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Working with dreams : e-learning and the unconscious

February 5, 2013 6:16 am / Leave a comment

Fig. 1. A mash-up in Picasa of a 3D laser generated image generated at the Design Museum during their ‘Digital Crystal’ exhibition.

The image exists and is transformed by the presence of the observer in front of a Kinex device making this a one-off and an expression or interpretation of that exact moment.

‘Working with dreams’ and ‘Keeping a dream journal’ are taught creative problem solving techniques at the Open University Business School. I did B822 ‘Creativity, Innovation and Change’ in 2012 (Henry et al 2010). I have the problem solving toolkit. I even got a hardback copy of VanGundy’s book on creative problem solving.

Using your unconscious isn’t difficult.

Just go to bed early with a ‘work’ related book and be prepared to write it down when you stir.

I woke soon after 4.00am. I’d nodded off between 9.30 and 11.30 so feel I’ve had my sleep.

Virtual bodies for first year medical students to work on, an automated mash-up of your ‘lifelog’ to stimulate new thinking and the traditional class, lecture and university as a hub for millions – for every student you have in a lecture hall you have 1000 online.

Making it happen is quite another matter. So I’m writing letters and with far greater consideration working on a topic or too for research.

“Nights through dreams tell the myths forgotten by the day.” — C.G. Jung (Memories, Dreams, Reflections)

How to work with a dream or metaphorical image:

  • Entering the dream
  • Studying the dream
  • Becoming the images
  • Integrating the viewpoints
  • Reworking the dream

Appreciating, reflecting, looking forward and emerging

REFERENCE

Glouberman, D. (1989) Life Choices and Life Changes Through Imagework, London, Unwin, pp. 232-6

Henry, J., Mayle, D., Bell, R., Carlisle, Y. Managing Problems Creatively (3rd edn) 2010. The Open University.

Isaacson, W. (2011) Steve Jobs. Little Brown.

VanGundy, A.B. (1988) Techniques of structured problem solving (2nd edn), New York: Van Nostran Reinhold.

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I cannot through words share with my mother our collective memories, I cannot do a ‘mind transfusion’.

February 2, 2013 4:43 pm / Leave a comment



Fig. 1  My parents – and a fraction of the record we have of left of them now that they are gone.

My mother had a stroke.

She would die within three months and after a second stroke very poor comprehension and ability to communicate will get very much worse. I cannot become an expert in care for a stroke victim overnight, but I read enough and ask questions. We find two ways ‘in’ – song and images. The images are never of people – various sparks of joyous recognition come when we are seen in the flesh and behave like children rather than adults in our 40s and 50s. I cannot through words share with my mother our collective memories, I cannot do a ‘mind transfusion’. I cannot even talk about things we did a year or ten years ago – I sense the time is irrelevant, she is as likely to recall her first doll as she is our last visit to the Royal Academy of Arts to enjoy Van Gogh’s Letters. A visit where she gently nurtured the interest of her 13 year old granddaughter, sharing insights between the letters, sketches and paintings from the point of view of an artist and art teacher and art historian, to a bright girl who liked to draw.

A mouthful of the food from the Fortnum and Mason’s restaurant might have triggered her memory – we did treat her to various foods.

What worked, in defiance of the medical reports that essentially said ‘there is nothing there’ was an iPad loaded with images grabbed from a number of hefty art books – 20th century art, the Van Gogh exhibition book and pictures from the Louvre. I spoke to that part of her that I might work. I challenged her as I showed the pictures to say when the letter had been written or why was Van Gogh so keen to tell his brother what he was up to. And what was the name of Van Gogh’ s brother? I got through Van Gogh and contemporary artists then moved onto the Louvre.

Up comes the Mona Lisa.

‘Where is this painting? We’ve seen it. It was so small?’

And she replied, ‘Louvre’.

‘Where’s that?’ I asked.

‘Paris’ she said.

Perhaps had my mother been in her sixties we and she could have seen a way to perceive with this.

Would a lifelog have got to this point in under 15 minutes? Might a screen of fast moving images offered in spaced-out way, with eye-tracking identify that ‘glimmer’ of recognition that would then prioritise images in the same set? Though who would know why a set was being favoured? We associate images with feelings, and people, and places, not with a set book or date or necessarily a genre of work.

