Lifelogging As An Extreme Form of Personal Information Management -- What Lessons To Learn

Personal data includes the digital footprints that we leave behind as part of our everyday activities, both online and offline in the real world. It includes data we collect ourselves, such as from wearables, as well as the data collected by others about our online behaviour and activities. Sometimes we are able to use the personal data we ourselves collect, in order to examine some parts of our lives but for the most part, our personal data is leveraged by third parties including internet companies, for services like targeted advertising and recommendations. Lifelogging is a form of extreme personal data gathering and in this article we present an overview of the tools used to manage access to lifelogs as demonstrated at the most recent of the annual Lifelog Search Challenge benchmarking workshops. Here, experimental systems are showcased in live, real time information seeking tasks by real users. This overview of these systems' capabilities show the range of possibilities for accessing our own personal data which may, in time, become more easily available as consumer-level services

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

FIRST - Flexible interactive retrieval SysTem for visual lifelog exploration at LSC 2020

Lifelog can provide useful insights of our daily activities. It is essential to provide a flexible way for users to retrieve certain events or moments of interest, corresponding to a wide variation of query types. This motivates us to develop FIRST, a Flexible Interactive Retrieval SysTem, to help users to combine or integrate various query components in a flexible manner to handle different query scenarios, such as visual clustering data based on color histogram, visual similarity, GPS location, or scene attributes. We also employ personalized concept detection and image captioning to enhance image understanding from visual lifelog data, and develop an autoencoderlike approach for query text and image feature mapping. Furthermore, we refine the user interface of the retrieval system to better assist users in query expansion and verifying sequential events in a flexible temporal resolution to control the navigation speed through sequences of images

Stress detection in lifelog data for improved personalized lifelog retrieval system

Stress can be categorized into acute and chronic types, with acute stress having short-term positive effects in managing hazardous situations, while chronic stress can adversely impact mental health. In a biological context, stress elicits a physiological response indicative of the fight-or-flight mechanism, accompanied by measurable changes in physiological signals such as blood volume pulse (BVP), galvanic skin response (GSR), and skin temperature (TEMP). While clinical-grade devices have traditionally been used to measure these signals, recent advancements in sensor technology enable their capture using consumer-grade wearable devices, providing opportunities for research in acute stress detection. Despite these advancements, there has been limited focus on utilizing low-resolution data obtained from sensor technology for early stress detection and evaluating stress detection models under real-world conditions. Moreover, the potential of physiological signals to infer mental stress information remains largely unexplored in lifelog retrieval systems. This thesis addresses these gaps through empirical investigations and explores the potential of utilizing physiological signals for stress detection and their integration within the state-of-the-art (SOTA) lifelog retrieval system. The main contributions of this thesis are as follows. Firstly, statistical analyses are conducted to investigate the feasibility of using low-resolution data for stress detection and emphasize the superiority of subject-dependent models over subject-independent models, thereby proposing the optimal approach to training stress detection models with low-resolution data. Secondly, longitudinal stress lifelog data is collected to evaluate stress detection models in real-world settings. It is proposed that training lifelog models on physiological signals in real-world settings is crucial to avoid detection inaccuracies caused by differences between laboratory and free-living conditions. Finally, a state-of-the-art lifelog interactive retrieval system called \lifeseeker is developed, incorporating the stress-moment filter function. Experimental results demonstrate that integrating this function improves the overall performance of the system in both interactive and non-interactive modes. In summary, this thesis contributes to the understanding of stress detection applied in real-world settings and showcases the potential of integrating stress information for enhancing personalized lifelog retrieval system performance

Overview of ImageCLEFlifelog 2018: daily living understanding and lifelog moment retrieval

Benchmarking in Multimedia and Retrieval related research fields has a long tradition and important position within the community. Benchmarks such as the MediaEval Multimedia Benchmark or CLEF are well established and also served by the community. One major goal of these competitions beside of comparing different methods and approaches is also to create or promote new interesting research directions within multimedia. For example the Medico task at MediaEval with the goal of medical related multimedia analysis. Although lifelogging creates a lot of attention in the community which is shown by several workshops and special session hosted about the topic. Despite of that there exist also some lifelogging related benchmarks. For example the previous edition of the lifelogging task at ImageCLEF. The last years ImageCLEFlifelog task was well received but had some barriers that made it difficult for some researchers to participate (data size, multi modal features, etc.) The ImageCLEFlifelog 2018 tries to overcome these problems and make the task accessible for an even broader audience (eg, pre-extracted features are provided). Furthermore, the task is divided into two subtasks (challenges). The two challenges are lifelog moment retrieval (LMRT) and the Activities of Daily Living understanding (ADLT). All in all seven teams participated with a total number of 41 runs which was an significant increase compared to the previous year

