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

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

The growth and characterisation of ordered arrays of zinc oxide nanostructures and optical studies of defects in zinc oxide

In this work the growth of c-axis aligned zinc oxide nanorods on non-epitaxially matched substrates is examined. Nanorod arrays were deposited on silicon by seeding and chemical bath deposition (CBD), carbothermal vapour phase transport (CTR-VPT) and a hybrid CBD / CTR-VPT method. The best optical quality nanorods were obtained by the hybrid CBD / CTR-VPT method. This hybrid method was extended further and a method was developed to deposit hexagonally close packed positioned c-axis aligned arrays using a facile nanosphere technique in conjunction with silica templating. The varying factors affecting the deposition process were examined, including the growth conditions, transformations in the CBD layer during high temperature CTR-VPT deposition and the formation of new interfaces between the substrates and nanorods. The optical properties of the nanorod arrays were examined by low temperature Fourier transform photoluminescence spectroscopy, where it was found that the quality of both the positioned and unpositioned nanorods was excellent. Work on an important deep level emission in ZnO (the structured green band) was also undertaken, both in nanostructures by deliberately introducing copper into the growth process and also by a soft Cu isotopically specific doping technique into highly perfect single crystals. These samples’ properties were then studied by low temperature photoluminescence spectroscopy

Investigation of the role of LRP in multidrug resistance

There have been many reports linking the overexpression of the lung resistance-related protein (LRP) with cross-resistance to chemotherapeutic drugs. However, no conclusive evidence existed to link LRP with a direct role in multidrug resistance (LRP). The OAW42SR is a cell line derived from a serous adenocarcinoma of the ovaries, and displays an increase in resistance to cytotoxic drugs concomitant with a moderate increase in LRP expression. Anti- LRP ribozyme and antisense expression plasmids were employed in this study in order to inhibit LRP expression in the OAW42SR cell line and examine any resulting effect on the drug resistance of the cells. Antisense oligonucleotides were also used to decrease LRP expression in the OAW42SR cell line in order to provide a clearer picture of whether LRP is involved in MDR. A large number of clones were isolated after transfection of the OAW42SR cell line with anti- LRP ribozyme and antisense expression plasmids. These clones displayed varying levels of LRP at both the mRNA and protein level. Cells transfected with only a control vector also displayed decreases in LRP expression, highlighting the extent of clonal variation within the OAW42SR population. The anti-LRP ribozyme construct appeared to significantly reduce LRP expression at both the mRNA and protein level. The anti-LRP antisense RNA construct failed to reduce LRP mRNA expression levels, but dramatically reduced LRP at the protein level. This demonstrated that antisense RNA acts mainly through steric inhibition of mRNA processing rather than cleavage of the target RNA, as with ribozymes. Resistance to anthracyclines and Vinca alkaloids was reduced in many of the clones. However, the levels of LRP expression could not be correlated with the reduction in resistance to the tested drugs. The levels of expression of the MDR facilitators, multidrug resistance gene 1 (mdr-1) and multidrug resistance-associated protein (MRP), within the clones was largely invariant, and could not be directly correlated with the observed reductions in drug resistance. The drug resistance profiles of the OAW42SR clones were, however, strikingly similar to that of typical mdr-1 overexpressing cell lines. It cannot be ruled out, therefore, that variation in Pglycoprotein activity, due to post-translational modifications, may be the sole mechanism of drug resistance in these clones. Antisense oligonucleotides targeted to LRP, reduced expression at both the mRNA and protein level in the OAW42SR cells, but failed to induce a reduction in resistance to adriamycin. This thesis provides the first direct evidence that LRP is not involved in multidrug resistance, at last within the OAW42SR cell line

The role of places and spaces in lifelog retrieval

Finding relevant interesting items when searching or browsing within a large multi-modal personal lifelog archive is a significant challenge. The use of contextual cues to filter the collection and aid in the determination of relevant content is often suggested as means to address such challenges. This work presents an exploration of the various locations, garnered through context logging, several participants engaged in during personal information access over a 15 month period. We investigate the implications of the varying data accessed across multiple locations for context-based retrieval from such collections. Our analysis highlights that a large number of spaces and places may be used for information access, but high volume of content is accessed in few

Multiple multimodal mobile devices: Lessons learned from engineering lifelog solutions

For lifelogging, or the recording of one’s life history through digital means, to be successful, a range of separate multimodal mobile devices must be employed. These include smartphones such as the N95, the Microsoft SenseCam – a wearable passive photo capture device, or wearable biometric devices. Each collects a facet of the bigger picture, through, for example, personal digital photos, mobile messages and documents access history, but unfortunately, they operate independently and unaware of each other. This creates significant challenges for the practical application of these devices, the use and integration of their data and their operation by a user. In this chapter we discuss the software engineering challenges and their implications for individuals working on integration of data from multiple ubiquitous mobile devices drawing on our experiences working with such technology over the past several years for the development of integrated personal lifelogs. The chapter serves as an engineering guide to those considering working in the domain of lifelogging and more generally to those working with multiple multimodal devices and integration of their data

Life editing: Third-party perspectives on lifelog content

Lifelog collections digitally capture and preserve personal experiences and can be mined to reveal insights and understandings of individual significance. These rich data sources also offer opportunities for learning and discovery by motivated third parties. We employ a custom-designed storytelling application in constructing meaningful lifelog summaries from third-party perspectives. This storytelling initiative was implemented as a core component in a university media-editing course. We present promising results from a preliminary study conducted to evaluate the utility and potential of our approach in creatively interpreting a unique experiential dataset

Adaptive Information Cluster at Dublin City University

The Adaptive Information Cluster (AIC) is a collaboration between Dublin City University and University College Dublin, and in the AIC at DCU, we investigate and develop as one stream of our research activities, various content analysis tools that can automatically index and structure video information. This includes movies or CCTV footage and the motivation is to support useful searching and browsing features for the envisaged end-users of such systems. We bring in the HCI perspective to this highly-technically-oriented research by brainstorming, generating scenarios, sketching and prototyping the user-interfaces to the resulting video retrieval systems we develop, and we conduct usability studies to better understand the usage and opinions of such systems so as to guide the future direction of our technological research

Bluetooth friendly names: bringing classic HCI questions into the mobile space

We explore the use of Bluetooth friendly names within the mobile space. Each Bluetooth-enabled device possesses a short string known as a 'friendly name' used to help identify a device to human users. In our analysis, we collected friendly names in use on 9,854 Bluetooth-enabled devices over a 7-month period. These names were then classified and the results analysed. We discovered that a broad range of HCI themes are applicable to the domain of Bluetooth friendly names, including previous work on personalisation, naming strategies and anonymity in computer mediated communication. We also found that Bluetooth is already being used as a platform for social interaction and communication amongst collocated groups and has moved beyond its original intention of file exchange