Fig. 2. I think in pictures. But have to communicate in words. I wonder if a stream of pictures, as Tumblrs do, is a better record of our thoughts?

I think Bell has shown how we can freeze content from the digital ocean without knowing what value it will bring.

Perhaps from such an iceberg or glacier, at a later date, we can mine such event sparking artifacts that call up a memory as indicated above. But this artifact is not the memory and never can be. We should applaud Bell and others for going beyond thinking about such massive data collections, the ‘world brain og H G Wells or the Memex of Vannevar Bush.

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Dreams of technology enhanced learning as a micro-chipped jelly-fish in a digital ocean

February 1, 2013 8:15 pm / 1 Comment on Dreams of technology enhanced learning as a micro-chipped jelly-fish in a digital ocean

Fig. 1. I visualised the biological and digitised memory as a huge, translucent jellyfish.

It is a deliberate exercise to fall asleep with a book or eBook in my hands and in my head. This may even be a mid-evening exercise lasting between 20 and 45 minutes. It works if I remember what goes on and then write it down. There’s no way this can be digitally grabbed.

In the skin of the jellyfish there is a microchip. This microchip represents the digital record, the stamp like artefact that is a snap of time, a set of images, a sound-bite, a record of the creatures physiological outputs. The rest of the creature is what isn’t capture – the tendrils of the jellyfish the synapses that connect the bulk of the creature memories that defy definition.

It isn’t a digital memory. The visual or sensory capture is a fraction of what forms the memory.

Not is memory static. It is forming and reforming, diminishing, refreshing and fracturing all the time. To grab a ‘memory’ is to capture and box a set of impossibly complex electro-chemical reactions. It is multi-dimentional too – when I see the Royal Cinema, I feel a sticky ice-lolly stick on my neck, I smell the fusty, cigarette-smoke embedded chairs and here the announcement of the serial. And what I see is filtered through my mind’s eye, not a lense.

I don’t see it in high definition.

There are three kinds of memory: (Bell and Gemmell, 2009. p. 53)

  • Procedural (muscle memory)
  • Semantic (facts that you know that aren’t rooted in time and place)
  • Episodic (autobiographical)

Perhaps if I am going to wear a gadget around my neck it should record something I cannot see or sense?

At a different wavelength or spectrum. i.e. telling me something I don’t know.

‘Biological memory is subjective, patchy, emotion-tinged, ego-filtered, impressionistic, and mutable. Digital memory is objective, disappassionate, prosaic, and unforgivingly accurate’. (Bell and Gemmel, 2009. p. 56)

The first is a memory the second is not. Bell appears to think that ‘memory’ is an artefact that is capable of a digital record – it is not. Nothing that MyLifeBits has done is a record of a memory – it is simply stuff digitised. For something to be called a ‘digital memory’ then it will need to have the attributes of its biological and analogue form.

A memory is a product of our lapses and distractions.

It matters that we daydream, as well as focus. It matters that what we see or experience once needs to be experienced a second, third and fourth time so that meaning aggregates and our minds adapt. What Bell is describing is a massive, relentless, comprehensive attempt at keeping a diary. Would it not be more useful to hire a personal assitance? If you have the wealth to support it have, like Winston Churchill, a secretary at hand to take dictation? This has to be a close proximity to the record of a memory as it is formed?  

With the written word came libraries.

‘If you have ever tried reading an old diary entry of yours from many years ago, you may have felt this strange mixture of familiarity and foreigness, of sensing that you remember some, perhaps most, but never all of the text’s original meaning’. (Mayer-Schönberger, 2009. p. 33)

On Gordon Bell – his goal is nothing short of obliterating forgetting. (Mayer-Schönberger, 2009. p. 50)

I wonder if the quest to make an Artificial Intelligence like the human mind will be a more fruitful one that trying to turn a human mind into a digital one? That adding AI attributes to a database will achieve more, than by thinking of the human as nothing more than a bipedal device from which to record external goings on?

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Automatically Augmenting Lifelog Events Using Pervasively Generated Content from Millions of People

January 24, 2013 1:30 pm / Leave a comment

English: This depicts the evolution of wearabl...

