Cathal Gurrin is an Irish Professor and lifelogger. He is the Head of the Adapt Centre at

Dublin City University Dublin City University (abbreviated as DCU) () is a Third-level education in the Republic of Ireland, university based on the Northside, Dublin, Northside of Dublin, Republic of Ireland, Ireland. Created as the ''National Institute for Highe ...

, a Funded Investigator of the Insight Centre, and the director of the Human Media Archives research group. He was previously the deputy head of the School of Computing. His interests include personal analytics and lifelogging. He publishes in

information retrieval Information retrieval (IR) in computing and information science is the task of identifying and retrieving information system resources that are relevant to an Information needs, information need. The information need can be specified in the form ...

(IR) with a particular focus on how people access information from pervasive computing devices. He has captured a continuous personal digital memory since 2006 using a wearable camera and logged hundreds of millions of other sensor readings. __TOC__

Early life

Cathal attended primary school in Scoil Lorcáin,

Kilbarrack Kilbarrack ( or 'church of young Barra') is a residential suburb of Dublin, Republic of Ireland, Ireland, running inwards from the coast, about from the city's centre. It is also a Civil parishes in Ireland, civil parish in the ancient Barony ( ...

, Dublin, and secondary school in

St. Fintan's High School St. Fintans High School () is an all-boys Roman Catholic voluntary-aided secondary school located between Sutton, Dublin, Sutton and Baldoyle, Dublin, Republic of Ireland, Ireland. History Background A school originally opened at Bellevue Hous ...

Sutton Sutton (''south settlement'' or ''south town'' in Old English) may refer to: Places United Kingdom England In alphabetical order by county: * Sutton, Bedfordshire * Sutton, Berkshire, a List of United Kingdom locations: Stu-Sz#Su, location * S ...

. He graduated from

with a PhD in developing web search engines, including the first Irish language search engine.

Research

Gurrin has worn a wearable camera since 2006 which takes several still photographs every minute. He is likely the longest wearer of such a device in the world. He also records his location (using GPS) and various other sources of biometric data. Gurrin generated a database of over 18 million images, and produces about a terabyte of personal data a year. Gurrin and his researchers use information retrieval algorithms to segment his personal image archive into "events" such as eating, driving, etc. New events are recognised on a daily basis using machine learning. In an interview Gurrin said that "If I need to remember where I left my keys, or where I parked my car, or what wine I drank at an event two years ago... the answers should all be there." While searching by date and time is easy, more complex searches within images such as looking for brand names and objects with complex form factors, such as keys, is more difficult. One aim of Gurrin's research is to create search engines to allow complex searches of such image databases, and to develop assistive technology. He is the founder of the annual ACM Lifelog Search Challenge, which attracts a worldwide participant list annually.

References

External links

Adapt Centre
1975 births Alumni of Dublin City University Living people People educated at St. Fintan's High School Lifelogging {{Ireland-bio-stub