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Qualifying Exam
5/14/2018 02:00 pm
CoRE B (305)

Semantic Modeling, Integration and Episodic Organization of Personal Digital Traces

Varvara Kalokyri, Dept. of Computer

Examination Committee: Prof. Alex Borgida (Chair), Prof. Amelie Marian, Prof. Gerard De Melo, Prof. Mridul Aanjaneya.

Abstract

Many individuals generate a flood of personal digital traces (PDTs) as a byproduct of their daily activities. These traces come from a wide variety of sources, such messaging, emails, calendars, location checkins, online reservations, financial transactions etc. and reflect a chronicle of the user’s life. A key problem is to integrate all these fragmented and highly heterogeneous traces into coherent episodes in order to facilitate querying and support natural retrospective and prospective memory tasks. Towards this end, we propose a solution based on episodic scripts - a theoretically well-founded idea in AI and Cognitive Science. By connecting PDTs through scripts, we build an episodic view of users’ digital memories, which allows users to explore related events and actions in an integrated way. We empirically validated our approach through a case study on real-user data, that confirms the need for integrating data from multiple sources to improve the accuracy of retrieval and inference for each user. In addition, we propose a conceptual modeling and script language for describing both documents and prototypical plans (scripts) for common everyday events. Finally, we present YourDigitalSelf, a mobile phone-based personal information organization application which shows how several disparate data traces can be integrated and combined to create personal narratives of the user’s activities.