Thursday, 02 March 2006
Gordon Bell has the zeal of a convert, but his conversion is not to some bizarre brainwashing cult – well, not quite. The veteran computer researcher at Microsoft is the guinea-pig for a groundbreaking new technology that his company is developing. Called MyLifeBits, the system is not far short of a surrogate brain.
Everything you see, it sees and saves. Everyone you meet is photographed and stored. Everything you read, hear and write gets stored in its searchable database. To Microsoft, this is a valuable tool, a searchable diary that stores all the information you might ever need to recall. To others - even some of the programmers working on the project - it could herald a brave new world where we sacrifice all privacy to the God of convenience.It all started seven years ago when Bell, now 71, was asked to participate in the “million book” project to create a huge library of electronic books. Bell agreed, and soon he was busy scanning in his book collection. But he didn’t stop there. “I decided to scan my papers at that time, as well as more content,” he explains. “From there, I realised that I was on a quest to capture everything that the computer could encode.”Over the next few years, he digitised every bit of paper that passed through his home and office - articles, letters, faxes, even his medical records and prescriptions. Soon, the sheer number of documents he was storing on his computer was becoming unmanageable, and Microsoft’s management, sensing a possible business opportunity, stepped in: MyLifeBits was born.Jim Gemmell, one of the programmers assigned to the project describes the immediate problem they faced: “It was easy to collect the data, the real problem was managing the information”, he explains, “and boy, sticking stuff in the file system wasn’t working - we needed a database.” The result, MyLifeBits, transformed the data Bell was storing: instead of just saving it on his PC and losing it amid the thousands of files he was storing, it was now all linked together. If he searched the system for “doctor”, his doctor’s name, phone number and photo would appear. Scrolling down would give him a list of letters, phone calls and prescriptions he had received; as well as the times of all the appointments he made. The system was working - but it was about to get even more powerful.Around the time the team in Redmond, USA, was beginning work on MyLifeBits, Lyndsay Williams, a researcher at Microsoft’s labs in West Cambridge was trying to remember the name of a bottle of wine she had enjoyed some weeks earlier. Trying to recall this piece of trivial data gave her an insight: what if everyone carried a camera around their neck, which recorded every person they met, everything they ate, every conversation they had? She built a prototype, which she called the SenseCam - and to test it, in true Cambridge style, she attached it to her bike. “Every time I braked due to a car pulling in front of me, the accelerometer sensor would detect this braking and capture an image of the car,” she explains. “The SenseCam is like a black-box accident recorder and stores other parameters like movement, temperature and light changes”.MyLifeBits and the SenseCam were clearly destined to go together - and so one of the prototype cameras was dispatched to Gordon Bell, leading to the MyLifeBits-SenseCam combination Bell uses today. As well as storing all his correspondence, the system now takes pictures of everyone he meets, as well as all the ambient data you could imagine. With the SenseCam attached to MyLifeBits, you can now search for almost any “memory hooks” you can think of, Gemmell explains. For example, if you remember you met someone, you can’t remember their name, but you’re sure it was cold, you can search the system for all times the ambient temperature was below 5°C - and, chances are, you will find the photo of the person you are looking for, and a record of the conversation you had.Neat? Perhaps, but also a little creepy, Gemmell concedes: “there are some challenges, mostly to do with copyright and privacy issues - but that’s something society will have to sort out, rather than the actual technology”. For the technology is nearly ready to be rolled out. None of the elements of the MyLifeBits-SenseCam system is really new, it’s just the way they are combined that is innovative. While the camera is still a little unwieldy, smaller versions are on the horizon, and as Bell’s experiment shows, even with a bulky SenseCam, the technology is already useable.Indeed, applications are already beginning to come on stream. Six of the prototype SenseCams were recently handed over to Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge, to help patients with memory loss. Unlike for Bell, where the system is simply a high-tech memory aid, it is a real lifesaver for these patients, who can now rely on MyLifeBits to remember what their brains are no longer capable of doing. The trial is still in its preliminary stages, but the early results, says Gemmell, are simply “astonishing”.And health is not the only application. To the horror of humanities students the world over, Gemmell says the system could be used to “track how good and bad students operate”, or - a far more palatable idea - to save them from having to take so many notes.Clearly, SenseCam and MyLifeBits are changing people’s lives already, whether it is elderly patients who can live normal lives once again, or whether it is Gordon Bell, who says his family is “amazed” at his enhanced “memory”. But even if the technology never takes off in the way Bell has used it, the MyLifeBits cult may well change your life too before long. Information overload affects us all, says Gemmell, and we need tools to make sense of the data we keep already. Many of the ideas trialled in MyLifeBits are set to be integrated into the next generation of Microsoft software, and the competition is learning too - Google’s desktop search engine is just one example. Gemmell has been trialling the software for the seemingly mundane task of tracking what websites he visits, a bit like the “history” function on Internet Explorer - but on steroids. “It’s amazingly useful,” he says. “I would never give it up”. So will this cult bring us to a totalitarian doomsday, or a nirvana of perfect memory? Ultimately, that’s up to every one of us - and we’ll need to make our minds up soon.
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