IBM Research has created a new software solution to help make sure you never forget anyone’s details while on the move.
The system is called Pensieve and uses a combination of your mobile phone and desktop computer. A mobile phone is used as a data collection tool and then your desktop PC gathers all the information, groups it and adds the finished results to your address book.
As an example, say you meet a new business associate at a trade show. They give you their business card and you take a picture of them with your phone camera and snap the business card too. The person’s image can be tagged to tell you who it is and you can later tie that up with the business card. If it’s a trade show though, you could do this many times making the work after the convention a pain.
With Pensieve that work disappears. When you get back from the trade show you download the tagged images to your PC. Pensieve detects the information such as name, address and phone number from the business cards and links it up with the tagged images. The information is then added to your address book giving you a complete profile of that person with no work required on your part.
Dr. Yaakov Navon, lead researcher and image processing expert at IBM’s Hafia Research Lab commented:
This is like having a personal assistant for your memory … Our daily routines are overflowing with situations where we gain new information through meetings, advertisements, conferences, events, surfing the web, or even window shopping. Instead of going home and using a general web search to find that information, PENSIEVE helps the brain recall those everyday things you might normally forget.
Pensieve goes further than just the image and business card though. It can use recorded speech to log additional details and GPS information to store exactly when and where you met a person (or all your meetings with them). It can also use the date and time information to figure out which business cards are linked to which images if you snapped them at roughly the same time in succession.
Once it has finished logging the information on your PC you can synchronize with your phone to get the sorted details. Then, next time your are introduced to someone you believe you have met before, you can enter their name on your phone and find out exactly who they are, where you have met them before and access any notes you made about them.
Read more at IBM
Matthew’s Opinion
I’m sure a lot of people would find such a system very useful and time saving. The automatic logging of GPS information would be very informative when trying to recall previous meetings e.g. It comes up on your phone that you met X on the first morning of E3 in convention hall Y, another page would give you their company, job title, mobile number, etc. To receive all that information without doing any additional work after meetings sounds fantastic.
Obviously, it relies on you having the hardware to record the information such as a phone with GPS, good camera and sound recorder. But with the rate at which mobile phone technology moves most phones that don’t have those features will be replaced with ones that do within 12 months.
Pensieve could also be used by management to log all meetings their staff had out in the field. If you have a group of journalists who are attending a convention it would be great to know at the end of each day the meetings they had, when they had them and who the people they met were in detail. With Pensieve I can see that being information accessible at the touch of a button once the journalists have synchronized with their PCs.
