Microsoft: Data Mining Your Digital Effluvia
March 18th, 2012People seem to be cracking up and looking for technological fixes to what amounts to mental illness that was caused by their technology in the first place.
Here’s how Becky chronicles milestones and other pleasant moments with our children. She pastes photographs to sheets of paper and handwrites the details of what happened on the pages. Sometimes she adds little drawings or decorations. These learning stories are placed in transparent sleeves, which are kept in a binder.
These collections of learning stories are treasures, and our sons love them.
And now, back to our regularly scheduled horror show…
Via: Technology Review:
Mining personal data to discover what people care about has become big business for companies such as Facebook and Google. Now a project from Microsoft Research is trying to bring that kind of data mining back home to help people explore their own piles of personal digital data.
Software called Lifebrowser processes photos, e-mails, Web browsing and search history, calendar events, and other documents stored on a person’s computer and identifies landmark events. Its timeline interface can explore, search, and discover those landmarks as a kind of memory aid.
“The motivation behind Lifebrowser is that we have too much stuff going on in our personal digital spheres,” says Eric Horvitz, the distinguished scientist at Microsoft who created Lifebrowser. “We were interested in making local machines private data-mining centers [that are] very smart about you and your memory so that you can better navigate through that great amount of content.”
