Speaker: Dr. Gordon Bell (MICROSOFT)
               A computer pioneer and member of National Academy of Engineering

Title: MyLifeBits: Storing Everything, Building Memex

Date and Time: November 24, 2003, 3:30 p.m.
Place: Howe Russel (E130), LSU
Reception: 5:00 p.m.

Directions: http://www.lsu.edu/campus/maps/HOWE01.html

Abstract:

The MyLifeBits project at Microsoft Research aims to put all personal documents and media online. For the last few years, we have been capturing and storing articles, books, correspondence (email, letters, memos), CDs, photos, presentations, home movies, videotaped lectures, and voice recordings. We are building software to support MyLifeBits, beginning with a Server that can support capture, storage, management, and use of personal media, including: telephone conversations, meetings, radio and TV with Web enhancement, and personal music and video collections. Such a project potentially includes everything from ensuring that this information will be readable in the future to privacy, security and sharing. The user interface challenges are many, and highly dependent on the various applications that utilize the data.

About the Speaker:

Gordon Bell is a senior researcher in Microsoft's Media Presence Research Group - a part of the Bay Area Research Center (BARC) maintaining an interest in startup ventures.

Gordon has long evangelized scalable systems starting with his interest in multiprocessors (mP) beginning in 1965 with the design of Digital's PDP-6, PDP-10's antecedent, one of the first mPs and the first timesharing computer. He continues this interest with various talks about trends in future supercomputing (see Papers …presentations, etc.) and especially clustered systems formed from cost-effective “personal computers”. As Digital's VP of R&D he was responsible for the VAX Computing Environment. In 1987, he led the cross-agency group as head of NSF's Computing Directorate that made "the plan" for the National Research and Education Network (NREN) aka the Internet. His Supercomputing and the CyberInfrastructure page lists articles, memos, talks, and testimony regarding the various aspects of computing including funding, goals, and problems in reaching to the Teraflops in 1995 and Petaflops in 2010.

http://research.microsoft.com/users/GBell/