Jim Gemmell

JGemmell@microsoft.com
1288 Pear Avenue, Mountain View, CA 94043 directions
Mailing address: 1065 La Avenida, Mountain View, CA, 94043, USA
Fax: (650)693.3329 (put "to jgemmell" on fax)

I am a senior researcher in Microsoft's Internet Services Research Center, currently working the next generation of search. Previously, my research focus was MyLifeBits, part of the CARPE research community, whose first and second workshops I was proud to chair. I was also guest editor for the IEEE Multimedia special issue on CARPE. I have done research on the topics of personal media management/enhancement, telepresence, and reliable multicast. I produced the on-line version of ACM97 and co-authored the PGM RFC. I serve on the editorial board of the ACM/Springer Multimedia Systems Journal. My program committee service includes the ACM Multimedia conference and the ICDE eChronicles workshop. (here is my standard bio).

PGM shipped in Windows XP and is used by Microsoft' MSMQ. I also helped the Windows Deployment Services team design a reliable multicast protocol that will ship in Windows Server code name "Longhorn"  slide deck

I am collaborating with William Jones and Harry Bruce of the UW iSchool on a research project called Structuring Personal Information Collections, part of Keeping Found Things Found.

I am on the PhD committees of UNC student Abe Crystal (advisors: Gary Marchionini & Jane Greenberg) and ASU student Weiwei Xu (advisor: Hari Sundaram)

I initiated and led the administration of the Digital Memories (Memex) RFP funding/software/hardware package. The  research projects supported by this RFP had impressive output.

I used to be part of the Next Media research group. Before that, I was in Jim Gray's Bay Area Research Center, working with Gordon Bell and Roger Lueder.

Papers   IETF RFCs   Presentations  Lecture Diary   MyLifeBits in the News

Projects:   MyLifeBits    PGM    Fcast   GazeMaster   Multicast PowerPoint Add-in  MPEGstats  

Papers & Book Chapters

Desney S Tan, Mary Czerwinski, Gordon Bell, Emma Berry, Jim Gemmell, Steve Hodges, Narinder Kapur, Brian Meyers, Nuria Oliver, George Robertson, Ken Wood, Save Everything: Supporting Human Memory with a Personal Digital Lifetime Store, Personal Information Management: Challenges and Opportunities (eds. William Jones and Jaime Teevan), University of Washington Press, 2007.

Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell, A Digital Life, Scientific American, March 2007.

Wang, Zhe, and Gemmell, Jim, Clean Living: Eliminating Near-Duplicates in Lifetime Personal Storage, Microsoft Research Technical Report MSR-TR-2006-30, March 2006 Word (0.1 MB) PDF(0.1 MB) Abstract

Jim Gemmell, Gordon Bell and Roger Lueder, MyLifeBits: a personal database for everything, Communications of the ACM, vol. 49, Issue 1 (Jan 2006), pp. 88.95. PDF Extended version published as Microsoft Research Technical Report MSR-TR-2006-23 Word (3MB)   PDF (1MB)   Abstract

Mary Czerwinski, Douglas W. Gage, Jim Gemmell, Catherine C. Marshall, Manuel A. Pérez-Quiñonesis, Meredith M. Skeels, Tiziana Catarci, Digital memories in an era of ubiquitous computing and abundant storage, Communications of the ACM, vol. 49, Issue 1 (Jan 2006), pp. 44-50. PDF

Gemmell, Jim, Aris, Aleks, and Lueder, Roger, Telling Stories With MyLifeBits, ICME 2005, Amsterdam, July 6-8, 2005 ,  PDF (1 MB) Word (2.4 MB)

Czerwinski, Mary, Gage, Doug, Gemmell, Jim, Catarci, Tiziana, Marshall, Cathy, Perez-Quinones, Manuel, and Skeels, Meredith M., Digital Memories & Ubiquitous Computing, breakout report, NSF Personal Information Management (PIM) Workshop, Jan. 27-29, 2005, Seattle, WA. PDF (58 KB)

Gemmell, Jim, Williams, Lyndsay, Wood, Ken, Bell, Gordon and Lueder, Roger, Passive Capture and Ensuing Issues for a Personal Lifetime Store, Proceedings of The First ACM Workshop on Continuous Archival and Retrieval of Personal Experiences (CARPE '04), Oct. 15, 2004, New York, NY, USA, pp. 48-55. Word (2 MB)  PDF (1 MB)

