Lifelogging: Personal Big Data: 24 (Foundations and Trends® in Information Retrieval) - Softcover

Lifelogging represents a phenomenon whereby people can digitally record their own daily lives in varying amounts of detail, for a variety of purposes. In a sense it represents a comprehensive “black box” of a human’s life activities and may offer the potential to mine or infer knowledge about how we live our lives. We have recently observed a convergence of technologies to foster the emergence of lifelogging as a mainstream activity. Computer storage has become significantly cheaper, and advancements in sensing technology allows for the efficient sensing of personal activities, locations and the environment. This is best seen in the growing popularity of the quantified self movement, in which life activities are tracked using wearable sensors in the hope of better understanding human performance in a variety of tasks. Lifelogging: Personal Big Data provides a comprehensive summary of lifelogging, to cover its research history, current technologies, and applications. Thus far, most of the lifelogging research has focused predominantly on visual lifelogging; hence the book maintains this focus. However, it also reflects on the challenges lifelogging poses for information access and retrieval in general. Lifelogging: Personal Big Data is a suitable reference for those seeking an information retrieval scientist’s perspective on lifelogging and the quantified self.

As of very recently, we are observing a convergence of technologies which are creating the conditions for the emergence of lifelogging as a mainstream activity. Computer storage has become incredibly cheap, either on the cloud or on personal devices, there are advances in sensing technologies for both the person as well as location and environment and there is growing interest in the phenomenon of sensing and recording oneself, the so-called quantified-self movement. Add to that our increased openness to sharing information about ourselves and this convergence of technologies and circumstances has led to a slow maturing in the area known as lifelogging, creating lifelogs and the software required to manage those lifelogs. This book sets out to provide a comprehensive review of lifelogging, to cover the history of the field, the technologies that are currently available and the applications for which lifelogging can be used. It presents lifelogging in terms of the challenges it poses for information access and information retrieval in general.