We are delighted to welcome Rami Albatal and Cathal Gurrin to Maynooth on Wednesday 27th May at 4pm, Iontas Building room 2.31 for the third of our Programmable City seminars this semester. Dr. Rami Albatal is the lead postdoctoral researcher of the Lifelogging team at Insight Centre for Data Analytics at Dublin City University, and received his Ph.D. in Computer Vision in 2010 from Grenoble University, France. His research focuses on three main areas: Lifelogging, Computer Vision and Machine Learning. Currently he is working on new generation of Quantified-Self technologies that employ contextual data gathering and analytics, in the goal of building advanced data-driven decision-making, planning and recommendation platforms. Cathal Gurrin is a lecturer at the School of Computing, at Dublin City University, Ireland and he is an investigator at the Insight Centre for Data Analytics where he leads a research group of 10 people. He is also a visiting scientist at the University of Tromso, Norway. His research interest is personal analytics and lifelogging (a search engine for the self). He has gathered a digital memory since 2006 (including over 15 million wearable camera images) and hundreds of millions of other sensor readings. He is the founder of the world’s first dedicated lifelog meetup group.

The session will introduce the topic lifelogging, explore the current state-of-the-art technology and look forward to a future in which lifelog archives may become commonplace. The current approaches to semantic enrichment will be explored, along with applications and user interfaces. In an era of personal data, Facebook, Twitter, digital photos and many other activities all leave significant trails of personal data.  One aspect of personal data gathering that is receiving increasing attention is the concept of lifelogging. Lifelogging is concerned with utilising sensors to create a large archives of personal data, or a surrogate memory for the individual. Applying semantic enrichment and organisational software over this data results in the creation of a lifelog for the individual. Lifelogging has been described as an inevitability and is expected to change life experience for all. Finally, lifelogging raises many societal issues, among them privacy and data security, which will be explored and solutions proposed. This session should be of interest to a wide range of academics and interested parties.