Cathal Gurrin

His interests include personal analytics and lifelogging. He publishes in a wide range of areas including information retrieval (IR) with a particular focus on how people access information from mobile devices (MHCIR). He has captured a personal digital memory since 2006 using a camera mounted on his chest and created hundreds of millions of other sensor readings.

Cathal has worn a chest mounted camera (a Microsoft SenseCam) since 2006 which takes several pictures every minute, he also records his location (using GPS) and accelerometer data with each image. Cathal now has a database of over 12 million images, and currently produces about a terabyte of personal data a year. Cathal and his researchers use information retrieval algorithms to segment his personal image archive into “events” such as eating, driving, etc. New events are recognized on a daily basis using machine learning algorithms. In an interview with The Economist Cathal said that “If I need to remember where I left my keys, or where I parked my car, or what wine I drank at an event two years ago... the answers should all be there.” It was noted that while searching by date and time is easy, more complex searches within images such as looking for brand names and objects with complex form factors, such as keys, is difficult. The ultimate aim of Cathal's research is to create a search engine to allow complex searches of such image databases.

Cathal attended primary school in Scoil Lorcáin, Kilbarrack, Dublin, and secondary school in St. Fintans High School, Sutton, nearby. He graduated from Dublin City University in 1997 with a degree in Computer Applications.