Mayer-Patel, Ketan and Gemmell, Jim, MPEG2Event: A Framework for Developing Analysis Tools for Compressed Video, Microsoft Research Technical Report MSR-TR-2004-111, October 2004 Word (4 MB)  PDF (0.4 MB)  Abstract

Aris, Aleks, Gemmell, Jim and Lueder, Roger, Exploiting Location and Time for Photo Search and Storytelling in MyLifeBits, Microsoft Research Technical Report MSR-TR-2004-102, October 2004 Word (1.5MB)  PDF (0.8 MB)  Abstract

Roberts, John, Lank, Edward, and Gemmell, Jim, Histogram-based Visualizations for Large Time Dependent Datasets, Proceedings of HCI 2004: Design for Life, Sept. 6-10, 2004, Leeds Metropolitan University, UK, Vol. 2, pp. 101-104 PDF (0.1 MB)

Gemmell, Jim, Lueder, Roger, and Bell, Gordon, The MyLifeBits Lifetime Store, Proceedings of ACM SIGMM 2003 Workshop on Experiential Telepresence (ETP 2003), November 7, 2003, Berkeley, CA. Word (1.5 MB) PDF (1.5 MB)

Gemmell, Jim, Lueder, Roger, and Bell, Gordon, Living With a Lifetime Store, ATR Workshop on Ubiquitous Experience Media, Sept. 9-10, 2003, Keihanna Science City, Kyoto, Japan, pp.69-76. Word (1.5MB)  PDF (1.5MB) Slides (PPT 7.3 MB) Erratum: In Table 1, "290 hours" should be "1.6K hours" (corrected in the versions posted here)

Gemmell, Jim, Lueder, Roger, Blumenstock, Joshua, Solomon, Evan and Bell, Gordon, Telephone, Television and Radio in the Home of the Future, Internet and Multimedia Systems and Applications (IMSA) 2003, August 13-15, 2003, Honolulu, Hawaii, USA, pp. 263-268. Word (2.5MB)  PDF (1.7MB)

Gemmell, Jim, Montgomery, Todd, Speakman, Tony, Bhaskar, Nidhi, and Crowcroft, Jon, The PGM Reliable Multicast Protocol, IEEE Network special issue on "Multicasting: An Enabling Technology", Vol. 17, No. 1, Jan/Feb 2003, pp. 16-22. Word (232KB)  PDF (266 KB)

Gemmell, Jim, Bell, Gordon, Lueder, Roger, Drucker, Steven, and Wong, Curtis, MyLifeBits: Fulfilling the Memex Vision, ACM Multimedia '02, December 1-6, 2002, Juan-les-Pins, France, pp. 235-238. Word (1.4 MB) PDF (297 KB) Erratum: In Table 1, "290 hours" should be "1.6K hours" (corrected in the versions posted here)

Gemmell, Jim, and Zhu, Dapeng, Implementing Gaze-Corrected VideoConferencing, Communications, Internet and Information Technology (CIIT) 2002, November 18-20, 2002, St. Thomas, US Virgin Islands, pp. 382-387. Word (522KB)  PDF (397KB)

Bell, Gordon and Gemmell, Jim, A Call For The Home Media Network, Communications of the ACM, 45(7), July 2002, pp. 71-75. PDF (277KB)  Word (not quite as published - 2+MB) An early version of this was published as: Microsoft Research Technical Report, MSR-TR-2001-52, May 2001. Word abstract

Gemmell, Jim, and Lueder, Roger, Progressive Layered Media: "It gets better every time", Internet and Multimedia Systems and Applications (IMSA) 2002, August 12-14, 2002, Kauai, USA, pp. 342-347. Also published as Microsoft Research Technical Report MSR-TR-2002-26, March 10, 2002. Word (2.9MB)  Postscript (1.5MB)  abstract PowerPoint (1MB)

Feris, Rogério Schmidt, Gemmell, Jim, Toyama, Kentaro, and Krueger, Volker, Facial Feature Detection Using A Hierarchical Wavelet Face Database, Microsoft Research Technical Report MSR-TR-2002-05, January 2002. Word (2.21 MB) PDF (1.37 MB)