English: This depicts the evolution of wearable computers. See http://wearcam.org/steve5.htm for the original JPEG file. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 

Automatically Augmenting Lifelog Events Using Pervasively Generated Content from Millions of People

In the pursuit of pervasive user-generated content (ugc) based on senors, by augmenting visual lifelogs with ‘Web 2.0’ content collected by millions of other individuals.

We present a system that realises the aim of using visual content and sensor readings passively captured by an individual and then augmenting that with web content collected by other individuals. Doherty and Smeaton (2009)

  • Lifelogging, like keeping a diary, is a private and exclusive form of reverse surveillance. Doherty and Smeaton (2009)
  • Using SenseCam from Microsoft. Zacks (2006)
  • human memory operates by associating linked items together. Baddley (2004)
  • supportive of those patients suffering from early stage memory impairment. Berry e al (2009)
  • enhancing SenseCam gathered images by data mining from ugc sites such as Flickr and YouTube. Doherty and Smeaton (2009)
  • See also MyLifeBits. Bell and Gemmel (2007)
  • A commercial lifelogging product ViconRevue. OMG
  • Flickr has over 95 million geo-tagged images. (2010)
  • YouTube has 100 million video views per day (2010) YouTube fact_sheet

It has a camera and a range of other sensors for monitoring the wearer’s environment by detecting movement, temperature, light intensity, and the possible presence of other people in front of the device via body heat.

(I’d like the sensecam to be smaller still and include a microchip in a swimmer’s cap, or goggle or swimsuit to monitor various other factors, including heart rate, blood sugar levels and carbon dioxide). 

How the mind disects, stores and correlates the information if gathers is somewhat different to the linear recording or cataloguing of current systems though. 

After her first stroke a patient found engagement when otherwise unable to communicate by looking at family photographs on an iPad. After a second stroke the same patient, deemed incapable of comprehension or communication, responded to hundreds of images of paintings she had known in her lifetime – in particular responding to the question posed when looking at one painting. Where is it? Ans; Louvre. What is it? Mona Lisa. (Vernon, 2012)

As sensing technologies become more ubiquitous and wearable a new trend of lifelogging and passive image capture is starting to take place and early clinical studies have shown much promise in aiding human memory. Doherty and Smeaton (2009)

Fig.1. A game of pairs – our minds are far more interprative, chaotic and illogical when it comes to visual associations based on what we see around us.

However, it is presumptious, prescritpive and even manipulative to assume that a person recalls ‘more of the same’ when visualing sensing or surveying a place. The foibles of the human mind and system is that noises and smell, the temperature and weather, and the time of day have a part to play. I visit Trafalgar Square and smell pigeons even though they are long gone. I visit Buckingham Palace and recall finding a woman dead on the pavement one late evening. I see snow and think of the broken leg I got from skiing in my teens – not snowmen. I see any icecream van and think specifically of Beadnell Bay, Northumberland.

The mind is far, far more complex than a fancy game of ‘pairs’. I have perhaps 30,000 of my own images online, so why support, replace or supplement these with those taken by others? What if during my lifetime I tag, link and assocaite these images? How might these be linked to another personal log – a diary of some 2.5 million written over a 30 year period?

There are research challenges involved in further improving the quality of the lifelog augmentation process, especially with regard to “event-specific” lifelog events, e.g., football matches, rock concerts, etc. Other research challenges include investigations into selecting initial seed images based on adaptive radii, more sophisticated tag selection techniques, and also considering how interface design and varying methods of visualisation affect users’ acceptance of augmented data.

REFERENCE

Baddeley, A., Ed. Your Memory: A User’s Guide; Carlton Books: New York, NY, USA, 2004.

Bell, G.; Gemmell, J. A digital life. Scientific American Magazine, March 2007.

Berry, E.; Hampshire, A.; Rowe, J.; Hodges, S.; Kapur, N.; Watson, P.; Smyth, G.B.G.; Wood, K.;
Owen, A.M. The neural basis of effective memory therapy in a patient with limbic encephalitis. J.
Neurol. Neurosurg. Psychiatry 2009, 80, 582–601.

