Information access tasks and evaluation for personal lifelogs

Emerging personal lifelog (PL) collections contain permanent digital records of information associated with individuals’ daily lives. This can include materials such as emails received and sent, web content and other documents with which they have interacted, photographs, videos and music experienced passively or created, logs of phone calls and text messages, and also personal and contextual data such as location (e.g. via GPS sensors), persons and objects present (e.g. via Bluetooth) and physiological state (e.g. via biometric sensors). PLs can be collected by individuals over very extended periods, potentially running to many years. Such archives have many potential applications including helping individuals recover partial forgotten information, sharing experiences with friends or family, telling the story of one’s life, clinical applications for the memory impaired, and fundamental psychological investigations of memory. The Centre for Digital Video Processing (CDVP) at Dublin City University is currently engaged in the collection and exploration of applications of large PLs. We are collecting rich archives of daily life including textual and visual materials, and contextual context data. An important part of this work is to consider how the effectiveness of our ideas can be measured in terms of metrics and experimental design. While these studies have considerable similarity with traditional evaluation activities in areas such as information retrieval and summarization, the characteristics of PLs mean that new challenges and questions emerge. We are currently exploring the issues through a series of pilot studies and questionnaires. Our initial results indicate that there are many research questions to be explored and that the relationships between personal memory, context and content for these tasks is complex and fascinating

Image annotation with Photocopain

Photo annotation is a resource-intensive task, yet is increasingly essential as image archives and personal photo collections grow in size. There is an inherent conflict in the process of describing and archiving personal experiences, because casual users are generally unwilling to expend large amounts of effort on creating the annotations which are required to organise their collections so that they can make best use of them. This paper describes the Photocopain system, a semi-automatic image annotation system which combines information about the context in which a photograph was captured with information from other readily available sources in order to generate outline annotations for that photograph that the user may further extend or amend

Creating stories for reflection from multimodal lifelog content: An initial investigation

Using lifelogging tools, digital artifacts can be collected continuously and passively throughout our day. These may include a stream of images recorded passively using tools such as the Microsoft SenseCam; documents, emails and webpages accessed; texts messages and mobile activity; and context sensing to uncover the current location and proximal individuals. The wealth of information such an archive contains on our personal life history provides us with the opportunity to review, reflect and reminisce upon our past experience. However, the complexity, volume and multimodal nature of such collections creates a barrier to such activities. We are currently exploring the potential of digital narratives formed from these collections as a means to overcome these challenges. By successfully reducing the content to that most appropriate to the story, and by then presenting it in a coherent and usable manner, we can hope to better enable reflection. The means by which content reduction and presentation should occur is investigated through card sorting activities and probe sessions which nine participants engaged in. The initial results are discussed, as well as the opportunity, as seen in these sessions, for lifelog-based stories to provide utility in personal reflection and reminiscence

iForgot: a model of forgetting in robotic memories

Much effort has focused in recent years on developing more life-like robots. In this paper we propose a model of memory for robots, based on human digital memories, though our model incorporates an element of forgetting to ensure that the robotic memory appears more human and therefore can address some of the challenges for human-robot interaction

Exploiting context information to aid landmark detection in SenseCam images

In this paper, we describe an approach designed to exploit context information in order to aid the detection of landmark images from a large collection of photographs. The photographs were generated using Microsoft’s SenseCam, a device designed to passively record a visual diary and cover a typical day of the user wearing the camera. The proliferation of digital photos along with the associated problems of managing and organising these collections provide the background motivation for this work. We believe more ubiquitious cameras, such as SenseCam, will become the norm in the future and the management of the volume of data generated by such devices is a key issue. The goal of the work reported here is to use context information to assist in the detection of landmark images or sequences of images from the thousands of photos taken daily by SenseCam. We will achieve this by analysing the images using low-level MPEG-7 features along with metadata provided by SenseCam, followed by simple clustering to identify the landmark images

Content vs. context for multimedia semantics: the case of SenseCam image structuring

Much of the current work on determining multimedia semantics from multimedia artifacts is based around using either context, or using content. When leveraged thoroughly these can independently provide content description which is used in building content-based applications. However, there are few cases where multimedia semantics are determined based on an integrated analysis of content and context. In this keynote talk we present one such example system in which we use an integrated combination of the two to automatically structure large collections of images taken by a SenseCam, a device from Microsoft Research which passively records a person’s daily activities. This paper describes the post-processing we perform on SenseCam images in order to present a structured, organised visualisation of the highlights of each of the wearer’s days

Exploring narrative presentation for large multimodal lifelog collections through card sorting

Using lifelogging tools, personal digital artifacts are collected continuously and passively throughout each day. The wealth of information such an archive contains on our life history provides novel opportunities for the creation of digital life narratives. However, the complexity, volume and multimodal nature of such collections create barriers to achieving this. Nine participants engaged in a card-sorting activity designed to explore practices of content reduction and presentation for narrative composition. We found the visual modalities to be most fluent in communicating experience with other modalities serving to support them and that the users employed the salient themes of the story to organise, arrange and facilitate filtering of the content

Guidelines for the presentation and visualisation of lifelog content

Lifelogs offer rich voluminous sources of personal and social data for which visualisation is ideally suited to providing access, overview, and navigation. We explore through examples of our visualisation work within the domain of lifelogging the major axes on which lifelogs operate, and therefore, on which their visualisations should be contingent. We also explore the concept of ‘events’ as a way to significantly reduce the complexity of the lifelog for presentation and make it more human-oriented. Finally we present some guidelines and goals which should be considered when designing presentation modes for lifelog conten