keyboard can be displayed to type on. Bar codes can be scanned while shopping and extra information about products projected on them. When you read the newspaper, extra video footage for a story can be played. When you read a book, annotations and extra information can be projected into the margins. Sixth Sense is a great illustration of the technological climate that Total Recall will live in: constant recording possible with a wearable camera, and your e-memory ready to consult and enjoy at any moment on any surface.

Sixth Sense demo video.
http://www.ted.com/talks/pattie_maes_demos_the_sixth_sense.html

Sixth Sense Web page.
http://www.pranavmistry.com/projects/sixth-sense.html

Mistry, P., P. Maes, and L. Chang. “WUW—Wear Ur World—A Wearable Gestural Interface.” To appear in the CHI ’09
Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems,
Boston, Massachusetts, 2009.

Storage trends: See Chapter 1.

Unified communications: “Forrester Research said recently that the unified communications (UC) market in North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific will reach $14.5bn (£10.5bn) in 2015.”

Bell, Gordon, and Jim Gemmell. 2002. “A Call for the Home Media Network.
Communications of the ACM
45, no. 7 ( July): 71-75. Association for Computing Machinery, Inc.

Montalbano, Elizabeth. 2008. “IBM Pledges $1 Billion to Unified Communications.”
PC World
(March 11).

O’Reilly, Paul. 2009. “Managing Unified Communications Performance.” CRN (March 9).

Semantic Web:

Berners-Lee, T., and J. Hendler. 2001. “Scientific Publishing on the Semantic Web.”
Nature
(26 April).

W3C Semantic Web Frequently Asked Questions.
http://www.w3.org/RDF/FAQ

British Library Digital Lives Project and conference:

Digital Lives Research Project Web page.
http://www.bl.uk/digital-lives

First Digital Lives Research Conference: Personal Digital Archives for the 21st Century. British Library, St. Pancras, London, February 9-11, 2009.

Randy Hahn helped us craft the story about him. The details are fictitious, but the scenario is completely realistic.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We have many to thank for helping make this book a reality. Roger Lueder was our key collaborator throughout the MyLifeBits project. It was the vision of our agent, James Levine, that spurred us on toward a much broader audience. Our editor, Stephen Morrow, guided us out of the mire of the scientific writing style. We are very grateful to Bill Gates for his excellent foreword, and for his technological vision that was a key inspiration for this work. Others who provided invaluable help with the manuscript include Sheridan Forbes, Ray Ozzie, Dave Gemmell, David Rollo, Randy Hahn, and Michael Hahn.

Thanks also to others who helped with MyLifeBits and CARPE: Aleks Aris, Josh Blumenstock, Mary Czerwinski, Steve Drucker, Jonathan Fay, Steve Hodges, Ron Logan, Kenji Mase, Brian Meyers, Tripp Millican, Evan Salomon, Hari Sundaram, Kentaro Toyama, Curtis Wong, Zhe Wang, and Ken Wood. The arrival of Lyndsay Williams’s SenseCam in 2003 added another dimension to the project.

Gordon would like to thank his family and friends for their encouragement and especially the enrichment of MyLifeBits. Vicki Rozycki digitized the thousands of items constituting MyLifeBits that enables him to have a real, living, working, essential e-memory.

Jim would like to thank Elizabeth, Sam, Naomi, Judah, Levi, Miriam, and Sara for their support through the hectic writing schedule.

Finally, we want to thank Microsoft, Microsoft Research, and especially Jim Gray. We had the privilege of working for Jim Gray for more than ten years in his Bay Area Research Center in San Francisco. For his Turing Award lecture, Jim outlined some key future research goals, one of them being: “Personal Memex: Record everything a person sees and hears, and quickly retrieve any item on request.” Without Jim’s support, there would have been no MyLifeBits, and we would not have written this book.

INDEX

A

Aaron computer program

absentmindedness

academia.
See
education; research

accelerometers

accessibility of data- .
See also
organization of data

ACM Multimedia 2004,

adaptation

address books

Adobe

Advanced Soldier Sensor Information Systems Technology (ASSIST)

aerial imagery

afterlife, digital

Allen, David

alphabetic sorting

Alzheimer’s disease

Amazon.com

American Heart Association

Android

annotation

anonymity.
See also
privacy issues

antisocial behavior

AOL

Apple

appliances

archivists

arguments

artificial intelligence

“As We May Think” (Bush)

associative memory

astronomy

asynchronous logic

Atlantic Monthly

AT&T

audio recordings and files

and human development research

and legal issues

and lifelogging

and memex

and metadata

and note taking

and storytelling

and total data collection

and travelogues

auditory learners

Augment system

autofill features

autographs

automatic teller machines (ATMs)

automation

automobiles

availability of information.
See also
searching data

avatars

Azure

B

Baby Boomer

backing-up data

Baldridge, Aimee

Ballmer, Steve

Bannon, Liam

Barclay, Tom

battery technology

battlefield awareness

Bay Area Research Center (BARC)

Bell Electric

Bickmore, Timothy

billing statements
See also
financial and transaction data

biographies

biomarker testing

biometric sensors

and battery technology

and cardiac health

forerunners of

and health management

and lifelogging

and miniaturization

and StartleCam

and unified communications

BitLocker

BlackBerry

blocking memories

blogs and blogging

blood pressure data

blood sampling

BodyBugg

boilerplate forms

bookmarks

books

Brahe, Tycho

Brain Age

Brain Fitness Program

A Brief History of Time
(Hawking)

British Library

British National Health Service

Bush, Vannevar

and higher learning

and lifelong learning

and memex

on scientific research

and “trails,”

business card scanners

Business Channel

C

calendars

Calvin, John

cameras

and bio-memory

and digitizing images

and electronic memory

and GPS technology

and health data

and implementation of Total Recall,

and lifelogging

and memex

and miniaturization

and picture-taking mirrors

and scanners

and SenseCam

and smartphones