EVER given up keeping a diary because you never remembered to fill it in? Don鈥檛 worry, your cellphone could soon be helping you write one.
A team at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, is tapping into the wealth of information that your smartphone sensors collect to automatically describe your daily activity in the form of a timeline.
聯The wealth of information your smartphone sensors collect can be used to create a daily timeline聰
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While GPS can easily give you information about your whereabouts outside, an accurate account of your day needs to know your movements indoors, too. To do this, the team produced software that converted the Wi-Fi signal an Android phone receives from a router into accurate indoor location information.
Next, Jordan Frank, now with Facebook in Palo Alto, California, used language-translation methods to turn this location data into a narrative text (). 鈥淚nstead of translating from, say, French to English, we translate from location signals to English,鈥� says Frank鈥檚 colleague Doina Precup. They asked cellphone users to write basic English descriptions of their daily activities for two weeks to create a data set that was used to teach a machine-learning system how to convert location data into simple English sentences.
The result is not exactly great literature. A typical example reads: 鈥淚 left home at 07:20. I arrived at auditorium at 11:48. I left auditorium at 11:50. I arrived at lounge at 11:52. I left lounge at 12:38. I arrived at my office at 12:46.鈥� While it might seem a bit dull at the moment, the idea is that it would serve as a template so that users could then add the colour and salient details later.
The team also aims to flesh out the diary by adding information from the apps people use, and who they call and text. 鈥淚t would give more information on how you spent your time 鈥� like when and how much you were on Facebook,鈥� says Precup. The team is preparing to launch a start-up company to spin the idea into a consumer product.
Such location-based lifelogging apps 鈥渁re starting to appear in droves鈥�, says Gordon Bell, a Microsoft researcher in the vanguard of the lifelogging movement. He says the app could produce potentially useful diary stories 鈥� but only if users contribute. 鈥淢aking something narrative doesn鈥檛 necessarily make it a story,鈥� he says.
This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淎uto-diary turns every action into part of your story鈥�
