The Future of Our Pasts: Rethinking Lifelogging

What if we could digitally capture everything we do and see? What if we could save every bit of information we touch, and record every event we experience? What would such a personal digital LIfelog be like, and how might it affect the way we live? This talk will describe and evaluate this Lifelogging vision. I will present empirical studies of how people actually use Lifelogging technologies, and revisit some of the central presuppositions of Lifelogging. I will conclude by suggesting new design principles for future systems that will allow us to move beyond ubiquitous capture to useful and usable digital support for memory.

Presenter(s)

Steve Whittaker is a Research Scientist at IBM Almaden. His research interests are in the design and evaluation of collaborative systems, personal information management, and digital systems that support memory. He has previously worked in industry for HP, Bell Labs, and AT&T, and been Chair of Information Retrieval at University of Sheffield, UK. He has published over 100 refereed articles and holds 12 patents. He is a member of the ACM Computer Human Interaction Academy.