ZhiWo: Activity tagging and recognizing system from personal lifelogs

With the increasing use of mobile devices as personal record- ing, communication and sensing tools, extracting the seman- tics of life activities through sensed data (photos, accelerom- eter, GPS etc.) is gaining widespread public awareness. A person who engages in long-term personal sensing is engag- ing in a process of lifelogging. Lifelogging typically involves using a range of (wearable) sensors to capture raw data, to segment into discrete activities, to annotate and subse- quently to make accessible by search or browsing tools. In this paper, we present an intuitive lifelog activity record- ing and management system called ZhiWo. By using a su- pervised machine learning approach, sensed data collected by mobile devices are automatically classified into different types of daily human activities and these activities are inter- preted as life activity retrieval units for personal archives

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

Lifelog access modelling using MemoryMesh

As of very recently, we have observed a convergence of technologies that have led to the emergence of lifelogging as a technology for personal data application. Lifelogging will become ubiquitous in the near future, not just for memory enhancement and health management, but also in various other domains. While there are many devices available for gathering massive lifelogging data, there are still challenges to modelling large volume of multi-modal lifelog data. In the thesis, we explore and address the problem of how to model lifelog in order to make personal lifelogs more accessible to users from the perspective of collection, organization and visualization. In order to subdivide our research targets, we designed and followed the following steps to solve the problem: 1. Lifelog activity recognition. We use multiple sensor data to analyse various daily life activities. Data ranges from accelerometer data collected by mobile phones to images captured by wearable cameras. We propose a semantic, density-based algorithm to cope with concept selection issues for lifelogging sensory data. 2. Visual discovery of lifelog images. Most of the lifelog information we takeeveryday is in a form of images, so images contain significant information about our lives. Here we conduct some experiments on visual content analysis of lifelog images, which includes both image contents and image meta data. 3. Linkage analysis of lifelogs. By exploring linkage analysis of lifelog data, we can connect all lifelog images using linkage models into a concept called the MemoryMesh. The thesis includes experimental evaluations using real-life data collected from multiple users and shows the performance of our algorithms in detecting semantics of daily-life concepts and their effectiveness in activity recognition and lifelog retrieval

Predicting user behavior using data profiling and hidden Markov model

Mental health disorders affect many aspects of patient’s lives, including emotions, cognition, and especially behaviors. E-health technology helps to collect information wealth in a non-invasive manner, which represents a promising opportunity to construct health behavior markers. Combining such user behavior data can provide a more comprehensive and contextual view than questionnaire data. Due to behavioral data, we can train machine learning models to understand the data pattern and also use prediction algorithms to know the next state of a person’s behavior. The remaining challenges for this issue are how to apply mathematical formulations to textual datasets and find metadata that aids to identify the person’s life pattern and also predict the next state of his comportment. The main idea of this work is to use a hidden Markov model (HMM) to predict user behavior from social media applications by analyzing and detecting states and symbols from the user behavior dataset. To achieve this goal, we need to analyze and detect the states and symbols from the user behavior dataset, then convert the textual data to mathematical and numerical matrices. Finally, apply the HMM model to predict the hidden user behavior states. We tested our program and identified that the log-likelihood was higher and better when the model fits the data. In any case, the results of the study indicated that the program was suitable for the purpose and yielded valuable data

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

Overview of imageCLEFlifelog 2019: solve my life puzzle and lifelog Moment retrieval

This paper describes ImageCLEFlifelog 2019, the third edition of the Lifelog task. In this edition, the task was composed of two subtasks (challenges): the Lifelog Moments Retrieval (LMRT) challenge that followed the same format as in the previous edition, and the Solve My Life Puzzle (Puzzle), a brand new task that focused on rearranging lifelog moments in temporal order. ImageCLEFlifelog 2019 received noticeably higher submissions than the previous editions, with ten teams participating resulting in a total number of 109 runs

