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RECALL researcher Evangelos Niforatos interviewed in Dutch Press

News

Our very own Evangelos Niforatos was interviewed by Dutch Journalist Anke Meijer from the Dutch newspaper “NRC Handelsblad“.  For her article “We maken zo veel meer foto’s dan vroeger – hebben ze nog waarde?” (We take so many more pictures than before – do these still have value?) she asked Evangelos about his work on “My Good Old Kodak” [1] – the smartphone app that would artificially limit the number of pictures one could take with the phone, in order to investigate how this affected both the type of pictures taken, and the kind of memories retained from an event. You can find the original article (in Dutch) at https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2016/10/27/3000-foto-momentjes-4959553-a1528724

[1] Niforatos, E., M. Langheinrich, and A. Bexheti. 2014. “My Good Old Kodak: Understanding the Impact of Having Only 24 Pictures to Take.” In Proceedings of the 2014 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing: Adjunct Publication, 1355–1360. UbiComp ’14 Adjunct. New York, NY, USA: ACM. http://doi.org/10.1145/2638728.2641715. http://uc.inf.usi.ch/node/329

WAHM 2016: 3rd Workshop on Ubiquitous Technologies for Augmenting Human Mind

Events, Research Update

RECALL researchers Tilman Dingler and Evangelos Niforatos recently collaborated with Kai Kunze (Osaka Prefecture University), Cathal Gurin (Dublin City University), Ioannis Giannopoulos (ETH Zurich), Andreas Dengel (German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence) and Koichi Kise (Osaka Prefecture University) to organize the 3rd Workshop on Ubiquitous Technologies for Augmenting the Human Mind – WAHM 2016. The workshop took place on September 12th in Heidelberg, Germany as part of the 2016 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp ‘16).
Continue reading WAHM 2016: 3rd Workshop on Ubiquitous Technologies for Augmenting Human Mind →

Developer Diary: Enabling secure sharing of personal memories

Concepts and Prototypes

In our previous work [1, 2, 3], we compared first-person-view lifelog images – e.g., images taken using Narrative Clip devices – with third-person-view lifelog images – e.g., images captured by fixed infrastructure cameras. First-person view images usually provide a very particular vantage point, and as such may miss many things: camera lenses may get covered by clothes or hair, or may simply face the wrong way due to the way they are “mounted” on the body (e.g., with a clip). Even if an unobstructed view can be had, a first-person-view may only show a very small part of the scene, e.g., potentially never showing a person that sits right next to us. Images from fixed infrastructure cameras can compensate for such shortage: their high vantage point usually allows them to captures comprehensive scenes, completely unobstructed. Alternatively, a first-person-view image from another person may equally offer an interesting alternative to my own capture. These considerations prompted us to investigate the best way to combine first-person-view and third-person-view images in RECALL to reconstruct a better representation of a previous experience. Continue reading Developer Diary: Enabling secure sharing of personal memories →

RECALL work featured in BBC Future

News

An article published in BBC future features work of Recall researcher Evangelos Niforatos as one of a group of scientific investigations centred on how photo taking influences human memory.

You can read the article at http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150901-are-you-taking-too-many-pictures

RECALL first-year review meeting

Meetings, News
Figure 1: RECALL Logo

It has been more than a year since the project’s kick off in November 2013. On January 7, 2015, RECALL had it’s first-year project review meeting. The meeting took place at the University of Lancaster, where RECALL researchers from the all four sites gathered together to present our first-year results to the reviewers.

Most of the team members arrived in Lancaster already a day early, to spend all of January 6 preparing the meeting. Meeting preparations included a full dry run of the presentations and demos, as well as poster printing and handouts preparations. Continue reading RECALL first-year review meeting →

Atmos: Crowd–sourcing Estimations about Current and Future Weather Conditions

Demos, Events, Publications, , ,

This month saw the International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp) held in the unexpectedly sunny Seattle. UbiComp is the premier conference in the field, regularly attracting over 700 participants. RECALL had a strong presence there, with team members organizing a novel Workshop on “Ubiquitous Technologies for Augmenting the Human Mind (WAHM)”. In additional, RECALL team member Evangelos Niforatos presented his work on the Atmos system in the conference’s poster session .

Atmos allows collecting empirical reports about current weather conditions.
Atmos Screenshot

Atmos is a novel approach to weather estimation. It introduces the use of participatory sensing to collect in-situ weather data, both from sensors and human input. Atmos leverages a crowd-sourcing network of mobile devices to generate highly localized information about current and future weather conditions. Participatory sensing involves the utilization of mobile devices to form interactive, collaborative sensor networks that enable users to garner, analyze and share local knowledge. Under this guise, participatory sensing exhibits a unique level of spatio-temporal coverage in observing phenomena of interest in urban spaces. The key idea behind this new paradigm is the enabling of mobile users to collect and share sensed data about their natural settings in large scale, using their mobile devices. Continue reading Atmos: Crowd–sourcing Estimations about Current and Future Weather Conditions →

The “RECALL House” Experiment

Lifelogging, Meetings, , ,
The small hostel in the Lake District that we took over for our "RECALL House" experiment
The small hostel in the Lake District that we took over for our “RECALL House” experiment

Last month we organized an internal 3-day event for gathering experience on how comprehensive imagery life-logging works, both from a technical point of view as well as from a participant’s point of view. From May 20-23 the Lancaster team rented a small hostel up in the Lake District, UK, for us, and lugged up plenty of food and technical equipment to keep us busy (and well fed) during the three days. The advantage of this rural setting was that we could rent the entire hostel for the team, hence minimizing the chances that other guests would be caught on one of our many cameras. Our only outside contact was a lady that brought us light luncheons each day, as well as the hostel owner who checked us in the first day. Each site brought different capturing devices, thus transforming the hostel into “RECALL House” — an instrumented environment (a very much simplified version of the MIT PlaceLab if you will) geared towards capturing imaging data from all participants during most of our waking hours. Continue reading The “RECALL House” Experiment →