A new relevance for multimedia when we record everything personal

Even school children know Moore’s Law, but the effects of exponential change are only clear when the change arrives to impact our lives. For example, in the last decade, all of us moved from 50 Megabyte disks to 50 Gigabyte disks, enabling video to become an everyday data-type as common as text. Research needs to be predicated on the ubiquity of Terabyte sized disks that will enable content of all types to be held and maintained. The era of unlimited storage has arrived and, hopefully, unlimited fixed and mobile network bandwidth will follow in the coming decade. Hence it is clear that those great bit-producers – digital audio, video, and real time data streams – can take a vastly increased role in all of our everyday lives. We are beginning to experience this impact with MyLifeBits, a project that began with an attempt to make my life paperless, and that has expanded to include the capture, storage, access, and use of a vast array of data-types including documents, photos, audio, and video from my past.