The book Total Recall (opens in new tab) (paperback title Your Life, Uploaded) is the culmination of our thoughts regarding MyLifebits and the larger CARPE research agenda.
There are two parts to MyLifeBits: an experiment in lifetime storage, and a software research effort.
The experiment: Gordon Bell has captured a lifetime’s worth of articles, books, cards, CDs, letters, memos, papers, photos, pictures, presentations, home movies, videotaped lectures, and voice recordings and stored them digitally. He is now paperless, and is beginning to capture phone calls, IM transcripts, television, and radio.
The software research: Jim Gemmell and Roger Lueder have developed the MyLifeBits software, which leverages SQL server to support: hyperlinks, annotations, reports, saved queries, pivoting, clustering, and fast search. MyLifeBits is designed to make annotation easy, including gang annotation on right click, voice annotation, and web browser integration. It includes tools to record web pages, IM transcripts, radio and television. The MyLifeBits screensaver supports annotation and rating. We are beginning to explore features such as document similarity ranking and faceted classification. We have collaborated with the WWMX team to get a mapped UI, and with the SenseCam (opens in new tab) team to digest and display SenseCam output.
Support for academic research: Our team led the 2005 Digital Memories (Memex) RFP, which supported 14 universities and led to an impressive list of publications (opens in new tab). We also established the ACM CARPE Workshops in 2004 (opens in new tab), 2005 (opens in new tab), and 2006 (opens in new tab)
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- Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell, A Digital Life (opens in new tab), Scientific American, March 2007. German version in Spektrum der Wissenschaft (April, 2007) (opens in new tab)
- Jim Gemmell, Gordon Bell and Roger Lueder, MyLifeBits: a personal database for everything (opens in new tab), Communications of the ACM, vol. 49, Issue 1 (Jan 2006), pp. 88.95. PDF (0.5 MB)
- Gemmell, Jim, Aris, Aleks, and Lueder, Roger, Telling Stories With MyLifeBits (opens in new tab), ICME 2005, July 6-9 2005
- Gemmell, Jim, Williams, Lyndsay, Wood, Ken, Bell, Gordon and Lueder, Roger, Passive Capture and Ensuing Issues for a Personal Lifetime Store (opens in new tab), Proceedings of The First ACM Workshop on Continuous Archival and Retrieval of Personal Experiences (CARPE ’04), Oct. 15, 2004, New York, NY, USA, pp. 48-55.
- Gemmell, Jim, Lueder, Roger, and Bell, Gordon, The MyLifeBits Lifetime Store (opens in new tab), ACM SIGMM 2003 Workshop on Experiential Telepresence (ETP 2003), November 7, 2003, Berkeley, CA.
- MyLifeBits: Fulfilling the Memex Vision (opens in new tab), Gemmell, Jim, Bell, Gordon, Lueder, Roger, Drucker, Steven, and Wong, Curtis, ACM Multimedia ’02, December 1-6, 2002, Juan-les-Pins, France, pp. 235-238.
- Jim Gemmell’s MyLifeBits talk given at a number of universities: Feb 2005 version PowerPoint (10 MB) (opens in new tab)
- Gordon Bell’s talk, given at BayCHI, on 11 February 2003 at PARC (opens in new tab), Palo Alto (4.8 MByte PPT) and U.S. Naval Post Graduate School, Monterey on 6 February 2003.
- MyLifeBits: A lifetime personal store (opens in new tab) beginning at 1:22. Streaming webcast of Bell by Austrian Telecom at Austria’s European (Technology) Forum Alpbach, Plenary Session speaker, “The World of Tomorrow”, held Thursday 26 August 2004. See also the PowerPoint presentation (opens in new tab) (approx. 10 MB).
- Don’t forget to back up your brain (opens in new tab), Fox News, 11/14/2007
- Remember This? (opens in new tab), The New Yorker, May 28, 2007
- Your Whole Life is Going to Bits (opens in new tab), Sydney Morning Herald 4/14/2007
- Researcher Records His Life On Computer (opens in new tab), CBS Evening News 4/9/2007
- Lifeblogging: Is a virtual brain good for the real one? (opens in new tab) Ars technica, 2/7/2007
- Digital Diary (opens in new tab), San Francisco Chronicle, 1/28/2007
- The Persistence of Memory (opens in new tab), NPR Radio “On the Media” show, 1/5/2007
- A Head For Detail (opens in new tab), Fast Company, Nov 2006.
- Digital age may bring total recall in future (opens in new tab), CNN 10/16/2006.
- El hombre que guarda todos los recuerdos de su vida en bits (opens in new tab), La Crónica de Hoy (Mexico), 7/16/2006.
- Life Bytes (opens in new tab), NPR Radio “Living on Earth” show, 1/20/2006
- Total Recall (opens in new tab), IEEE Spectrum, 11/1/2005
- Wouldn’t It Be Nice (opens in new tab) The Wall Street Journal 5/23/2005
- How To Be A Pack Rat (opens in new tab), Forbes.com 4/29/2005 – see also blog entry by Thomas Hawk at eHomeUpgrade (opens in new tab)
- Computer sage cuts paperwork, converts his life to digital format (opens in new tab) The Seattle Time 4/9/2005
- Channel 9 video interviews 8/21/2004 Introduction with Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmel (opens in new tab), Jim Gemmell and the SenseCam (opens in new tab), and Roger Leuder: Developing MyLifeBits (opens in new tab)
- Life in byte-sized pieces (opens in new tab) The Age, 7/18/2004
- This is Your Life (opens in new tab) San Jose Mercury News 3/6/2004
- I Know It’s Here Somewhere (opens in new tab) New York Times 2/19/2004
- Offloading Your Memories (opens in new tab) New York Times Magazine Year in Ideas issue 12/14/2003
- Memories as Heirlooms Logged Into a Database (opens in new tab) The New York Times 3/20/2003
- Microsoft Fair Forecasts Future AP 2/27/2003 (This story ran on many newspapers and news sites, including USA Today (opens in new tab), The Globe and Mail, The San Jose Mercury News, and ABC News)
- Saving your life in bits and bytes (opens in new tab) ZDNet 1/6/2003
- Saving Your Bits for Posterity (opens in new tab) Wired 12/6/2002
- Microsoft solves “giant shoebox problem” (opens in new tab) Geek.com 11/22/2002
- Would you put your life in Microsoft’s hands? (opens in new tab) ZDNet News 11/21/2002
- Microsoft plans online life archive (opens in new tab) BBC News 11/20/2002
- Software aims to put your life on a disk (opens in new tab) New Scientist 11/20/2002
