User:Andnocturnes/sandbox

= Cathal Gurrin =

Cathal Gurrin is a lifelogger  and lecturer at the School of Computing, at Dublin City University, a visiting researcher at the University of Tromsoe, the director of the Human Media Archives research group and a Funded Investigator in the Insight Centre for Data Analytics. His interests include personal analytics and lifelogging. He publishes in a wide range of areas including information retrieval (IR) with a particular focus on how people access information from mobile devices (MHCIR). He has created a personal digital memory since 2006 (including over 12 million images from a camera mounted on his chest) and hundreds of millions of other sensor readings.

Early life and education
Cathal attended primary school in Scoil Lorcáin, Kilbarrack and secondary school in St. Fintans High School, Sutton, Dublin 13. He graduated from Dublin City University in 1997 with a degree in Computer Applications.

Research
Cathal has worn a chest mounted camera since 2006 which takes several pictures every minute, recording his location and GPS and Accelerometer data each time it does so. He has created a database of over 12 million images, and he currently produces about a terabyte of data a year.

Cathal and his researchers use information retrieval algorithms to segment the image archive into “events” such as eating, driving, etc. Through automated machine learning the algorithms identify new events each day.

In an interview with The Economist Cathal said that “If I need to remember where I left my keys, or where I parked my car, or what wine I drank at an event two years ago... the answers should all be there.” It was noted that while searching by date and time is easy, more complex searches such as looking for brand names and form factors such as keys within images is difficult. The ultimate aim of Cathal's research is to create a search engine to allow complex searches of such image databases.