Learning and mining from personal digital archives

Given the explosion of new sensing technologies, data storage has become significantly cheaper and consequently, people increasingly rely on wearable devices to create personal digital archives. Lifelogging is the act of recording aspects of life in digital format for a variety of purposes such as aiding human memory, analysing human lifestyle and diet monitoring. In this dissertation we are concerned with Visual Lifelogging, a form of lifelogging based on the passive capture of photographs by a wearable camera. Cameras, such as Microsoft's SenseCam can record up to 4,000 images per day as well as logging data from several incorporated sensors. Considering the volume, complexity and heterogeneous nature of such data collections, it is a signifcant challenge to interpret and extract knowledge for the practical use of lifeloggers and others. In this dissertation, time series analysis methods have been used to identify and extract useful information from temporal lifelogging images data, without benefit of prior knowledge. We focus, in particular, on three fundamental topics: noise reduction, structure and characterization of the raw data; the detection of multi-scale patterns; and the mining of important, previously unknown repeated patterns in the time series of lifelog image data. Firstly, we show that Detrended Fluctuation Analysis (DFA) highlights the feature of very high correlation in lifelogging image collections. Secondly, we show that study of equal-time Cross-Correlation Matrix demonstrates atypical or non-stationary characteristics in these images. Next, noise reduction in the Cross-Correlation Matrix is addressed by Random Matrix Theory (RMT) before Wavelet multiscaling is used to characterize the `most important' or `unusual' events through analysis of the associated dynamics of the eigenspectrum. A motif discovery technique is explored for detection of recurring and recognizable episodes of an individual's image data. Finally, we apply these motif discovery techniques to two known lifelog data collections, All I Have Seen (AIHS) and NTCIR-12 Lifelog, in order to examine multivariate recurrent patterns of multiple-lifelogging users

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

The role of context in human memory augmentation

Technology has always had a direct impact on what humans remember. In the era of smartphones and wearable devices, people easily capture on a daily basis information and videos, which can help them remember past experiences and attained knowledge, or simply evoke memories for reminiscing. The increasing use of such ubiquitous devices and technologies produces a sheer volume of pictures and videos that, in combination with additional contextual information, could potentially significantly improve one’s ability to recall a past experience and prior knowledge. Calendar entries, application use logs, social media posts, and activity logs comprise only a few examples of such potentially memory-supportive additional information. This work explores how such memory-supportive information can be collected, filtered, and eventually utilized, for generating memory cues, fragments of past experience or prior knowledge, purposed for triggering one’s memory recall. In this thesis, we showcase how we leverage modern ubiquitous technologies as a vessel for transferring established psychological methods from the lab into the real world, for significantly and measurably augmenting human memory recall in a diverse set of often challenging contexts. We combine experimental evidence garnered from numerous field and lab studies, with knowledge amassed from an extensive literature review, for substantially informing the design and development of future pervasive memory augmentation systems. Ultimately, this work contributes to the fundamental understanding of human memory and how today’s modern technologies can be actuated for augmenting it

Leveraging Smartphone Sensor Data for Human Activity Recognition

Using smartphones for human activity recognition (HAR) has a wide range of applications including healthcare, daily fitness recording, and anomalous situations alerting. This study focuses on human activity recognition based on smartphone embedded sensors. The proposed human activity recognition system recognizes activities including walking, running, sitting, going upstairs, and going downstairs. Embedded sensors (a tri-axial accelerometer and a gyroscope sensor) are employed for motion data collection. Both time-domain and frequency-domain features are extracted and analyzed. Our experiment results show that time-domain features are good enough to recognize basic human activities. The system is implemented in an Android smartphone platform. While the focus has been on human activity recognition systems based on a supervised learning approach, an incremental clustering algorithm is investigated. The proposed unsupervised (clustering) activity detection scheme works in an incremental manner, which contains two stages. In the first stage, streamed sensor data will be processed. A single-pass clustering algorithm is used to generate pre-clustered results for the next stage. In the second stage, pre-clustered results will be refined to form the final clusters, which means the clusters are built incrementally by adding one cluster at a time. Experiments on smartphone sensor data of five basic human activities show that the proposed scheme can get comparable results with traditional clustering algorithms but working in a streaming and incremental manner. In order to develop more accurate activity recognition systems independent of smartphone models, effects of sensor differences across various smartphone models are investigated. We present the impairments of different smartphone embedded sensor models on HAR applications. Outlier removal, interpolation, and filtering in pre-processing stage are proposed as mitigating techniques. Based on datasets collected from four distinct smartphones, the proposed mitigating techniques show positive effects on 10-fold cross validation, device-to-device validation, and leave-one-out validation. Improved performance for smartphone based human activity recognition is observed. With the efforts of developing human activity recognition systems based on supervised learning approach, investigating a clustering based incremental activity recognition system with its potential applications, and applying techniques for alleviating sensor difference effects, a robust human activity recognition system can be trained in either supervised or unsupervised way and can be adapted to multiple devices with being less dependent on different sensor specifications