1. Universal Memex (A Research Project for Discussion)

2. Vannevar Bush’s Memex Record everything one sees All human knowledge in Memex “a billion books” hyper-linked together Camera glasses “A machine which types when talked to”

3. Storage Needed for A Personal Memex If the disk technology trend continues, a single disk will hold –10TB by 2010 –1PB by 2020 –10PB by 2030 Your husband died, but here is his black box. Human input data /hr /lifetime read text 100 KB 25 GB Hear speech @ 10KBps 40 MB 10 TB See TV@.5 MB/s 2 GB 8 PB

4. Universal Memex Record everything a person reads, writes, hears, and sees anywhere Retrieve needed information effectively anywhere anytime Distributed (Planet) Capture, store and transfer

5. Related Research Topics How to capture information –Wearable devices, etc How to transfer information –Mobile storage system, etc How to store information –Distributed, scalable storage How to summarize –Summarization, mining, etc How to retrieve information –Search, visualization, display system, etc. How to protect information –Security, disaster, etc How to be legal –Privacy, copyright, etc Capture, store and transfer Distributed (Planet)

6. A Small Step: Capture Device Build audio capture and transfer mechanisms Infrastructure: a iPAQ with wireless networking and a storage server Research issues: –How to capture and preprocess audio information for Memex retrieval? (speech to text?) –How to obey the law? (machine voice?) –How to protect data? –How to transfer data? (leverage R. Wang’s group project?)

7. A Small Step: Memex Browser Build a software package to remember all web pages a person has visited (Due to Han Chen) Infrastructure: IE or Navigator Research Issues: –How to store data for Memex retrieval? –How to obey the copyright law? (link only?) –How to protect privacy?

8. A Small Step: ICU Memex Build a medical data collection appliance to capture all data of a patient in an ICU and visualize desired data (Due to discussion with Dr. Bill Hanson at UPenn Medical School) Infrastructure: a PC, HP medical equipment and a storage server Research issues: –How to capture and store medical specific information for data visualization –How to allow doctors to look at data and protect patient’s rights? –How to visualize the medical data

9. A Small Step: Voice-Based Search Build a software package to search a Personal Memex based on voice input (e.g. Find all conversations I had with Dr. Bill Hanson on ICU) Infrastructure: a PDA, notebook or desktop, and a storage server Research issues: –How to organize audio data for such search? –How to output search results (completely sequential)? –How to deal with privacy issues (who are supposed to see the results)?

10. A Small Step: A Distributed Storage Server for Universal Memex Build a distributed storage system Infrastructure: A PC cluster (140 PCs in the lab) and later Planet-Lab Research issues –How to securely store and access data? –How to find data (maintain directory information) in a distributed environment? –How to build a scalable system? –How to support search and summarization in various Memex applications?