Feris, Rogério Schmidt, Gemmell, Jim, Toyama, Kentaro, and Krueger, Volker, Hierarchical Wavelet Networks for Facial Feature Localization,  The 5th International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition, May 20-21, 2002 Washington D.C., USA. PDF

Gemmell, Jim, Zitnick, C. Lawrence, Kang, Thomas, Toyama, Kentaro, and Seitz, Steven, Gaze-awareness for Videoconferencing: A Software Approach, IEEE Multimedia, Vol. 7, No. 4, Oct-Dec 2000, pp. 26-35 Word (2MB)  Postscript (1.4MB)

Gemmell, Jim, Scalable Multicast File Distribution Using Fcast, Dr. Dobb's Journal, Vol. 25, Issue 5, May 2000, pp. 82-89. HTML

Gemmell, Jim, Schooler, Eve, and Gray, Jim, Fcast Multicast File Distribution, IEEE Network, Vol. 14, No. 1 (Jan 2000), pp. 58-68. Word postscript

Kang, Thomas, Gemmell, Jim, Toyama, Kentaro, A Warp-Based Feature Tracker, Microsoft Research Technical Report, MSR-TR-99-80, October 1999. Word (541 KB) Postscript (6729 KB) Abstract

Gemmell, Jim, Schooler, Eve, and Gray, Jim, Fcast multicast file distribution: "Tune in, download, and drop out", Proceedings of the IASTED International Conference on Internet and Multimedia Systems and Applications (IMSA '99), Oct. 18-21, 1999, Nassau, Bahamas, Published by ACTA Press, Editor: B. Furht, ISBN: 0-88986-269-9, pp. 371-377. Word Postscript

Zitnick, C. Lawrence, Gemmell, Jim, and Toyama, Kentaro, Manipulation of Video Eye Gaze and Head Orientation for Video Teleconferencing, Microsoft Research Technical Report, MSR-TR-99-46, June 1999. Postscript Word

Gemmell, Jim, Schooler, Eve, and Gray, Jim, Fcast Scalable Multicast File Distribution: Caching and Parameters Optimizations, Microsoft Research Technical Report, MSR-TR-99-14, June 1999. Postscript Word

Gemmell, Jim, Schooler, Eve, and Kermode, Roger, An Architecture for Multicast Telepresentations, Journal of Computing and Information Technology, Vol. 6, No. 3, Sept 1998, pp. 255-272. Word Postscript abstract

Gemmell, Jim, Schooler, Eve, and Kermode, Roger, A Scalable Multicast Architecture for One-to-many Telepresentations, IEEE International Conference on Multimedia Computing Systems (ICMCS '98), pp. 128-139. Word Postscript PPT slides from presentation abstract

Schooler, Eve, and Gemmell, Jim, Using Multicast FEC to Solve the Midnight Madness Problem, Microsoft Research Technical Report, MSR-TR-97-25, Sept. 1997. Word Postscript

Gemmell, Jim, Liebeherr, Jorg, and Bassett, Dave, An API for Scalable Reliable Multicast, International Conference on Computer Communications and Networks, Sept. 22-25, 1997 (Las Vegas, Nevada), IEEE Computer Society, pp. 60-42. Word postscript PPT Slides from presentation

Gemmell, Jim, Scalable Reliable Multicast Using Erasure-Correcting Re-sends, Microsoft Research Technical Report, MSR-TR-97-20, June 1997. Word postscript

Gemmell, Jim, Liebeherr, Jorg, and Bassett, Dave, In Search of an API for Scalable Reliable Multicast, Microsoft Research Technical Report, MSR-TR-97-17, June 1997. Word postscript

Gemmell, D. James, and Bell, C. Gordon, Non-collaborative Telepresentations Come of Age, Communications of the ACM, Vol. 40, No. 4, April 1997, pp. 79-89. Word  pdf

Bell, Gordon, and Gemmell, Jim, On-ramp Prospects for the Information Superhighway Dream, Communications of the ACM, July 1996, Vol. 39, No. 7, pp. 55-61. PDF (361KB) abstract

Gemmell, D. James, Disk Scheduling For Continuous Media, Multimedia Information Storage and Management, Soon M. Chung, Ed., Kluwer Academic Publishers, Boston, August 1996, pp. 1-21. (cannot post on Internet due to copyrights).

