2004 Articles

Minimal-Impact Audio-Based Personal Archives

Ellis, Daniel P. W.; Lee, Keansub

Collecting and storing continuous personal archives has become cheap and easy, but we are still far from creating a useful, ubiquitous memory aid. We view the inconvenience to the user of being 'instrumented' as one of the key barriers to the broader development and adoption of these technologies. Audio-only recordings, however, can have minimal impact, requiring only that a device the size and weight of a cellphone be carried somewhere on the person. We have conducted some small-scale experiments on collecting continuous personal recordings of this kind, and investigating how they can be automatically analyzed and indexed, visualized, and correlated with other minimal-impact, opportunistic data feeds (such as online calendars and digital photo collections). We describe our unsupervised segmentation and clustering experiments in which we can achieve good agreement with hand-marked environment/situation labels. We also discuss some of the broader issues raised by this kind of work including privacy concerns, and describe our future plans to address these and other questions.