First Camera, Then Fork. NY Times article by Kate Murphy

Ms. Murphy describes the fact that people are photographing their food as a growing trend. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/07/dining/07camera.html?hp=&pagewanted=print

She opens with a story about a neuroscientist who has 9000 photographs of everything he has eaten in the last five years--after he lost 80 pounds, as a method of self motivation. She states that Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin wrote, “Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are.” Flickr has 300K food photos from 19,000 of its members.  Other motivators include match making. voyeurism, just plain showing off, or whatever as a way of filling your facebook page while filling your face, or in general documenting another part of your life just like we advocate.

I was able to resonate with this trend and then went back to look at trips in France beginning in the late 70s when memorable meals were photographed and logged in terms of price performance-- correlating taste with the Michelin food tasters.  Since then, I tend to photograph all meals eaten at restaurants including the check, and especially memorable "restaurant quality" home cooking. Just a month ago, faced with the first course of a potentially memorable 7-course degustation menu meal at our favorite Japanese restaurant. I had no option but to run home (across the street), get the camera, and arrive back to photograph and enjoy.

SenseCam also greps these photos too. Wearing it while dining allows you to see a plate of food disappear. If only it would analyze the calories.  In a way, I get this by estimating my calories burned and adjusting it by the weight gain when I step on the scales!

I have little urge to do anything other than to savor the screen saver recollection. Like virtually all of MyLifeBits, these photos are for me. However, if you saw the photos, you would conclude like the people in the article-we all like to eat. I just wish my body and heart wouldn't mind so much.

SenseCam Browser released

Whenever I talk about Total Recall, people ask: "won't you get swamped by all that data?" It’s a great question. If it takes automatic capture to get close to logging everything, it will also take automatic organization, and, even more importantly, automatic summarization to deal with the scale of one's lifelog. So, my Total Recall presentation isn't complete without showing off the great work by Aiden Doherty, Alan Smeaton and others from Dublin City University (DCU).

The DCU SenseCam browser takes the several thousand pictures that a SenseCam can generate in a day, and produces a daily diary. The idea is to look for novelty as a proxy for interestingness. Faces and clothing patches are recognized, and they ask: are these the same old faces, or new ones? Looking accelerometer values, and taking location from a separate GPS into account, they can also distinguish movements that are out of the ordinary. The end result shows snapshots of your day, with the pictures of more interesting events taking up more space. When you put your mouse over an event’s picture, a time-lapse style video plays of all the pictures from that event.

Now the DCU SenseCam browser is being made public. Check out the SenseCam browser site for source code and links to more information about the project. This first public release doesn’t include the image comparison, but they have actually found they can get within a few percent of the same answers without it. But this release is just the start as they’ve got the capability to add in much more functionality, such as event importance or visual event search ... stay tuned for more!

New York Times article on SenseCam

A Little Black Box to Jog Failing Memory, By YUDHIJIT BHATTACHARJEE, NYT, March 8, 2010.

A nice article on SenseCam with a focus on memory-loss applications.

Two years ago, Mr. Reznick, who has early-stage Alzheimer’s disease and is now 82, signed up for an experiment intended to help people with Alzheimer’s and other memory disorders. The concept was simple: using digital pictures and audio to archive an experience like a weekend visit from the grandchildren, creating a summary of the resulting content by picking crucial images, and reviewing them periodically to awaken and strengthen the memory of the event.

SenseCam licensed by OMG, as the Vicon Revue

The Vicon arm of Oxford Metrics Group has signed a license to use SenseCam

OMG plc, Oxford Metrics Group (LSE: OMG), (“OMG” or “the Group”) the technology group providing image understanding products for the entertainment, defence, life science and engineering industries announced today that it has signed an intellectual property (“IP”) license agreement with Microsoft Corp.

The agreement will allow the Group’s Vicon arm, which develops motion capture products for the life science, engineering and entertainment industries, to manufacture and sell devices incorporating Microsoft’s SenseCam technology worldwide.

They plan to sell it as the Vicon Revue