Gemmell, D. James, Vin, Harrick M., Kandlur, Dilip D., Rangan, P. Venkat, and Rowe, Lawrence A., Multimedia Storage Servers: A Tutorial, COMPUTER, Vol. 28, No. 5 (May 1995), pp. 40-49. postscript abstract

Gemmell, D. James, Support For Continuous Media In File Servers, PhD thesis, Simon Fraser University, April 1995. Word Postscript

Gemmell, D. James, Beaton, Richard, Han, Jaiwei, and Christodoulakis, Stavros, Delay Sensitive Multimedia on Disks, IEEE Multimedia, Vol. 1, No. 3 (Fall 1994), pp. 56-67.Word postscript abstract

Gemmell, D. James and Han, Jiawei, Multimedia Network File Servers: Multi-Channel Delay Sensitive Data Retrieval, Multimedia Systems, Vol. 1, No. 6 (1994), pp. 240-252. Word postscript

Gemmell, D. James, Multimedia Network File Servers: Multi-Channel Delay Sensitive Data Retrieval, Proceedings of ACM Multimedia '93,(Anaheim, CA, August 1-6 1993), Association for Computing Machinery, New York, 1993, pp. 243-250. Word abstract

Gemmell, D. James, and Christodoulakis, Stavros, Principles of Delay Sensitive Multimedia Data Storage and Retrieval, ACM Transactions on Information Systems, vol. 10, no. 1 (Jan. 1992) pp. 51-90. PDF

Gemmell, D. James, and Christodoulakis, Stavros, Principles of Delay Sensitive Multimedia Data Retrieval, Proceedings of the International Conference on Multimedia Information Systems '91 (Singapore), McGraw-Hill, New York, 1991, pp. 147-158. (on-line version not available).

IETF RFCs

Speakman, T., Crowcroft, J., Gemmell, J., Farinacci, D. , Lin, S., Leshchiner, D., Luby, M., Montgomery, T. , Rizzo, L., Tweedly, A., Bhaskar, N., Edmonstone, R., Sumanasekera, R., Vicisano, L., PGM Reliable Transport Protocol Specification, RFC 3208, December 2001. rfc3208.txt also available at ftp://ftp.rfc-editor.org/in-notes/rfc3208.txt

Asynchronous Layered Coding (ALC) Protocol Instantiation, Luby, M., Gemmell, J., Vicisano, L., Rizzo, L., and Crowcroft, J., RFC 3450, December 2002. rfc3450.txt also available at ftp://ftp.rfc-editor.org/in-notes/rfc3450.txt

Layered Coding Transport (LCT) Building Block, Luby, M., Gemmell, J., Vicisano, L., Rizzo, L., Handley, M., and Crowcroft, J., RFC 3451 , December 2002. rfc3451.txt also available at ftp://ftp.rfc-editor.org/in-notes/rfc3451.txt

Forward Error Correction (FEC) Building Block, Luby, M., Vicisano, L., Gemmell, J., Rizzo, L., Handley, M., Crowcroft, J., RFC 3452, December 2002 rfc3452.txt also available at ftp://ftp.rfc-editor.org/in-notes/rfc3452.txt

The Use of Forward Error Correction (FEC) in Reliable Multicast, Luby, M., Vicisano, L.. Gemmell, J., Rizzo, L., Handley, M., Crowcroft, J., RFC 3453, December 2002 rfc3453.txt also available at ftp://ftp.rfc-editor.org/in-notes/rfc3453.txt

History: Drafts leading up to these RFCs

Presentations

MyLifeBits talk given at a number of universities, Feb 2005 version PowerPoint (10 MB) Feb 2004 version PowerPoint (10 MB), Oct 2003 version PowerPoint (10 MB)

Experiential systems panel at CIVR 2003 - my statement (43 KB Word)& my presentation (2.6 MB PowerPoint)

Gaze-corrected video conferencing talk given at at UCSB, Cambridge U., U. Virginia, UCB and Stanford HTML PowerPoint

Fcast: Reliable Multicast File Transfer - talk given at Cal Tech (PowerPoint)

Scalable Reliable Multicast Telepresentations - talk given at Stanford (PowerPoint)

Telepresentations and Scalable Reliable Multicast - A lecture given at a number of universities.

