WORKSHOP REPORT

Information Access for Personal Media Archives
Aiden R. Doherty1,2, Cathal Gurrin1,2, Gareth J.F. Jones2, and Alan F. Smeaton1,2
CLARITY: Centre for Sensor Web Technologies1
Dublin City University2, Ireland
aiden.doherty@dcu.ie
www.iapma2010.dcu.ie
Abstract
It is now possible to archive much of our life experiences indigital form using a variety of sources, e.g. blogs written,
tweets made, photographs taken, etc. Information can be
captured from a myriad of personal information devices. In
this workshop, researchers from diverse disciplines discussed
how we can advance towards the goal of effective capture,retrieval and exploration of e-memories. Proposed solutions
included advanced textile sensors to capture new data, P2P
methods to store this data, and personal reflection
applications to review this data. Much discussion centeredaround search and navigation strategies, interactive interfaces,
and the cognitive basis in using digitally captured information
as memorabilia.

1

Introduction

The domain of lifelogging has received much attention of late [1, 2, 3] and shows the potential oftechnology to record life’s activities and interactions. The benefits of achieving this are widespreadfrom personal health applications, to automated diary capture, to understanding the lifestylecharacteristics of populations of people. However other forms of data may not be automatically
captured, but they still represent one’s lifestyle and can act as a form of memorabilia to act as
memory cues to help one re-experience a given event. These forms of data include digital
photographs, word documents, e-mails, family videos, etc. As a result of this we believe that it is ofupmost importance that people can access relevant information from their personal media archives
hence the formation of the inaugural IAPMA workshop.

1.1 Workshop Theme“Towards e-memories” – challenges of capturing, summarising, presenting, understanding, using, andretrieving relevant information from heterogeneous data contained in personal media archives.

2

Background & Challenges

There has been a relative explosion of personal multimedia data in recent times [4] e.g. work
documents [5], e-mail, personal images/videos [6], sensing devices to record biometric data when wego running, cell phone text messages [7], sensed data from the environment around us (air quality,our home energy usage), etc. Some of these technologies already potentially offer great assistance tothose with memory impairments, with emerging results from the cognitive psychology field being

very encouraging [8]. The most significant missing element is the technologies to give end users
reliable, efficient and high-quality information retrieval over these personal media archives.
These archives pose new and unique challenges in that: data is likely to be multi-modal in nature(text, audio, photo, video, biometric, location, etc.); there may be a vast number of data items (alifetime of data); items will often not be joined by inter-document links; the archive will containmuch non-useful data that users will never want to see again; the archive will contain data about theuser’s environment that they may not understand; the user may be unable to describe clearly what
they are looking for; they may not even be aware that the data was captured and is available; and it
may often be helpful to recommend content related to the user’s current context.
There have been a number of related workshops over the past few years, with the closest match being
the PIM workshop series which incorporates different disciplines including databases, HCI, AI andIR. This has been held in conjunction with various conferences including SIGIR 2006 and CHI 2008.
The fourth PIM workshop will take place this year at ASIS&T 2009, a conference focusing on
broadcasting information. Another related past workshop series was CARPE which ran from 20042006 and was dedicated to the retrieval of personal life experience data and was associated withACM MM. The “Memories for Life” project in the U.K. organised a series of workshops from 20062009 successfully bringing together researchers from computing science and cognitive psychology
fields along with others such as biographers to propose a roadmap to access e-memories.
Following in the spirit of these workshops it was our aim to continue investigations in this researcharea, and to especially encourage contributions from researchers from different backgrounds topresent and discuss their ideas relating to the IR challenges of effectively accessing personal media
archives. We are interested in work including: development of new sensing devices and technologies
to capture novel data of personal interest, algorithmic research, user studies on the real-life benefits ofefficiently accessing personal media archives, and also position papers on the place of personal media
archive research within IR or proposals for research strategies in this area. Submissions were selected
for presentation to reflect a spectrum of work and to encourage discussion in the workshop.

