DARPA project LifeLog

What it was?

LifeLog was a project of the Information Processing Techniques Office of DARPA, the research arm of the U.S. Department of Defense. According to its 2003 bid solicitation pamphlet, it was to be "an ontology-based (sub)system that captures, stores, and makes accessible the flow of one person's experience in and interactions with the world in order to support a broad spectrum of associates/assistants and other system capabilities".

The objective was to be able to trace the 'threads' of a person's life in terms of events, states and relationships.

What it wanted to collect?

LifeLog aimed to gather in a single place just about everything an individual says, sees or does: the phone calls made, the TV shows watched, the magazines read, the plane tickets bought, the e-mail sent and received.

Later explainers expand that list to GPS locations, websites visited, media consumed, purchases and financial transactions, physical activities, biomedical data from wearable sensors, and interactions with people and environment. The idea was a searchable, queryable electronic diary to help understand human cognition and build AI assistants.

LifeLog was cancelled in February 4, 2004. Officially it was killed after heavy criticism from civil libertarians who saw it as state surveillance and profiling.

As it happens, Facebook launched as TheFacebook at Harvard on February 4, 2004.