Reliable, Scalable Multicast: A lecture given to Larry Rowe's class at UC Berkeley, with a focus on SRM. PowerPoint (450 KB) HTML

MBONE for the Masses - Presentation from the May 96 WWW conference MBONE panel.

Links

Multicast information including ECSRM, Multicast PowerPoint Add-in, Mping test utility, MBONE videoconferencing tools, and lots of related links

Talks from ACM 97 "The Next 50 years"

.wav files using different compression types

Lecture Diary

11/13/2007 UC Berkeley I School - MyLifeBits
9/18/2007 Rice U. Scientia lecture series - MyLifeBits
8/16/2007 Stanford Center for Innovations in Learning eLearning workshop - MyLifeBits
6/12/2007 Dublin City U. - MyLifeBits
5/4/2007 FXPAL - MyLifeBits
4/7/2006 eChronicles workshop - panelist statement
11/30/2005 U. Washington iSchool - MyLifeBits
8/19/2005 MSR Faculty Summit, Redmond WA - Digital Memories RFP
2/17/2005 Princeton U. - MyLifeBits
2/15/2005 U. Maryland - MyLifeBits
2/9/2005 TTI Vanguard - MyLifeBits
11/30/2004 Ricoh Innovations - MyLifeBits
10/29/2004 UC Berkeley Database Seminar (w. Roger Lueder) - MyLifeBits
10/15/2004 ACM Workshop on Continuous Archival and Retrieval of Personal Experiences – MyLifeBits
10/13/2004 Columbia University - MyLifeBits (w. Gordon Bell)
9/16/2004 Intelligent Systems conference, Perugia, Italy - MyLifeBits
7/29/2004 NPUC workshop, IBM Almaden Research Lab – MyLifeBits (w. Gordon Bell)
6/10/2004 NASA Ames Research Center – MyLifeBits (w. Gordon Bell)
6/4/2004 MSR Cambridge – MyLifeBits
6/4/2004 Cambridge University - MyLifeBits
2/11/2004 General Print Office of US Federal Government (at Microsoft Silicon Valley campus) – MyLifeBits
1/19/2004 SDForum Distinguished Speaker series – MyLifeBits (w. Gordon Bell)
11/19/2003 Georgia Tech – MyLifeBits
10/2003 San Francisco State U. MyLifeBits
10/2003 Arizona State U. MyLifeBits
10/2003 Microsoft Research Technical Advisory Board (at Microsoft Silicon Valley campus)
9/2003 ATR Workshop on Ubiquitous Experience Media - MyLifeBits
7/2003 International Conference on Image and Video Retrieval – Panelist statement on Experiential Computing
5/2003 UCLA MyLifeBits
5/2003 U. North Carolina MyLifeBits
4/2003 UC Davis MyLifeBits
12/2002 ACM Multimedia Conference – MyLifeBits Poster presentation
11/2002 CIIT – GazeMaster paper presentation
10/2002 U. Virginia – MyLifeBits
10/2002 U. Minnesota – MyLifeBits
10/2002 U. Illinois – MyLifeBits
8/2002 IMSA – PLM paper presentation
4/2002 MSR Cambridge – Reliable Multicast
4/2002 Cambridge University - GazeMaster
2/26/2002 San Francisco State U. – GazeMaster
4/2000 Stanford U. – GazeMaster
3/2000 UC Berkeley – GazeMaster
10/1999 IMSA – Fcast
10/1999 U. Virginia – Fcast & GazeMaster
2/1999 Cal Tech – Fcast
11/1998 Stanford – Multicast Telepresentations
3/1998 UC Berkeley - Telepresentations
2/1998 U. British Columbia – Telepresentations
2/1998 Simon Fraser U. – Telepresentations
12/1997 Xerox PARC – Telepresence/multicast
10/1997 CMU - Telepresence/multicast
10/1997 MIT - Telepresence/multicast
10/1997 NY Polytechnic - Telepresence/multicast
10/1997 Columbia U. - Telepresence/multicast
9/1997 ICCCN – Reliable Multicast APIs
11/1996 UC Berkeley