Doherty,.R. and Smeaton.A.F. (2009) Automatically Augmenting Lifelog Events Using Pervasively Generated Content from Millions of People

Vernon, J.F. (2012) Use of hundreds of image grabs of contempary artists, Leonardo da Vinci and Van Gogh to communicate with an elderly patient after a series of catastrophic and ultimately fatal strokes.

Zacks, J.M.; Speer, N.K.; Vettel, J.M.; Jacoby, L.L. Event understanding and memory in healthy
aging and dementia of the alzheimer type. Psychol. Aging 2006, 21, 466–482.

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Automatically captured autobiographical metadata

January 21, 2013 2:05 pm / Leave a comment

W3c semantic web stack

W3c semantic web stack (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Automatically captured autobiographical metadata : Mischa Tuffield (2006)

Faculty of Engineering, science and mathematics. School of Electronics and Computer Science. Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia Group.

Supervisors: Nigel Shadbolt, David Millard.

Those who know me well will understand why this subject fascinates me – a diarist since I was 13, blogging since 1999 and recently completed a Master’s Degree in Open and Distance Education with the Open University. Over a decade ago I registered domain names like ‘The Contents of My Mind’ and ‘TCMB’ but didn’t know how to take my enthusiasm and turn it into a research project or product.

Know I do … or nearly do.

There’s a reason to this day why I blog as ‘My Mind Bursts’.

Current reading is on the combined themes of memory support, lifelogging, augmented learning and virtual companions – there’s considerable overlap into supporting those with diminishing senses or memory with illness or old age, as well as enhancing the learning and information retrieval and manipulation process.

An infrastructure for capturing and exploitation of personal metadata to drive research into context aware systems.

  • Capture of personal experiences
  • Context aware systems
  • Multimedia annotation systems
  • Narrative generation
  • Semantic Web enabling technologies
  • A contextual log of a user’s digital life.
  • To facilitate auto–biographical narrative generation.

Towards a methodology for the capture and storage of personal metadata and is proposed as a framework for multimedia asset management.

PROBLEM

Information overload, or infosmog (Shadbolt and O’Hara, 2003)

A liberation of personal information.

  • Ease of publishing. (House and Davis, 2005)
  • Towards a web–accessibke Knowledge Base (KB)
  • Photocopain.
  • Adhereance to as many W3C recommendations as possible.
  • Semantic Web (Berners–Lee et al, 2001)

Scientific American article to assemble and integrate personal information into web accessible resources (Shadbolt et al., 2006)

Exposing information in a structured snd standard form … using Resource Description Framework (RDF) Manola and Miller, 2004)
Universal Resource Identifier (URI)
Friend of a Friend (FOAF)
Memories for Life (M4L)
Semantic Squirrels Group (SSSIG)

Image classification, content–based indexing and retrieval,
Content and context based services

  • Marc Davis (2004a)
  • Spatial
  • Temporal
  • Social

Design methods to generate narratives from bespoken knowledge bases

  • Alani et al., 2003
  • Geurts et al., 2003
  • Mulholland et al., 2004

so automatically, not hand– crafted metadata.

The Semantic Logger (Tuffield et al., 2006a)

Photo annotation
Recommender system (Tuffield et al., 2006a) and (Loizou and Dasmahaptra, 2006)
Posting of data to the knowledge database.

By virtue of knowledge integration alone, added value emerges. (Tuffield,  2006.  p. 20)

Community of practice identification (Alani et al., 2003a)

Simile Project at MIT

(As a diarist since I was 13 I came to seek a way to say enough to recall the day. I needed the trigger, not the detail. The boring stuff might not work as such a trigger).

Clustering algorithms

FURTHER LINKS TO EXPLORE

The World Wide Web Consortium

The AKT project

Friend of a Friend 

The Memories for Life Network 

The Semantic Squirrels SIG

The Semantic Logger Downloads Page 

The Semantic Logger

Simile Project

3RDFizers

Open Knowledge Project

Google Maps API

The Flickr API

Wikipedia Categories

Work undertaken my Marc Davis at Berkeley provides insight into how context can be combined with content to aid the identification of faces inside photographs (Davis et al., 2006).

