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Have you ever wished for a backup brain, a device that could remember everything in your life from the smallest of details to your most memorable moments?

Computer engineer Gordon Bell, a researcher for Microsoft, is working on just such a mechanism. He's trying to devise what amounts to a digital diary, a searchable database that contains digitized versions of nearly everything in his life.

“As a research project, the idea is being obsessed with recording everything I can,” said Bell, the head researcher in a project called MyLifeBits for nearly five years at Microsoft.

There are two parts to the project. The first is Bell's experiment with life storage-capturing his papers, faxes, phone calls, photographs and home movies in digitalized form. The second part focuses on developing software that would support this type of lifetime library on anyone's computer.

“The quest is to essentially build a surrogate memory. Something that's as good as my own memory, that I can use it as a supplement, and will remember everything that I should have remembered, that came to my ears, eyes, whatever,” Bell said of his experiment.

“The interim objective is to make this kind of system available, to gradually put these kind of capabilities in all of our PCs.”

Conceivably you could someday be able to rehear every conversation you had when you were 20 and search for all photographs of your cousin John.

But would this actually be useful? And would people other than computer experts want to use it? Bell said he thinks they would.

A family with kids, for example, has “their computers, and they've got a lot of homework, and at some point in time, they'll probably want all of that stuff recorded,” he said. “And the family would have their music, all of the content they would have in their machines available. It's really keeping all of your digital assets around and alive forever.”

He added, “As more and more information goes from analog to digital, essentially from physical items to electronic items, why, you basically need to have a way of preserving all that and also dealing with all the problems that conjures up.”

The MyLifeBits software will include tools to record Web sites, instant message conversations and television and radio transcripts, according to the project's Web site.

CNN

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