Q&A: Rick Rashid

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TR: What else could you do with that prospective memory and processing power?

RR: One of our research projects a few years ago asked, If you started to harvest all the information on usage, what could you do? Logically, your computer knows where every piece of text in a document comes from. Did you type it? Did you cut and paste it? Where from? Did it come from an e-mail? And so on. Extrapolate that idea: computers could use the knowledge of where information comes from to very powerful effect.

TR: Like what?

RR: For businesses, it could be a source of business intelligence. For individuals, it could be your entire life's history. We've got a project at our Cambridge, England, facility called SenseCam. The researchers developed a device which you could wear around your neck. It was a kind of black box for a human being. It had a 180-degree camera, it had sound sensors, heat sensors, acceleration sensors--whatever. And the idea behind it was: we're getting to a stage where we have human-scale storage. Where it's possible to record every conversation you will have until you die. You could record every conversation and it would take a terabyte of storage and it would cost you $500. Or you could keep an entire year of video--everything you saw!--and it would also cost you a terabyte. You could keep all those things. You could begin to augment human memory in a way that science fiction talks about but wasn't really possible before. The interesting thing about this is that people wouldn't have to lose any of their life. My dad passed away a few years ago. How valuable would it be if I could recapture a conversation I had with him?

TR: Life has been a process of forgetting.

RR: But it doesn't have to be anymore. I don't even have a record of my father's voice! One of the things that came out of this research at Cambridge is very poignant. They gave the SenseCam to a woman who had a form of encephalitis that removed her ability to remember anything for more than a day or so. In the past, the way you worked with a patient like that is that a relative would write a diary for her. But we discovered that for this particular woman, when she reviewed the video of her day, she not only remembered more events, but she remembered the events a month later. It stimulated her mind. When I think of the future of computing, these are the kinds of developments I am excited about.