3Workshop Organisation

To reflect the diverse themes of the workshop, our program committee consisted of the following
ranges of expertise:
Program Committee
Lifelogging
Kiyoharu Aizawa (Toyko, Japan)
Jim Gemmell (Microsoft Research, USA)
Mobile Devices
Kevin Curran (University of Ulster, N. Ireland)
Lothar Fritsch (Norwegian Computing Center, Norway)
Josef Hallberg (Luleå University of Technology, Sweden)
Hardware & Device Design
Mike Sinclair (Microsoft Research, USA)
Steve Hodges (Microsoft Research Cambridge, UK)

Information Retrieval
Alexander Hauptmann (Carnegie Mellon University, USA)
Kristin Tolle (Microsoft Research, USA)
Steve Whittaker (IBM Almaden, USA)
User Experience
Kieron O’Hara (University of Southampton, UK)
Daniela Petrelli (University of Sheffield, UK)
Kälervo Jarvelin (University of Tampere, Finland)To ensure a sufficient blend of diversity and quality would be represented at the workshop, 4 longpapers and 1 short paper were accepted for presentation. To complement the range of topics
represented in the workshop, we subsequently invited a keynote speaker in the area of personal
memorabilia user interaction.

4Workshop Presentations

The workshop was held on the 28th March 2010 and was co-located with ECIR 2010, the 32nd
European Conference on Information Retrieval. There were two sessions, and we now describe thetopics covered in these sessions.

4.1 Session 1
Digital Technology and the Value of Personal Memories. Keynote by Daniela Petrelli
Textile Sensors for Personalized Feedback. Shirley Coyle, Edmond Mitchell, Tomas Ward, Gregory
May, Noel E. O'Connor and Dermot Diamond
FoodLog: the Easiest Way to Capture and Archive What We Eat. Kiyoharu Aizawa, Gamhewage
Chaminda de Silva, Keigo Kitamura and Yuto Maruyama.
The morning session was started with a keynote given by Dr. Daniela Petrelli from the University ofSheffield who discussed the merits of digital technology and personal media archives, and the valuein assisting people in effectively accessing their memories. CLARITY researcher Edmond Mitchellpresented developments in the field of wearable sensing which will provide less intrusive monitoringof person activities in the near future. To conclude the first session, Prof. Kiyoharu Aizawa from
Tokyo presented an overview of one of the most successful systems in the lifelogging domain,
namely a diet monitoring application which has approximately 280 users, who have uploaded morethan 5,500 images of meals.

4.2 Session 2
Evaluating Interactive Access to Personal Visual Archives. Kan Ren, Risto Sarvas and Janko Calic
Description and Selection of Media Archives for Geographic Nearest Neighbour Queries in P2P
Network. Daniel Blank and Andreas Henrich
Search and navigation as retrieval strategies in large photo collections. Ivar Solheim, Øystein Dale,
Lothar Fritsch, Till Halbach, Knut Holmqvist and Ingvar Tjøstheim.
After a lunch containing much lively discussion from our well attended workshop, the afternoon
session saw Kan Ren from the University of Surrey introduce a novel intuitive interactive interface
for browsing of large-scale personal image and video collections. Daniel Blank from the Universityof Bamberg in Germany considered the problem of managing the vast collections of lifelog generated
content, and suggested that peer-to-peer technologies offer interesting solutions. Ivar Solheim fromthe Norwegian Computing Center discussed the perceived and actual effectiveness of various searchand navigation strategies used by individuals when interacting with their lifelog content.

5Workshop Outcomes & Conclusion

The workshop proved a success in providing a forum for researchers from different backgrounds topresent and discuss their ideas relating to the challenges of effectively accessing personal media
archives. The workshop fostered much discussion on issues related to personal media archives which
capture access mechanisms to life’s experiences. We learned of: 1) advances in textile sensors to
unobtrusively gather sensed data of our daily activities, 2) possible P2P methods of storing this datawith digital legacy implications; 3) of applications classifying eating activities; 4) of search andnavigation strategies; 5) of interactive interfaces; and 6) the cognitive basis in using digitally captured
information as memorabilia.
The workshop was well received by all attendees, and to maintain the momentum and growinginterest in personal life data, it is likely that a sequel workshop will be run in ECIR 2011 in Dublin,Ireland.

6Workshop Proceedings

For the interested reader, the workshop proceedings have been made available online at http://doras.dcu.ie/15373/ - which can also be accessed via the workshop website,www.iapma2010.dcu.ie

Acknowledgements
This workshop was supported by the Science Foundation Ireland under Grant No. 07/CE/I1147. We
would also like to express our gratitude to Susan Little, Thomas Roelleke, Udo Kruschwitz, andStefan Rüger of the ECIR organisation committee who ensured the smooth running of the workshop.

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MDPI, 2010.
[4] K. Cukier. Data, data everywhere: The data deluge. The Economist, 25th February 2010.
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