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Content archived on 2024-05-29

Memoir: Learning how technology can help people create and manage long-term personal memories

Objective

The major technological success of the last decade was information retrieval methods for public textual data. But these word-based techniques have reached a plateau and we need new research to explore methods for accessing non-textual data such as video, image, and speech. Increases in digital storage technology also mean that people are beginning to store huge amounts of digital videos, photographs, music and speech in personal systems.

Early research indicates that techniques used for public data may not generalise to such personal data. We will leverage EU and international research to build new competence in personal memories (PM), to better understand the technology, ethics and psychology of storing and accessing a lifetime of personal information. We will take a multidisciplinary cognition-systems approach: psychological principles about how people ordinarily remember and organise information will inform the prototype design to shape PM technology in a human-centric way.

Devising tools for storing personal memories has major societal implications. Providing digital tools for the disadvantaged may address the digital divide, as personalisation makes technology relevant to sections of the society who are reticent to adopt it. And personal memories might also be shared within a community, preserving its cultural heritage. It has so far proved difficult to combine the relevant skills in one EU location. The University of Sheffield (USFD) is an ideal site for such a training project, we have expertise in the related areas of information retrieval, interdisciplinary human aspects of computing, and strong local community and industry ties.

Our training programme allows the exchange of EU expertise with Sheffield acting as a catalyst by building an exemplar prototype incorporating requirements gathered from regional contacts, SMEs and EU communities. We will disseminate our learning back into the EU research and regional communities.

Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)

Keywords

Topic(s)

Call for proposal

FP6-2004-MOBILITY-3
See other projects for this call

Funding Scheme

TOK - Marie Curie actions-Transfer of Knowledge

Coordinator

UNIVERSITY OF SHEFFIELD
EU contribution
No data
Total cost
No data

Participants (4)