LifeLogging: personal big data

We have recently observed a convergence of technologies to foster the emergence of lifelogging as a mainstream activity. Computer storage has become significantly cheaper, and advancements in sensing technology allows for the efficient sensing of personal activities, locations and the environment. This is best seen in the growing popularity of the quantified self movement, in which life activities are tracked using wearable sensors in the hope of better understanding human performance in a variety of tasks. This review aims to provide a comprehensive summary of lifelogging, to cover its research history, current technologies, and applications. Thus far, most of the lifelogging research has focused predominantly on visual lifelogging in order to capture life details of life activities, hence we maintain this focus in this review. However, we also reflect on the challenges lifelogging poses to an information retrieval scientist. This review is a suitable reference for those seeking a information retrieval scientist’s perspective on lifelogging and the quantified self

Interdisciplinary perspectives on privacy awareness in lifelogging technology development

Population aging resulting from demographic changes requires some challenging decisions and necessary steps to be taken by different stakeholders to manage current and future demand for assistance and support. The consequences of population aging can be mitigated to some extent by assisting technologies that can support the autonomous living of older individuals and persons in need of care in their private environments as long as possible. A variety of technical solutions are already available on the market, but privacy protection is a serious, often neglected, issue when using such (assisting) technology. Thus, privacy needs to be thoroughly taken under consideration in this context. In a three-year project PAAL (‘Privacy-Aware and Acceptable Lifelogging Services for Older and Frail People’), researchers from different disciplines, such as law, rehabilitation, human-computer interaction, and computer science, investigated the phenomenon of privacy when using assistive lifelogging technologies. In concrete terms, the concept of Privacy by Design was realized using two exemplary lifelogging applications in private and professional environments. A user-centered empirical approach was applied to the lifelogging technologies, investigating the perceptions and attitudes of (older) users with different health-related and biographical profiles. The knowledge gained through the interdisciplinary collaboration can improve the implementation and optimization of assistive applications. In this paper, partners of the PAAL project present insights gained from their cross-national, interdisciplinary work regarding privacy-aware and acceptable lifelogging technologies.Open Access funding enabled and organized by Projekt DEAL. This work is part of the PAAL-project (“Privacy-Aware and Acceptable Lifelogging services for older and frail people”). The support of the Joint Programme Initiative “More Years, Better Lives” (award number: PAAL_JTC2017), the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (grant no: 16SV7955), the Swedish Research Council for Health, Working Life, and Welfare (grant no: 2017–02302), the Spanish Agencia Estatal de Investigacion (PCIN-2017-114), the Italian Ministero dell’Istruzione dell’Universitá e della Ricerca, (CUP: I36G17000380001), and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research is gratefully acknowledged

A lifelogging system supporting multimodal access

Today, technology has progressed to allow us to capture our lives digitally such as taking pictures, recording videos and gaining access to WiFi to share experiences using smartphones. People’s lifestyles are changing. One example is from the traditional memo writing to the digital lifelog. Lifelogging is the process of using digital tools to collect personal data in order to illustrate the user’s daily life (Smith et al., 2011). The availability of smartphones embedded with different sensors such as camera and GPS has encouraged the development of lifelogging. It also has brought new challenges in multi-sensor data collection, large volume data storage, data analysis and appropriate representation of lifelog data across different devices. This study is designed to address the above challenges. A lifelogging system was developed to collect, store, analyse, and display multiple sensors’ data, i.e. supporting multimodal access. In this system, the multi-sensor data (also called data streams) is firstly transmitted from smartphone to server only when the phone is being charged. On the server side, six contexts are detected namely personal, time, location, social, activity and environment. Events are then segmented and a related narrative is generated. Finally, lifelog data is presented differently on three widely used devices which are the computer, smartphone and E-book reader. Lifelogging is likely to become a well-accepted technology in the coming years. Manual logging is not possible for most people and is not feasible in the long-term. Automatic lifelogging is needed. This study presents a lifelogging system which can automatically collect multi-sensor data, detect contexts, segment events, generate meaningful narratives and display the appropriate data on different devices based on their unique characteristics. The work in this thesis therefore contributes to automatic lifelogging development and in doing so makes a valuable contribution to the development of the field

Evaluating Information Retrieval and Access Tasks

This open access book summarizes the first two decades of the NII Testbeds and Community for Information access Research (NTCIR). NTCIR is a series of evaluation forums run by a global team of researchers and hosted by the National Institute of Informatics (NII), Japan. The book is unique in that it discusses not just what was done at NTCIR, but also how it was done and the impact it has achieved. For example, in some chapters the reader sees the early seeds of what eventually grew to be the search engines that provide access to content on the World Wide Web, today’s smartphones that can tailor what they show to the needs of their owners, and the smart speakers that enrich our lives at home and on the move. We also get glimpses into how new search engines can be built for mathematical formulae, or for the digital record of a lived human life. Key to the success of the NTCIR endeavor was early recognition that information access research is an empirical discipline and that evaluation therefore lay at the core of the enterprise. Evaluation is thus at the heart of each chapter in this book. They show, for example, how the recognition that some documents are more important than others has shaped thinking about evaluation design. The thirty-three contributors to this volume speak for the many hundreds of researchers from dozens of countries around the world who together shaped NTCIR as organizers and participants. This book is suitable for researchers, practitioners, and students—anyone who wants to learn about past and present evaluation efforts in information retrieval, information access, and natural language processing, as well as those who want to participate in an evaluation task or even to design and organize one

Communicating with your E-memory: finding and refinding in personal lifelogs

The rapid development of technology enables the digital capture and storage of our life experiences in an “E-Memory” (electronic–memory) or personal lifelog (PLL). This offers the potential for people to store the details of their life in a permanent archive, so that the information is still available even when its physical existence has vanished and when memory traces of it have faded away. A major challenge for PLLs is enabling people to access information when it is needed. Many people may also want to share or transfer some of their memory to their friends and descendants, so that their experiences can be appreciated and their knowledge can be kept even after they have passed away. This thesis further explores people’s potential needs from their own PLLs, discuss the possible methods people may use and potential problems that they may encounter while accessing their PLLs, and hypothesize that better support of users’ own memory can provide better user experience and improved efficiency for accessing their E-memories (or PLLs). As part of a larger project, three lifeloggers collected their own prototype lifelog collection for about 20 months’ time. To complete this study, the author developed a prototype PLL system, called the iCLIPS Lifelog Archive Browser (LAB), based on the author’s theoretical exploration and empirical studies, and evaluated it using our prototype lifelog collections through a user study with the three lifeloggers. The results of this study provide promising evidence which support the hypothesis. The end of this thesis also discusses the issues that the lifeloggers encountered in using their lifelogs and future technologies that are desirable based the studies in this thesis

Proceedings of the ECIR2010 workshop on information access for personal media archives (IAPMA2010), Milton Keynes, UK, 28 March 2010

Towards e-Memories: challenges of capturing, summarising, presenting, understanding, using, and retrieving relevant information from heterogeneous data contained in personal media archives. This is the proceedings of the inaugural 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. In this workshop research from diverse disciplines was presented on how we can advance towards the goal of effective capture, retrieval and exploration of e-memories