To help people remember key facts, IBM has unveiled a software that uses the images, sounds, and text recorded on everyday mobile devices to help people recall names, faces, conversations and other important information.
Nicknamed “PENSIEVE” the technology, uses associative recall to make connections between pieces of related data acquired by a person.
The software has the ability to understand the context in which data is captured, then connect various data, and then use this knowledge to help bring the correct information to a person when it is needed. It blends techniques from image processing, GPS information, smart clustering, optical character recognition, speech recognition, and information retrieval to index and tag the information.
“This is like having a personal assistant for your memory,” said Dr. Yaakov Navon, the lead researcher and image processing expert from IBM’s Haifa Research Lab.
“Our daily routines are overflowing with situations where we gain new information through meetings, advertisements, conferences, events, surfing the web, or even window shopping. Instead of going home and using a general web search to find that information,‘PENSIEVE’ helps the brain recall those everyday things you might normally forget.”
Researchers at IBM’s Haifa Research Lab in Israel are pairing advanced mobile technologies with memory cues to develop a system that can analyze acquired data, create hooks to related experiences, and use them to populate a person’s information management applications. Once the address books and calendars are updated, the technology enables memory recall triggered by time, location or the introduction of related information.
For example, if you meet someone at a conference and use your phone to take a picture of him or her and another picture of that person's business card, the new technology will associate the two pieces of data because they were taken at the same time and location. It then creates a virtual briefcase of data that includes the person’s image, the name of the conference where you met, the date and time, and any other relevant data.
Another use of this technology is in reconstructing and sharing an experience or memory. If enough media-rich data was collected about a particular event, it can be used to build a more complex visual associative representation of the experience.
“This is where the real power of collaboration kicks in,” says Eran Belinsky, research team leader and a specialist in collaboration. You can recall the name of the person you met right before you entered a meeting by traversing a timeline of your experiences, or share a business trip with colleagues by creating a mashup that shows a map with an animation of your trail and the pictures you took in every location.” |
