ISD Lecture

MyLifeBits: A Personal Lifetime Store

Tuesday, November 13, 2007
5:00 pm to 6:00 pm
Jim Gemmell, Microsoft Research

MyLifeBits is a lifetime store of everything. It is the fulfillment of Vannevar Bush's 1945 Memex vision including full-text search, text & audio annotations, and hyperlinks. MyLifeBits is both an experiment in lifetime storage and a software research effort. As an 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. In this talk, we will demonstrate the software we have developed for MyLifeBits, 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 team to digest and display SenseCam output.

Jim Gemmell is a senior researcher in Microsoft's Next Media research group. His current research focus is on personal lifetime storage, as architect of the MyLifeBits project and chair of the First and Second ACM Workshops on Capture, Archival and Retrieval of Personal Experience (CARPE). Dr. Gemmell received his Ph.D. from Simon Fraser University and his M. Math from the University of Waterloo. His research interests include personal media management, telepresence, and reliable multicast. He produced the on-line version of the ACM 97 conference and is a co-author of the PGM reliable multicast RFC. Dr. Gemmell serves on the editorial boards of the ACM/Springer Multimedia Systems Journal and Computer Communications. He also served on the editorial advisory board of ACM netWorker.

Last updated:

March 26, 2015