IBM Research develops technology to aid human memory

30 July 2008

To help people remember key facts, today, IBM unveiled a software technology created in its Research Labs that uses the images, sounds, and text recorded on everyday mobile devices to help people recall names, faces, conversations and other important information.

The technology, nicknamed "Pensieve" by the IBM team, uses associative recall to make connections between pieces of related data acquired by a person. The advantage of the new technology is its ability to understand the context in which data is captured, then connect various data, and then use this knowledge to help bring the correct information to a person when it is needed.

"This is like having a personal assistant for your memory," said Dr Yaakov Navon, the lead researcher and image processing expert from IBM's Haifa Research Lab. "Our daily routines are overflowing with situations where we gain new information through meetings, advertisements, conferences, events, surfing the web, or even window shopping. Instead of going home and using a general web search to find that information, Pensieve helps the brain recall those everyday things you might normally forget."

Today's mobile devices have an endless number of functions that can record data in real time. IBM's new software blends techniques from image processing, GPS information, smart clustering, optical character recognition, speech recognition, and information retrieval to index and tag the information.

Researchers at IBM's Haifa Research Lab in Israel are pairing advanced mobile technologies with memory cues to develop a system that can analyse acquired data, create hooks to related experiences, and use them to populate a person's information management applications. Once the address books and calendars are updated, the technology enables memory recall triggered by time, location or the introduction of related information.

For example, if you meet someone at a conference and use your phone to take a picture of him or her and another picture of that person's business card, the new technology will associate the two pieces of data because they were taken at the same time and location. It then creates a virtual briefcase of data that includes the person's image, the name of the conference where you met, the date and time, and any other relevant data.