Memories for Life Colloquium: The Future of our Pasts

British Library Conference Centre
London
12th December, 2006

The M4L Network announces a colloquium, to be held at the British Library Conference Centre, London, 12th December 2006.

The workshop will consist of a series of panel discussions, intended for a general audience, a poster session, and keynotes.

Guest speakers:
Richard Wiseman (University of Hertfordshire) will speak on Remembering the Impossible
Jonathan Zittrain (Oxford Internet Institute) will speak on Ubiquitous Data and the Madness of Crowds

Confirmed panellists include Susan Blackmore (independent researcher), Katherine Campbell (BBC), Andrew Charlesworth (Bristol University), Gareth Crossman (Liberty), Andrew Fitzgibbon (Microsoft), Sue Gathercole (University of York), Wendy Hall (University of Southampton), Victor Keegan (The Guardian), Cliff Lynch (Coalition of Networked Information), Richard Morris (University of Edinburgh), Robert Perks (British Library), Tom Rodden (University of Nottingham), Anne Sebba (independent biographer), Nigel Shadbolt (University of Southampton), John Tuck (British Library),Yorick Wilks (University of Sheffield).

Memories for Life (M4L) is a project that brings together a diverse range of scientists, academics and experts to study and understand how memory works and to develop the technologies needed to enhance it.

The Future of our Pasts, on the 12th December at the British Library, will bring together, representatives from all the fields involved in the M4L project including psychologists, neuroscientists, sociologists and computer scientists in one of the most wide-ranging gatherings of memory and information experts in recent years.

Understanding our memories is key to understanding ourselves, and psychologists and neuroscientists are making great strides in understanding how we lay our memories down, and get at them again when we need them. At the same time, technologies for dealing with information are getting more powerful - while more of us are computer literate, and more systems are aimed at the 'person in the street'. What are the implications of these two strands of research and progress?

• Will it be possible for us to replace parts of our memory with artificial aids?
• How can technologies help those with memory disorders?
• Will communities be able to use technologies to create or preserve their communal experiences?
• What will happen when our entire lives are available to us to look back on?
• How will this change the way we live?
• What legal, ethical and political implications can we expect?

Those at the colloquium can expect to hear from members of the M4L Network and other eminent memory experts in panel sessions that will endeavor to define the scale of these upheavals, to help us to understand what to expect, and to set out this crucial research and development agenda.

Panel Sessions at the colloquium will cover issues including:

• Personal Memory: how important in our daily lives is the recollection (accurate or otherwise) of our past?
• The Technology of Memory: Future Directions: what new devices are waiting for us round the corner?
• The Human Sciences: Psychology, Neuroscience: how much do we know about our memories, how we store and recall knowledge?
• Social, Ethical and Legal Issues: how will increased access to knowledge affect our society?

Each panel will last 60 mins, and will include a short presentation by each panellist, followed by an open discussion session. The provisional programme is available here.

The colloquium will take place all day. Attendance is free, but the audience is strictly limited to 200 places. Lunch will be provided. If you wish to attend, or need further information, contact us on info@memoriesforlife.org.

During the lunch session, posters illustrating promising research will be shown in the foyer.

Proposals for posters from any relevant discipline are welcomed, including:

• Cognitive neuroscience
• Cognitive psychology
• Medicine
• Information science
• Computer Science
• Philosophy
• Law
• Sociology
• Ethnography
• History

Examples of topics that submissions may wish to explore include, but are not limited to:

• Descriptions of existing or potential systems or applications that use personal digital memories. What are the main challenges that the system deals with, and what benefits does it provide to users?
• Descriptions of resources (such as corpora and analysis tools) which can be used by Memories for Life researchers.
• Computer science research issues, including how memories are stored, organised, searched, integrated, interpreted, interacted with, and protected (security). Also the impact of new technologies, such as the semantic web.
• Cognitive science research issues, including the requirements and prospects of memory prostheses, and analysis of similarities and differences between human memory systems and computer digital memories. For example, humans can forget memories, is there an analogous forgetting in digital memories?
• Social issues research issues, including the relationship between the memory of an individual and the collective memory of his/her social groups, and public policy and legal issues (who has rights to access and modify digital memories). Also, how does the identity (of an individual or collective) depend on memory?

Posters to reach us by 23rd October.

To download the call for posters, click here.