Given
the increasing amount of storage of information, particularly
in digital form, it is obviously a challenge for computer
science to manage it. Much of this information will
be associated with particular people (e.g. emails,
digital images, web browsing histories), which raises
the question of how such ‘digital memories’
can be stored over periods of decades.
Serious
issues include: search, indexing and organisation;
privacy; extracting knowledge from potentially vast
and heterogeneous repositories; avoiding the creation
of a digital divide, hence developing sophisticated
user models and interfaces; representation techniques
that will be robust over periods of time that may
be longer than the whole current history of computer
science.
It
is no accident that the issues and challenges arising
in this area should have been echoed in the Physical
Sciences Workshops held by Foresight and alluded to
in the Memory, Reasoning and Learning report written
for Foresight. Nor that the subject of memory, forgetting,
plasticity and associated encoding should feature
prominently in a variety of the Life Science reports
namely; Learning and Memory, Representation, Self-Organisation
in the Nervous System.
As
well as the research challenges this Challenge is
capable of generating a number of target systems over
a period of time that could also capture the imagination
of the research community. One example is systems
that capture longitudinal information sets relating
a patient’s visual appearance, their behaviour
and environmental interactions. These in turn would
provide a means to profile health, welfare and cognitive
development. A second set of systems might revolve
around memory augments for various stages of an individual’s
life. For example, childhood supporting the well-known
phenomenon of childhood amnesia (we recall few detailed
memories from before the age of 3 and relatively few
from before the age of 8) through to assistive memory
technologies for the elderly suffering memory impairment. |
