Memories for Life and Live Memories are two projects in UK and Trento Italy, respectively, that are working on similar things and hence are now coming closer. I was invited to attend their meeting because of my interest in similar technology. I found that these projects are closer to my own interest, particularly EMME, than I had imagined. Interestingly both these projects have started using events as important organizing principles. I was really very surprised to see the importance being given to events and diction of those in pictorial data. The most direct example is the work being done at the Dublin City University in interpreting and organizing Sensecam data. It clearly is a very direct and obvious case where one needs to divide regular life activities collected using Sensecam in meaningful events.
Another two important aspects of these projects are trying to develop devices beyond Sensecam and augmenting information using the Web. There was some talk about using mobile phones as becoming the device of choice. I consider this direction to be very promising. The idea of using the Web to augment and support information has been gaining increasing support from the research community.
It was also refreshing to see that the leaders in this community are more interested in solving problems than doing academic things. This was not direct, but was clear from the way the discussion took place. In particular the idea of not being overly concerned about the ‘pure’ aspects of ontology but using more practical versions was dominant and so was the idea of using any source of information that was needed to solve the problem.
It was very nice to spend some time with this group of researchers.