Total Recall - C. Gordon Bell [61]
Time lines are a really compelling way to visualize your life, and software can help automatically produce digestible time lines. Our colleague Eric Horvitz and his research team have done some very promising work in predicting which events people will consider to be significant “memory landmarks.” This allows the best material to be put on a time line, and the less interesting material hidden away until it is asked for. Eric demonstrated the software to a reporter, starting with pictures of his wife and son:
“What’s cool—I love this feature—I can say, ‘Go to July Fourth,’ and it’s making guesses about the things I am likely to remember, to use memory landmarks, and it jumped right to this place,” he said. The screen showed several images—a small-town parade, and his wife and son among figures at a cookout, from July 4, 2005. Responding to his request, “the computer brought up its best guess.”
“It comes to understand your mind, how you organize your memories, by what you choose. It learns to become like you, to help you be a better you.”
Remember the Dublin City University project that finds novel SenseCam images out of thousands to highlight the interesting ones and spare you from the mundane? Automatic summarization has become an entire field of research. There are even sub-specialties, for example, summarizing just video. While we would like it best if a human creates a photo album, it is possible for the computer to do a pretty good job of automatic photo-album composition, choosing only interesting, high-quality photos. The nice thing about machine-composed albums or time lines is that, unlike physical albums, they keep the “outtakes”; with just a few mouse clicks you can retrieve the other shots that weren’t included in the album, allowing you to be as absorbed as you like with one particular event or topic.
With automatic summarization, posterity will be able to browse your e-memories starting from a manageable “birds-eye” view of a life, rather than just confronting an intimidating jungle of material.
IMMORTALIZING JIM GRAY
When Jim Gray went missing in 2007, I was not alone in wishing to immortalize him in the most rich and resilient way possible.
I am certain that Jim Gray’s name will be immortal at least in some ways. His name cannot be neglected in any history of computing as a winner of the Turing Award (often called the Nobel Prize of computer science). He is best known for his role in developing transaction processing, which we all use every time we withdraw cash from banking ATMs. In an effort to have his name be even better remembered, I helped establish the Jim Gray Endowed Chair in Computer Systems at UC Berkeley. I’d also like to see a building named after him. Jim’s astronomer friends have already identified an asteroid that will bear his name.
For a computer scientist like Jim, the most common way to gain an immortal name is to pass on ideas that are used by future generations. If you are lucky, some concept will be named after you. Moore’s Law is undoubtedly the best-known, predicting that transistor density in computer chips would double every two years, and explaining the meteoric rise of computing power. I hope that someday we will refer to the Gray Data Cube, the Gray Transaction Processing Benchmarks, the Gray Five-Minute Rule, and the Gray Paradigm of Scientific Discovery.
I’ll certainly be lobbying for such an immortal name for Jim. However, while it would be fitting for him to join the ranks of other such esteemed names, having an immortal name is a pretty superficial immortality. We may say Pythagoras’ name until the end of time when discussing geometry, but we will never know much about him, or even how he did his work. I want something better for Jim.
Someone’s work can be immortalized,