Chapter 8: Timeshifting Life 339 COMMENT: AN EXCERPT FROM THE HOMEPAGE OF LARRY RUDOLPH I am currently thinking about cell phones and controlling my own personal information. This includes searching, security, privacy, prediction, managing multiple devices, and interacting with distributed data, services, and people. I mostly remember stuff based on time, place, and event. I program my phone (in python) to tag all content I gen- erate based on these attributes. I also try to get these attributes into human terms. So, time is “working”, “relaxing”, and so on. Location may be “home”, “work”, “library”, “Boston”, “shopping”, and so on. These are my labels but my system actually learns them from my calendar and blog entries (my daily activities are automatically included into my blog or diary). I can fi nd things using a query such as: “who called me when I was listening to the Beatles on my way home from work last week?” Now that I have a model of my daily travels, I can lie about my location. It is mostly correct, but no guaran- tees. Since I control the distribution of my personal information, I can choose what to reveal and what to hide. This is a very powerful way of controlling one’s personal information. Professor Larry Rudolph Principal Research Scientist MIT (Professor Larry Rudolph’s current research and teaching focuses on technologies and applications of experimental pervasive computing. http://csg.csail.mit.edu/u/r/ rudolph/public_html/) We are experimenting with various approaches to life retrieval. One 9 of our research projects, Sharme, emphasises sharing of memories (the fundamental bits of life) with other people. It records life events and data with an embedded mobile phone application, which then trans- fers the data to a server (e.g., the user’s PC) for subsequent processing, storage, and retrieval. Figure 8-3 shows a prototype of the Sharme retrieval system. In the fi gure, the system has generated rudimentary summaries of someone’s photos and locations during a visit in Italy. The lifebase is shared with 9 http://www.sharme.org/