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

Context-aware personal route recognition

Personal route recognition is an important element of intelligent transportation systems. The results may be used for providing personal information about location-specific events, services, emergency or disaster situations, for location-specific advertising and more. Existing real-time route recognition systems often compare the current driving trajectory against the trajectories observed in past and select the most similar route as the most likely. The problem is that such systems are inaccurate in the beginning of a trip, as typically several different routes start at the same departure point (e.g. home). In such situations the beginnings of trajectories overlap and the trajectory alone is insufficient to recognize the route. This drawback limits the utilization of route prediction systems, since accurate predictions are needed as early as possible, not at the end of the trip. To solve this problem we incorporate external contextual information (e.g. time of the day) into route recognition from trajectory. We develop a technique to determine from the historical data how the probability of a route depends on contextual features and adjust (post-correct) the route recognition output accordingly. We evaluate the proposed context-aware route recognition approach using the data on driving behavior of twenty persons residing in Aalborg, Denmark, monitored over two months. The results confirm that utilizing contextual information in the proposed way improves the accuracy of route recognition, especially in cases when the historical routes highly overlap

Context-aware personal route recognition

Personal route recognition is an important element of intelligent transportation systems. The results may be used for providing personal information about location-specific events, services, emergency or disaster situations, for location-specific advertising and more. Existing real-time route recognition systems often compare the current driving trajectory against the trajectories observed in past and select the most similar route as the most likely. The problem is that such systems are inaccurate in the beginning of a trip, as typically several different routes start at the same departure point (e.g. home). In such situations the beginnings of trajectories overlap and the trajectory alone is insufficient to recognize the route. This drawback limits the utilization of route prediction systems, since accurate predictions are needed as early as possible, not at the end of the trip. To solve this problem we incorporate external contextual information (e.g. time of the day) into route recognition from trajectory. We develop a technique to determine from the historical data how the probability of a route depends on contextual features and adjust (post-correct) the route recognition output accordingly. We evaluate the proposed context-aware route recognition approach using the data on driving behavior of twenty persons residing in Aalborg, Denmark, monitored over two months. The results confirm that utilizing contextual information in the proposed way improves the accuracy of route recognition, especially in cases when the historical routes highly overlap