IBM software aims at total recall by tapping data from mobile phone

By Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 30 July 2008 04:59

Technology

IBM researchers have developed software aimed at putting to use the wealth of information that can be captured by current mobile devices. The idea is to make data from photos and audio recordings made with mobile phones and similar devices easily retrievable in context on the desktop.

A typical scenario is that you remember meeting someone at a conference or other event, but you can't recall their name. If you had captured the person's business card with your camera phone, it would most likely be automatically tagged with the date and perhaps even the geographical location thanks to GPS.

So imagine returning from an event and syncing the content from your mobile device to your PC, where the PENSIEVE software applies OCR to any text in the image (eg, to extract names, addresses and phone numbers from business cards) and then links related information using the available metadata.

For instance, if you take photographs of a person and their business card within a few seconds, the system could assume both items relate to the same person. Information in your calendar for that date and time may help identify the event at which the meeting occurred in addition to the geographical location as determined by GPS.

PENSIEVE can also apply speech recognition to audio recordings.

Down the track, a calendar entry for a subsequent meeting with that person might trigger the display of the previously captured material to refresh your memory.

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