FURTHER RESEARCH

I am proposing the design of a human centric personal image search and browsing task, similar to that undertaken by Mor Naaman (Naaman et al., 2004). This is presented as a manner of evaluating the utility of the various asset management. The results of this experiment is intended as a contribution to the identification of useful automatically captured metadata to aid memory recall.

REFERENCES

T. Berners-Lee, J. Hendler, and O. Lassila. The Semantic Web. Scientific American, 284(5), May 2001.

Marc Davis, Michael Smith, Fred Stentiford, Adetokunbo Bambidele, John Canny, Nathan Good, Simon King, and Rajkumar Janakiraman. Using context and similarity for face and location identification. In Proceedings of the IS&T/SPIE 18th Annual Symposium on Electronic Imaging Science and Technology Internet Imaging VII. IS&T/SPIE Press, 2006.

J. Gemmel, G. Bell, R. Lueder, S. Drucker, and C. Wong. MyLifeBits: fulfilling the memex vision. In MULTIMEDIA ’02: Proceedings of the 10th ACM international conference in Multimedia, pages 235–238, 2002.

J. Gemmell, A. Aris, and R. Lueder. Telling stories with MyLifeBits. ICME 2005, 8: 6–9, July 2005.

Carsten Rother, Sanjiv Kumar, Vladimir Kolmogorov, and Andrew Blake. Digital tapestry. In CVPR ’05: Proceedings of the 2005 IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR’05) – Volume 1, pages 589–596, Washington, DC, USA, 2005. IEEE Computer Society. ISBN 0-7695-2372-2.

L. Sauermann, A. Bernandi, and A. Dengel. Overview and outlook on the semantic desktop. In Proc. of Semantic Desktop Workshop at the ISWC, 2005.

N. Shadbolt and K. O’Hara. AKTuality: An overview of the aims, ambitions and assumptions of the advanced knowledge technologies interdisciplinary research collaboration. AKT Selected Papers 03, pages 1–11, 2003.

Nigel R. Shadbolt, Wendy Hall, and Tim Berners-Lee. The Semantic Web: Revisted. IEE-Intelligent System, 21(3):96–101, May 2006.

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Life-Logging and the contents of my brain, your brain, easily accessed, shared and ameliorated (or just picked over?)

October 23, 2011 6:02 am / Leave a comment

Gordon Bell

Gordon Bell (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This fascinates me. When I started blogging in 1999 I called the blog ‘The Contents of My Brain’ as for a couple of years I’d been using an early version of Filemaker Pro offline (in Clarisworks) to assemble/catalogue everything I had read, all the films I had seen … and all the diary entries I had kept since March 1975. Then I read about this guy. I’d like to meet him. I’d like to work with him!

 

Gordon Bell

 

Microsoft Research Silicon Valley

 

Email: GBell At Microsoft.com is the most reliable communication link
Mobile phone & answering machine: (415) 640 8255 best voice link
Office & Computer LYNC Phone: (415) 972-6542; this rings on my PC
FAX only if you must: MS fax gateway(425) 936-7329 address to “gbell”
Microsoft Office: 835 Market Street, Suite 700, San Francisco, CA, 94103

 

(c) Dan Tuffs, Photographer

 

Gordon Bell is a principal researcher in the Microsoft Research Silicon Valley Laboratory, working in the San Francisco Laboratory. His interests include extreme lifelogging, digital lives, preserving everything in cyberspace, and cloud computing as a new computer class and platform. He proselytizes Jim Gray’s Fourth Paradigm of Science.

 

Gordon has long evangelized scalable systems starting with his interest in multiprocessors (mP) beginning in 1965 with the design of Digital’s PDP-6, PDP-10’s antecedent, one of the first mPs and the first timesharing computer. He continues this interest with various talks about trends in future supercomputing (see Papers… presentations, etc.) and especially clustered systems formed from cost-effective “personal computers”.  As Digital’s VP of R&D he was responsible for the VAX Computing Environment. In 1987, he led the cross-agency group as head of NSF’s Computing Directorate that made “the plan” for the National Research and Education Network (NREN)aka the Internet.

