The Man With the Perfect Memory - Just Don't Ask Him to Remember What's in It
From: Guardian Unlimited (UK) - 12/28/2005
By: Ian Sample

Gordon Bell of Microsoft's Bay Area Research Center in San Francisco is
capturing his life in the present, using a miniature camera to take pictures,
sensors to note changes in light and temperature, recorders to store
conversations, and a GPS receiver to log his whereabouts. Health data is also
now being captured, including heart beats and calories burned. Bell, 71, is
compiling a surrogate memory of his life, and is storing it in a digital
database called MyLifeBits. Microsoft researchers are now considering issues
such as how to organize the mountain of information of an electronic mind,
and are also observing problems that Bell faces during his experiment. For
example, Bell has not contributed all of his personal experiences to the
digital database because of privacy concerns, and a crash has resulted in the
loss of four months of data, which he described in a report as "a severe
emotional blow, perhaps like having one's memories taken away." Bell no
longer has to focus on using his memory, but he has come to realize that the
digital database may mean that he may never be able to forget anything,
including the warts of his life. Dr. Frank Nack of the Center for Mathematics
and Computer Science in Amsterdam, equates Bell's work to surveillance of the
people, by the people, and believes it would ultimately have a negative
impact on social development. Nonetheless, a similar system is being tested
in Cambridge to see if it can help people with degenerative brain disease
remember key moments throughout the day. Since Bell's project began in 2001,
he has recorded 42,000 digital pictures, 100,000 emails, 1,300 videos, and
5,067 sound files. Microsoft researchers estimate that as technology
improves, one terabyte of memory will be sufficient to store all data except
video for 83 years. If video were captured continuously, another 200
terabytes would be needed to store it all. (For more on Bell's work, and the
field of Personal Information Management, see the January 2006 issue of
Communications of the ACM.) 

Read the entire article at:
http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/research/story/0,9865,1674439,00.html

Links:
A look into Microsoft's Bay Area Research Center
http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=46702

MyLifeBits Project
http://www.research.microsoft.com/barc/MediaPresence/MyLifeBits.aspx

Download your life onto this computer
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2002-11/ns-dyl112002.php

Total Recall
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/nov05/2153