Selected MyLifeBits news articles

Don't forget to back up your brain, Fox News, 11/14/2007
Remember This?, The New Yorker, May 28, 2007
Total recall becomes a reality, The Telegraph, 4/21/2007
Your Whole Life is Going to Bits, Sydney Morning Herald 4/14/2007
Researcher Records His Life On Computer, CBS Evening News 4/9/2007
Perfect Memory,WATTnow, March 2007
Lifeblogging: Is a virtual brain good for the real one? Ars technica, 2/7/2007
On the Record, All the Time, Chronicle of Higher Education, 2/4/2007
How Microsoft’s Gordon Bell is Reengineering Human Memory (and Soon, Your Life and Business), Fast Company, Nov 2006.
Digital age may bring total recall in future, CNN 10/16/2006.
El hombre que guarda todos los recuerdos de su vida en bits, La Crónica de Hoy (Mexico), 7/16/2006.
That's My Life, Aria Magazine April 2006.
The ultimate digital diary The Dominion Post 5/31/2006
In 2021 You'll Enjoy Total Recall Popular Science 5/18/2006
The Memory Machine, Varsity.co.uk, 3/2/2006
Life Bytes, NPR Radio "Living on Earth" show, 1/20/2006
The man with the perfect memory - just don't ask him to remember what's in it The Guardian, 12/28/2005
Bytes of my life, Hindustan Times, 11/17/2005
Total Recall, IEEE Spectrum, 11/1/2005 Podcast on IEEE Spectrum Radio (Choose arrow on October 2005 show and select "MyLifeBits -- the digitized life of Gordon Bell")
Turning Your Life Into Bits, Indexed, Los Angeles Times 7/11/2005
Wouldn't It Be Nice The Wall Street Journal 5/23/2005
Life Bits IEEE Spectrum Online May 2005
How To Be A Pack Rat, Forbes.com 4/29/2005 - see also blog entry by Thomas Hawk at eHomeUpgrade
Computer sage cuts paperwork, converts his life to digital format The Seattle Time 4/9/2005
Channel 9 video interviews 8/21/2004 Intro Gemmell Lueder
Slices of Life Spiked-Online 8/19/2004
Next-generation search tools to refine results CNET 8/9/2004
Life in byte-sized pieces The Age, 7/18/2004
Removable Media For Our Minds TheFeature 3/25/2004
This is Your Life San Jose Mercury News 3/6/2004
Navigating Digital Home Networks New York Times 2/19/2004
Offloading Your Memories New York Times Magazine Year in Ideas issue 12/14/2003  "Bright notions, bold inventions, genius schemes and mad dreams that took off (or tried to) in 2003"
Logged on for life Toronto Star 9/8/2003
This is your life--in bits U.S. News & World Report 6/23/2003
My Life in a Terabyte IT-Analysis.com 5/14/2003
How MS will know ALL about you ZD AnchorDesk 4/18/2003
Memories as Heirlooms Logged Into a Database The New York Times 3/20/2003
Microsoft Fair Forecasts Future AP 2/27/2003 (This story ran on many newspapers and news sites, including USA Today, The Globe and Mail, The San Jose Mercury News, and ABC News)
This Is Your Brain on Digits ABC News 2/5/2003
A life in bits and bytes c|net News.com 1/6/2003 (run also by ZDNet)|
Your Life - On The Web Computer Research & Technology 12/20/2002
Saving Your Bits for Posterity Wired 12/6/2002
Microsoft works to create back-up brain Knowledge Management 11/25/2002
Microsoft Creating Virtual Brain NewsFactor Network 11/22/2002
Microsoft solves "giant shoebox problem" Geek.com 11/22/2002
Would you put your life in Microsoft's hands? Silicon.com (run also by ZDNet News) 11/21/2002
Microsoft Plans Digital Memory Box, a Step Toward "Surrogate Brain" BetterHumans 11/21/2002
E-hoard with Microsoft's life database vnunet.com IT Week 11/21/2002
Microsoft plans online life archive BBC News 11/20/2002
Software aims to put your life on a disk New Scientist 11/20/2002