PEPYS: Generating Autobiographies by Automatic Tracking

This paper presents one part of a broad research project entitled 'Activity-Based Information Retrieval' (AIR) which is being carried out at EuroPARC. The basic hypothesis of this project is that if contextual data about human activities can be automatically captured and later presented as recognisable descriptions of past episodes, then human memory of those past episodes can be improved. This paper describes an application called Pepys, designed to yield descriptions of episodes based on automatically collected location data. The program pays particular attention to meetings and other episodes involving two or more people. The episodes are presented to the user as a diary generated at the end of each day and distributed by electronic mail. The paper also discusses the methods used to assess the accuracy of the descriptions generated by the recogniser.