My interests in Memories for Life are fourfold, and connected with the interactions between technology and society. My main interest is in the construction of public memory and notions of "the past" and "the present". For example, tradition and ritual serve within a society both as storehouses of knowledge and wisdom, and as vehicles for political legitimation. So technologies which aim to create "memories for life", or otherwise create new methods and popular paradigms for storing and retrieving information, must ideally preserve continuity with the past while also allowing innovation for the future. Technologies which became merely vehicles for nostalgia could cause more harm than good. So I would like to see M4L bringing technologists together with those who study the social aspects of memory and knowledge, to understand the technology in its context.

Second, the management and engineering of knowledge are clearly important as we move towards a knowledge economy. Information storage is trivially cheap and simple nowadays, but this is creating a crisis of information overload and problems of retrieval. The democratisation of content creation may well exacerbate these problems. So new methods of modelling knowledge, organising it in repositories and retrieving it will be very interesting.

Third, as Lifelog's experience shows in the States, public trust of new infrastructures for information storage and retrieval is essential. The issues of trust and privacy with respect to technology are very important.

Fourth, as a related point, explaining the scope of new memory technologies, and the potential social and political problems they raise, is of great interest to me - I have always tried to communicate academic research to wider audiences than just academe. So the M4L community could bring together several disparate research perspectives and help form a straightforward narrative to aid public outreach.