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'Through the Wormhole' - CLARITY research
A film crew from Discovery Channel visited DCU's CLARITY research centre this week to film interviews for series 3 of 'Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman'. The programme is an American science documentary television series narrated by American actor Morgan Freeman, and brings together the brightest minds and best ideas from the world of science. It is particularly interested in discussing new groundbreaking technologies. The show regularly features the "Rock Stars of Science", such as Michio Kaku and Brian Cox.
The producers interviewed Dr Cathal Gurrin, researcher with CLARITY and lecturer in DCU's School of Computing, who described and demonstrated progress in the area of 'lifelogging', which uses wearable and environmental sensors to automatically capture and semantically understand life experience in as much detail as possible. 'Lifelog' can then become a digital archive of your daily life for your own exclusive personal use. It is a form of reverse surveillance, sometimes termed sousveillance, referring to us, the subjects, watching ourselves.
While recent technical advances in digital sensing and storage have allowed early adaptors to collect and store vast quantities of lifelog information, the next big challenge will be in managing, processing and presenting the incredible volumes of lifelog information. This is the focus of Clarity research efforts in the lifelogging area. Clarity researchers have made ongoing advances in three areas of lifelog-related research; sensor data mining to identify everyday activities automatically, lifelog search engines to easily locate any digital memory event and finally presentation technologies to support different user groups.
"Lifelogging is an area of research that we have been involved in since 2006. We are now internationally recognised leaders in the field," said Gurrin. "Our passion is the development of automatic understanding tools to gather and segment life experience, researching the new search engines that operate over these vast digital archives and making them as easy to use as a Google search."
The potential benefits of this research are immense and range from providing a better quality of life for people with memory difficulties to developing new and novel techniques for market research. "Being on a TV show such as 'Through the Wormhole' elevates our research to a worldwide stage and shows the potential of Irish research to break new ground and develop new technologies that can benefit all of society", he said.
Series 3 of Through the Wormhole will be aired in mid 2012.