Considering documents in lifelog information retrieval

Lifelogging is a research topic that is receiving increasing attention and although lifelog research has progressed in recent years, the concept of what represents a document in lifelog retrieval has not yet been sufficiently explored. Hence, the generation of multimodal lifelog documents is a fundamental concept that must be addressed. In this paper, I introduce my general perspective on generating documents in lifelogging and reflect on learnings from collecting multimodal lifelog data from a number of participants in a study on lifelog data organization. In addition, the main motivation be- hind document generation is proposed and the challenges faced while collecting data and generating documents are discussed in detail. Finally, a process for organizing the documents in lifelog data retrieval is proposed, which I intend to follow in my PhD research

Experiments in lifelog organisation and retrieval at NTCIR

Lifelogging can be described as the process by which individuals use various software and hardware devices to gather large archives of multimodal personal data from multiple sources and store them in a personal data archive, called a lifelog. The Lifelog task at NTCIR was a comparative benchmarking exercise with the aim of encouraging research into the organisation and retrieval of data from multimodal lifelogs. The Lifelog task ran for over 4 years from NTCIR-12 until NTCIR-14 (2015.02–2019.06); it supported participants to submit to five subtasks, each tackling a different challenge related to lifelog retrieval. In this chapter, a motivation is given for the Lifelog task and a review of progress since NTCIR-12 is presented. Finally, the lessons learned and challenges within the domain of lifelog retrieval are presented

Experiences of aiding autobiographical memory Using the SenseCam

Human memory is a dynamic system that makes accessible certain memories of events based on a hierarchy of information, arguably driven by personal significance. Not all events are remembered, but those that are tend to be more psychologically relevant. In contrast, lifelogging is the process of automatically recording aspects of one's life in digital form without loss of information. In this article we share our experiences in designing computer-based solutions to assist people review their visual lifelogs and address this contrast. The technical basis for our work is automatically segmenting visual lifelogs into events, allowing event similarity and event importance to be computed, ideas that are motivated by cognitive science considerations of how human memory works and can be assisted. Our work has been based on visual lifelogs gathered by dozens of people, some of them with collections spanning multiple years. In this review article we summarize a series of studies that have led to the development of a browser that is based on human memory systems and discuss the inherent tension in storing large amounts of data but making the most relevant material the most accessible

Overview of NTCIR-13 Lifelog-2 Task

In this paper we review the NTCIR13-Lifelog core task, which ran at NTCIR-13. We outline the test collection employed, along with the tasks, the submissions and the findings from this pilot task. We finish by suggesting future plans for the task

Experiences of aiding autobiographical memory using the sensecam

Human memory is a dynamic system that makes accessible certain memories of events based on a hierarchy of information, arguably driven by personal significance. Not all events are remembered, but those that are tend to be more psychologically relevant. In contrast, lifelogging is the process of automatically recording aspects of one's life in digital form without loss of information. In this article we share our experiences in designing computer-based solutions to assist people review their visual lifelogs and address this contrast. The technical basis for our work is automatically segmenting visual lifelogs into events, allowing event similarity and event importance to be computed, ideas that are motivated by cognitive science considerations of how human memory works and can be assisted. Our work has been based on visual lifelogs gathered by dozens of people, some of them with collections spanning multiple years. In this review article we summarize a series of studies that have led to the development of a browser that is based on human memory systems and discuss the inherent tension in storing large amounts of data but making the most relevant material the most accessible

Providing effective memory retrieval cues through automatic structuring and augmentation of a lifelog of images

Lifelogging is an area of research which is concerned with the capture of many aspects of an individual's life digitally, and within this rapidly emerging field is the significant challenge of managing images passively captured by an individual of their daily life. Possible applications vary from helping those with neurodegenerative conditions recall events from memory, to the maintenance and augmentation of extensive image collections of a tourist's trips. However, a large lifelog of images can quickly amass, with an average of 700,000 images captured each year, using a device such as the SenseCam. We address the problem of managing this vast collection of personal images by investigating automatic techniques that: 1. Identify distinct events within a full day of lifelog images (which typically consists of 2,000 images) e.g. breakfast, working on PC, meeting, etc. 2. Find similar events to a given event in a person's lifelog e.g. "show me other events where I was in the park" 3. Determine those events that are more important or unusual to the user and also select a relevant keyframe image for visual display of an event e.g. a "meeting" is more interesting to review than "working on PC" 4. Augment the images from a wearable camera with higher quality images from external "Web 2.0" sources e.g. find me pictures taken by others of the U2 concert in Croke Park In this dissertation we discuss novel techniques to realise each of these facets and how effective they are. The significance of this work is not only of benefit to the lifelogging community, but also to cognitive psychology researchers studying the potential benefits of lifelogging devices to those with neurodegenerative diseases

IAPMA 2011: 2nd Workshop on information access to personal media archives

Towards e-Memories: challenges of capturing, summarising, presenting, understanding, using, and retrieving relevant information from heterogeneous data contained in personal media archives. Welcome to IAPMA 2011, the second international workshop on "Information Access for Personal Media Archives". It is now possible to archive much of our life experiences in digital form using a variety of sources, e.g. blogs written, tweets made, social network status updates, photographs taken, videos seen, music heard, physiological monitoring, locations visited and environmentally sensed data of those places, details of people met, etc. Information can be captured from a myriad of personal information devices including desktop computers, PDAs, digital cameras, video and audio recorders, and various sensors, including GPS, Bluetooth, and biometric devices

Overview of the NTCIR-14 Lifelog-3 task

Lifelog-3 was the third instance of the lifelog task at NTCIR. At NTCIR-14, the Lifelog-3 task explored three different lifelog data access related challenges, the search challenge, the annotation challenge and the insights challenge. In this paper we review the activities of participating teams who took part in the challenges and we suggest next steps for the community

Temporal multimodal video and lifelog retrieval

The past decades have seen exponential growth of both consumption and production of data, with multimedia such as images and videos contributing significantly to said growth. The widespread proliferation of smartphones has provided everyday users with the ability to consume and produce such content easily. As the complexity and diversity of multimedia data has grown, so has the need for more complex retrieval models which address the information needs of users. Finding relevant multimedia content is central in many scenarios, from internet search engines and medical retrieval to querying one's personal multimedia archive, also called lifelog. Traditional retrieval models have often focused on queries targeting small units of retrieval, yet users usually remember temporal context and expect results to include this. However, there is little research into enabling these information needs in interactive multimedia retrieval. In this thesis, we aim to close this research gap by making several contributions to multimedia retrieval with a focus on two scenarios, namely video and lifelog retrieval. We provide a retrieval model for complex information needs with temporal components, including a data model for multimedia retrieval, a query model for complex information needs, and a modular and adaptable query execution model which includes novel algorithms for result fusion. The concepts and models are implemented in vitrivr, an open-source multimodal multimedia retrieval system, which covers all aspects from extraction to query formulation and browsing. vitrivr has proven its usefulness in evaluation campaigns and is now used in two large-scale interdisciplinary research projects. We show the feasibility and effectiveness of our contributions in two ways: firstly, through results from user-centric evaluations which pit different user-system combinations against one another. Secondly, we perform a system-centric evaluation by creating a new dataset for temporal information needs in video and lifelog retrieval with which we quantitatively evaluate our models. The results show significant benefits for systems that enable users to specify more complex information needs with temporal components. Participation in interactive retrieval evaluation campaigns over multiple years provides insight into possible future developments and challenges of such campaigns