Total Recall - C. Gordon Bell [100]
Lamming, M. G., and W. M. Newman. 1992: “Activity-based Information Retrieval: Technology in Support of Personal Memory.” Personal Computers and Intelligent Systems: Information Processing ’92. Amsterdam: North-Holland, 68-81.
Newman,W. M., M. A. Eldridge, and M. G. Lamming. 1991. “Pepys: Generating Autobiographies by Automatic Tracking.” Proceedings of the Second European Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work—ECSCW ’91. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer, 175-88.
The SPECTOR project looks at how to use Pepys-like automatic diaries to develop a model of the user and perform machine learning to help the user.
Kröner, Alexander, Stephan Baldes, Anthony Jameson, and Mathias Bauer. “Using an Extended Episodic Memory Within a Mobile Companion.” Pervasive 2004 Workshop on Memory and Sharing of Experiences, Vienna, Austria, April 20, 2004.
The Infinite Memory Multifunction Machine (IM3) was a system to automatically capture every document that a user copies, faxes, or prints. It was able to automatically detect duplicates, and was quite successful in automatically filing new documents into a user’s existing file hierarchy based on word counting and image analysis. A study with twenty users over two years showed that the average age of a retrieved document was forty-four days, with 10 percent of all accesses being for documents older than six months. This debunked a common conjecture that old documents would virtually never be needed.
Hull, Jonathan J., and Peter Hart. “The Infinite Memory Multifunction Machine (IM3).” Pre-Proceedings of the Third IAPR Workshop on Document Analysis Systems, Nagano, Japan, November 4-6, 1998, 49-58.
Hull, Jonathan J., Dar-Shyang Lee, John Cullen, and Peter Hart. “Document Analysis Techniques for the Infinite Memory Multifunction Machine.” Proceedings of the 10th International Workshop on Database and Expert Systems Applications, Florence, Italy, September 1-3, 1999, 561-65.
Hull, Jonathan J., and Peter E. Hart. 2001. “Toward Zero Effort Personal Document Management.” IEEE Computer 34, no. 3 (March).
Here are several works that discuss expanding our definition of mind to encompass e-memories. For instance, David Chalmers, who says in an interview with The Philosophers’ Magazine,
When bits of the environment are hooked up to your cognitive system in the right way, they are, in effect, part of the mind, part of the cognitive system. So, say I’m rearranging Scrabble tiles on a rack. This is very close to being analogous to the situation when I’m doing an anagram in my head. In one case the representations are out in the world, in the other case they’re in here. We say doing an anagram on a rack ought be regarded as a cognitive process, a process of the mind, even though it’s out there in the world.
. . . A whole lot of my cognitive activities and my brain functions have now been uploaded into my iPhone. It stores a whole lot of my beliefs, phone numbers, addresses, whatever. It acts as my memory for these things. It’s always there when I need it.
Baggini, Julian. “A Piece of iMe: An Interview with David Chalmers.” 2008. The Philosophers’ Magazine, Issue 43 (4th Quarter).
Clark, Andy. 2008. Supersizing the Mind. Introduction by David J. Chalmers. New York: Oxford University Press.
Noë, Alva. 2009. Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness. New York: Hill and Wang.
Jill Price has an astonishing memory, and it seems to be a burden to her. The human mind seems to improve memory at the price of unwanted recall—this won’t be the case for e-memory.
Price, Jill, and Bart Davis. 2008. The Woman Who Can’t Forget: The Extraordinary Story of Living with the Most Remarkable Memory Known to Science. New York: The Free Press.
Stephen Wiltshire uses a photographic memory to amaze people with his art.
Adams, Stephen. 2008. “Stephen Wiltshire, the Human Camera Who Drew London from Memory.” Telegraph