 

When joining Microsoft in 1995, Gordon had started focusing on the use of computers and the necessity of telepresence: being there without really being there, then. “There” can be a different place, right now, or a compressed and different time (a presentation or recording of an earlier event). In 1999 this project was extended to include multimedia in the home (visit Papers… presentations, etc.).

 

He puts nearly all of his atom- and electron-based bits in his local Cyberspace—the MyLifeBits project c1998-2007. This includes everything he has accumulated, written, photographed, presented, and owns (e.g. CDs). In February 2005 an epiphany occurred with the realization that MyLifeBits goes beyond Vannevar Bush’s “memex” and is a personal transaction processing database for everything described in June 14, 2005 SIGMOD Keynote. The MyLifeBits project with Jim Gemmell is described in an article by us in the March 2007 Scientific American. Alec Wilkinson described Gordon and the MyLifeBits effort in the 28 May 2007 issue of the New Yorker. By the publication of the book the final epiphany was that our e-memories are where the records reside and bio-memories are just URLs into these records.

 

He and Jim Gemmell have written a book entitled Total Recall: How the e-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything which was published in=n September 2009. You can order it at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Borders, orIndieBound. Please check out the Total Recall book website. Your Life, Uploaded: The Digital Way to Better Memory, Health, and Productivity is the paperback version published September 2010. It is available in Dutch, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, and Portuguese.

 

The remainder of the site includes these pages:

 

  1. Papers, books, PowerPoint presentations, videos since 1995, when joining Microsoft
  2. Extended Bio— education, work history, honors… Alaska fishing and France biking
  3. Vitae: Listing of books, computers, interviews, papers, patents, projects, and videos
  4. THE COMPUTER MUSEUM ARCHIVE An archive of The Computer Museum in Boston 1980-1998.

5. Gordon’s  Cyber Museum that has Bell’s books, the Hollerith Patent, the CDC 8600 Manual, a talk about Seymour Cray, an album of supercomputer photos, posters about the history of computing, etc.

 

6. Gordon’s Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) Cyber Museum has artifacts, books, brochures, clippings, manuals, memos (e.g. The VAX Strategy), memorabilia, photos, posters, presentations, etc. relating to Digital Equipment Corporation a.k.a. DEC.

 

7. Supercomputing and the CyberInfrastructure lists articles, memos, talks, and testimony regarding the various aspects of high performance computing including funding, goals, and problems in reaching to the Teraflops in 1995 and Petaflops in 2010.

 

Bell’s Law of Computer Classes and Class formation was first described in 1972 with the emergence of a new, lower priced microcomputer class based on the microprocessor. Microsoft Technical Report MSR-TR-2007-146 describes the law and gives the implication for multiple cores per chip, etc. Established market class computers are introduced at a constant price with increasing functionality (or performance). Technology advances in semiconductors, storage, interfaces and networks enable a new computer class (platform) to form about every decade to serve a new need. Each new usually lower priced class is maintained as a quasi independent industry (market). Classes include: mainframes (60’s), minicomputers (70’s), networked workstations and personal computers (80’s), browser-web-server structure (90’s), web services (2000’s), palm computing (1995), convergence of cell phones and computers (2003), and Wireless Sensor Networks aka motes (2004). Beginning in the 1990s, a single class of scalable computers called clusters built from a few to tens of thousands of commodity microcomputer-storage-networked bricks began to cover and replace mainframes, minis, and workstation. Bell predicts home and body area networks will form by 2010. See also the description of several laws (e.g. Moore’s, Metcalfe’s, Bill’s, Nathan’s, Bell’s) that govern the computer industry is given in Laws, a talk by Jim Gray and Gordon Bell.

 

Description: \\research\root\web\external\en-us\UM\People\gbell\CGB on Segway 020405_small.jpgDescription: \\research\root\web\external\en-us\UM\People\gbell\CGB on GM Segway GM model_small.jpgGordon was with his Diamond Exchange colleagues at the Boulders, Carefree, AZ where the group tested the Segway, a dual-processor, two wheeled, computer and Human Transporter.  Since the test in 2002, he has taken and recommended tours in the Pacificia near San Francisco, and Washington, DC. Yes, this is a product endorsement. Right is the Ford SUV version

 

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