Graph-based indexing and retrieval of lifelog data

Understanding the relationship between objects in an image is an important challenge because it can help to describe actions in the image. In this paper, a graphical data structure, named “Scene Graph”, is utilized to represent an encoded informative visual relationship graph for an image, which we suggest has a wide range of potential applications. This scene graph is applied and tested in the popular domain of lifelogs, and specifically in the challenge of known-item retrieval from lifelogs. In this work, every lifelog image is represented by a scene graph, and at retrieval time, this scene graph is compared with the semantic graph, parsed from a textual query. The result is combined with location or date information to determine the matching items. The experiment shows that this technique can outperform a conventional method

Semantic interpretation of events in lifelogging

The topic of this thesis is lifelogging, the automatic, passive recording of a person’s daily activities and in particular, on performing a semantic analysis and enrichment of lifelogged data. Our work centers on visual lifelogged data, such as taken from wearable cameras. Such wearable cameras generate an archive of a person’s day taken from a first-person viewpoint but one of the problems with this is the sheer volume of information that can be generated. In order to make this potentially very large volume of information more manageable, our analysis of this data is based on segmenting each day’s lifelog data into discrete and non-overlapping events corresponding to activities in the wearer’s day. To manage lifelog data at an event level, we define a set of concepts using an ontology which is appropriate to the wearer, applying automatic detection of concepts to these events and then semantically enriching each of the detected lifelog events making them an index into the events. Once this enrichment is complete we can use the lifelog to support semantic search for everyday media management, as a memory aid, or as part of medical analysis on the activities of daily living (ADL), and so on. In the thesis, we address the problem of how to select the concepts to be used for indexing events and we propose a semantic, density- based algorithm to cope with concept selection issues for lifelogging. We then apply activity detection to classify everyday activities by employing the selected concepts as high-level semantic features. Finally, the activity is modeled by multi-context representations and enriched by Semantic Web technologies. The thesis includes an experimental evaluation using real data from users and shows the performance of our algorithms in capturing the semantics of everyday concepts and their efficacy in activity recognition and semantic enrichment

Visual access to lifelog data in a virtual environment

Continuous image capture via a wearable camera is currently one of the most popular methods to establish a comprehensive record of the entirety of an indi- vidual’s life experience, referred to in the research community as a lifelog. These vast image corpora are further enriched by content analysis and combined with additional data such as biometrics to generate as extensive a record of a person’s life as possible. However, interfacing with such datasets remains an active area of research, and despite the advent of new technology and a plethora of com- peting mediums for processing digital information, there has been little focus on newly emerging platforms such as virtual reality. We hypothesise that the increase in immersion, accessible spatial dimensions, and more, could provide significant benefits in the lifelogging domain over more conventional media. In this work, we motivate virtual reality as a viable method of lifelog exploration by performing an in-depth analysis using a novel application prototype built for the HTC Vive. This research also includes the development of a governing design framework for lifelog applications which supported the development of our prototype but is also intended to support the development of future such lifelog systems

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

Organising and structuring a visual diary using visual interest point detectors

As wearable cameras become more popular, researchers are increasingly focusing on novel applications to manage the large volume of data these devices produce. One such application is the construction of a Visual Diary from an individual’s photographs. Microsoft’s SenseCam, a device designed to passively record a Visual Diary and cover a typical day of the user wearing the camera, is an example of one such device. The vast quantity of images generated by these devices means that the management and organisation of these collections is not a trivial matter. We believe wearable cameras, such as SenseCam, will become more popular in the future and the management of the volume of data generated by these devices is a key issue. Although there is a significant volume of work in the literature in the object detection and recognition and scene classification fields, there is little work in the area of setting detection. Furthermore, few authors have examined the issues involved in analysing extremely large image collections (like a Visual Diary) gathered over a long period of time. An algorithm developed for setting detection should be capable of clustering images captured at the same real world locations (e.g. in the dining room at home, in front of the computer in the office, in the park, etc.). This requires the selection and implementation of suitable methods to identify visually similar backgrounds in images using their visual features. We present a number of approaches to setting detection based on the extraction of visual interest point detectors from the images. We also analyse the performance of two of the most popular descriptors - Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) and Speeded Up Robust Features (SURF).We present an implementation of a Visual Diary application and evaluate its performance via a series of user experiments. Finally, we also outline some techniques to allow the Visual Diary to automatically detect new settings, to scale as the image collection continues to grow substantially over time, and to allow the user to generate a personalised summary of their data