A presentation that I gave at the October 2013 Quantified Self meetup in Portland, Oregon. I began wearing an automated camera around my neck in August of 2012. This presentation is the why and how of my lifelogging experiment, including how you can use it to make your life searchable.

2. • My phone takes a photo about every minute
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3. Max, Walking – 10/8/2012
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4. • Android phone
• Tasker for Android
– Phone automation
• Rooted
– To turn off shutter noise
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5. • Pretty continuous since August 4th, 2012
• A few times farther back
Quantified Self – 7/19/2011
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6. • Initially:
– Seemed interesting
• Seeing what’s possible
– A historical record
• For me
• For my descendents
• For “other people”
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8. • Initially:
– Fodder for future technology
• “Agents” that understand behavior
– Photos are just another stream of data
• Life searching (Tivo + Google)
– One of several streams of possible data
– “Who did I talk about QS with last week?”
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10. • Daily phone dumps
• Google’s Picasa
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11. • Search by date/time
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12. 12:00:00 pm –
12:00:59 pm
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13. Sushi
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14. Mexican
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15. Pizza
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16. • Picasa does it
– My broad estimates:
• 30% of possible faces found
• 10% of found faces accurately recognized
– Mostly doesn’t find a match
• Creates Views by Person
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19. • Tagging activities
– New thing for me
– Walking
– Driving
• Tagging locations
– Home
– Work
– Restaurant
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21. • 1,440 possible minutes a day
• But
– Overnight blackout periods
– Computer connected blackout periods
– Phone crashes
• Ok, just resets the phone, which starts capturing again
– Camera app crashes
• Bad, as nothing reports being wrong
– Mystery outages
– About 5 seconds of time slippage per photo
• 100 – 800+ a day
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22. • From about 120MB to
700MB a day
• Assuming 500MB a day…
• …About 183GB a year
• Or about 2TB a decade
• Which may sound like a lot
• But you can get 2TB for
about $100 today
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23. • Projected to 2020:
– $1 per TB
– (We’re already at half
2010 prices at $50/TB)
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24. • Yes.
• Yes it does.
• About 3 full charges a day
– Always have a backup battery ;)
– Or be tethered to power when possible
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25. •
•
•
•
Feels like getting into someone’s business
Most people suspect
A few ask
Most people that ask are cautious and wonder why
– Sometimes they ask if the photos are made public
• Those that have come into contact with it regularly
seem to acclimate fairly quickly
• Somehow, this is not the same as a regular camera
– Surreptitious?
• I’m ready to lie about it
– I haven’t had to yet
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26. • Microsoft SenseCam
– Gordon Bell
• http://research.microsoft.com/enus/um/cambridge/projects/sensecam/
– Vicon Revue
• http://viconrevue.com
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27. • OMG Life’s Autographer
– http://autographer.com
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28. • Google’s Project Glass
– https://plus.google.com/+projectglass/
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29. • Memoto on Kickstarter
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30. • Memoto on Kickstarter
– Takes photo every 30 seconds
– Launched on October 23, 2012
– Reached their goal of $50,000 in under 5 hours
– Stretch goal of $150,000 reached the same day
– As of about noon today, reached $358,849 with 30
days to go
– http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/martinkallstr
om/memoto-lifelogging-camera
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31. • Plus audio
• Plus video
• That’s good….right?
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33. • “Time” Questions
– When did I last have sushi?
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35. • “Time” Questions
– When did I last have sushi?
– How much time will it take me to walk home?
~45 minutes
8:01:33
8:46:00
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36. • “Time” Questions
– When did I last have sushi?
– How much time will it take me to walk home?
• “What” Questions
– What was the last name of the person at the QS
data session?
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38. • Being more in the moment
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39. • Post-Processing Life
– Tagging events later
– Putting names to faces
• Setting Baselines
– Retroactively
•
•
•
•
Drum practice
Trips to the restroom
Hours in front of the TV
Coarse-grained food
tracking
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40. • Round is not the best surface
– Lots of photos of light fixtures
• One minute is actually a lot
of time
– Much gets missed
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41. • People don’t show up as often as you’d expect
– It turns out that facing your body right at
someone when you’re talking to them is not
common
• Need to track with your head for best results
– Reminds me of garfield MINUS garfield
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42. • Even simple things can be technically tricky
– Getting the photo taking right wasn’t simple
• Complicated rules (like “not when there’s not enough light”) didn’t
work out well
– Getting photos off the phone isn’t yet completely
automated
– No geotagging
– No automatic light adjustment
• Lots of over exposed and under exposed
– No shutter speed adjustment (lots of blurry)
– Phone/app crashes
– But phone memory isn’t really a problem
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43. • Wider angle lens
• Some way to lay this all out
– By location
– By time of day
• Allow for human pattern recognition to create “ah-ha”s
• Integration with other relevant data streams
– TagTime data
– GPS/Checkins
• Could eliminate location tagging, and add GPS searching
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44. • Some kind of object detection (e.g. “table”)
– Currently everything goes through Google Goggles
– Doesn’t find much, but does occasionally find
interesting things
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49. • Could add additional context
(and, therefore, search terms)
• But there’s no way to integrate the data from
Goggles back into the photos
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50. • Tagging TV
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51. •
•
•
•
Tagging TV
Tracking restaurants by employees
Adding detail to people
Food tracking
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53. If you want to be part of my ongoing record, come stand in front of me
for at least a minute (and talking would be cool too ;)
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55. • Google+ will auto-upload all your photos to a
private location
– They are down-sized
– They are hard to search
– Can be battery intensive
– I didn’t find a limit
• Dropbox is similar, though they have stated
limits
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56. • Takes a while to get used to
• Having the camera faded away over 30 days
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57. • People clusters
– Which people are associated with which other
people (on some sort of relationship graph)
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