The Hindu Business Line : It's easy to forget...

To forget is, well... human. If we cannot forget what we keep assimilating as we grow, most of us would be mental wrecks, what with all the gory stuff haunting us, say some experts. But what about the things we do need to remember but never do? There again we have a problem up our sleeve, isn't it?

From being better organised to memory enhancing exercises and even memory pills... the suggestions are aplenty. And now there's technology to the rescue. Dr Sunil Vemuri, a second-generation Indian technocrat in the US, says technology, especially computer-aided tools, can provide answers. In the last few years, he has concentrated on building a simple, practical tool to help people remember, or recall interesting pieces of information. At the Media Lab of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Vemuri grappled with this problem as a doctoral student.

"Today I have a system in place, which allows people to record and archive conversations and then search for snippets from them months or even years later, says Vemuri, who is associated with Q Tech promoted by Dr N.R. Machiraju, a veteran of the Silicon Valley.

Individual memory

"In the present day, where we are constantly bombarded by data, the challenge to remember is always growing," Vemuri says. He has used computers, speech recognition techniques, archival tools and search engines like Google to put in place a system that is focussed on individual memory. "My focus has been on individual memory and recall, as organisational memory anyway has been the subject of research for decades now," he says. The system, which he calls memory prosthesis, works at three levels.

Initially, a handheld computer is used to record discussions or conversations a person has throughout the day. The recorded audio is downloaded to a laptop computer where speech recognition software translates the audio data into text. Finally, the search tools developed by Vemuri hunt for a specific conversation or information. The retrieval criteria can be anything from words or phrases to a date range.

Inbuilt memory trigger

The results appear on the computer screen as a list of days and time. A click reveals the transcript of a conversation, with the search words or phrases in boldface. If a user does not remember the exact date of a conversation but recalls that it took place around some event, such as an India-England ODI at Mumbai, he can employ a memory-trigger function built into the application. This function automatically stores text from news agencies on the computer, he explains. The device would prove handy for the media, especially the news report application, he feels. The reason? These are people faced with a lot of data and deadlines, which call for good, selective memory as well as recall.

What are the product's practical applications and can it become a commercial product in the near future? Vemuri says the real obstacles to commercialisation are social and legal, not technical. "We are currently working on a version of the system that will allow users to record, store, and search for conversations, all on one handheld device. What I am thinking of is a watch- or cellphone-sized device," he says.

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