Keeping your bits for posterity - A life in bits and bytes

Anyone who's ever wanted to Google search their life or wished they could get a “back up” of their brain is going love this.

Computer engineers are busily working on a technology that will collect a person's life experiences in a database to be used for memory recall or historical education. Apart from being a very effective “add-on personal memory”, the developer of the system sees it as an accurate surrogate brain. At some point in the future, those of us who are compulsive recorders or diary keepers will be able to call up a single day in our life and get a blow-by-blow, hour-by-hour breakdown of what we did, said or observed.

Eventually it is hoped, people will begin using the system as an "add-on personal memory" to order up instant replays, years after the material was collected. Such a database could be used to refresh a failing memory, resuscitate a stalled project, or educate our future generations about what today's lives are like.

Well at least that's the idea behind, a new Microsoft research project, MyLifeBits, that aims to record the very essence of a person's life onto computer disks: every photograph snapped, home movie filmed, Web page browsed, e-mail jotted, phone calls made, TV watched or bill paid. This project is currently underway at Microsoft's Media Presence Research Group.

So for all you 50-somethings worried about those increasing memory lapses, don’t despair, because work is well underway to get computers to capture human life and remember it as people do, by recalling bits of experience that are linked by a common time or place or person.

So, how does it work?

The system involves the scanning and recording of every document or auditory input, photos, phone conversations, emails, TV shows, etc. that a person receives, hears, reads, or otherwise experiences. Using this database of experiences in conjunction with a software program that imitates human minds ability to recall, such a system could be used to remind a person of past experiences by playing back a phone call and simultaneously displaying any documents or material they saw at the same time, for instance.

But why would we want to do this for in the first place?

In the course of our lives, most of us accumulate an incredible amount of documents, photographs, pictures, videos and even e-mail messages that are far too important to throw away. This collection becomes a vast repository of information that can often become overwhelming - filling our cupboards, drawers, bookcases, offices and shoeboxes with hard-to-find information that gathers dust. The aim is to capture and store all this information in a personal directory.

Perhaps, long after you're dead, your descendents rather than rummaging through the paper of your life will poke around eavesdropping on long-ago phone conversations, reading private e-mail exchanges and watching the video highlights of your very existence. And your life deathbed flashback will already be uploaded to your hard drive

This must be one of the latest brainwaves to come out of the IT industry?

Actually, the concept was inspired by one Vannevar Bush, an engineer, who in 1945 posited the creation of a "configurable storehouse of knowledge" known as a Memex.

The main researcher of the system is currently downloading his own life onto a hard drive. His database spans more than a century of data: the first entry consists of photographs of his parents taken as children in 1900.

But is this practical and affordable? Won’t the cost to do this be extraordinary?

A lifetime's experience will soon fit easily on an ordinary hard drive. For example, so far the system designer’s life of 68 years has filled just 30 gigabytes, a mere fraction of the terabyte (1,000 gigabytes) of storage capacity that hard disks are expected to have within five years. For the last few years it has been capturing and storing Gordon Bell's articles, books, correspondence (letters and email), CDs, memos, papers, photos, pictures, presentations, home movies, videotaped lectures, and voice recordings. Of the 30 Gigabytes 12 of this are CDs.

It is predicted that very soon, the price of Terabyte (that’s big) hard drives will cost less than $300. This amount of storage will allow for nearly endless recording. For example users could upload over 3.6 million 300-kilobyte images, or how about 290 hours of video. We would also expect compression technologies to get better in the future.

How do you recall all this information you are recording – some people’s lives are an incredible jumble?

After years of digitizing a person’s life, it is obvious that there is a need for software that will behave in the same manner the human mind recalls things. Right now the system has the ability to play back a phone conversation while simultaneously displaying any Web pages the user was viewing at the same time, plus E-mails and documents relevant to that same conversation. It seems our mind works by association; people recall information in part by remembering where they were, what else was happening, and whom they were with.

How is this going to be made possible?

Two technology trends are merging together to make this possible. Firstly, we increasingly live in an electronic goldfish bowl. That is to say that more and more of our activities are captured automatically and electronically - from our on-line bank and shopping trips to the e-mails we send in our everyday business and personal lives. A high and growing proportion of our activities are now recorded electronically somewhere.

Secondly, storage technology is making it possible to store all our documents, CDs, books, photographs and other digital paraphernalia, within a personal computer.

Are there any problems foreseen with such an advanced system?

The security implications for such a system would be very “interesting”. Certainly it will never forget anything so people will need to protect it very carefully. Its loss would be a complete disaster. Maybe the best place to keep it would be in a secure on-line server farm rather than on a desktop or laptop computer, as Microsoft intend.

To some the very idea may seem unpalatable, after all, who wants a computer watching your every move? Then again retired IBM Fellow Dave Thompson, who coined the term "memory prosthesis”, says 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,” "Why should the rich people have all the fun?"

Any other sectors of the community see a use for this kind of technology?

Interestingly enough efforts are underway at America’s Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop tools that will record and store all facets of an individual's experience to serve as electronic memory aids.

It wants to combine sensors, cameras, bugging devices, and wearable computers to capture a wide-ranging, searchable database of an individual human life. DARPA then hopes that the project will yield clues about how to make robots become more humanlike. Ultimately it is also aiming for "a powerful automated multimedia diary and scrapbook.

Arthur Hissey
Computer Research & Technology
www.crt.net.au