Gregory Grefenstette (INRIA TAO, Université Paris Sud)  

Organizing Personal Data with Personal Semantics and Natural Language Processing

Abstract:

People generally think of Big Data as something generated by machines or large communities of people interacting with the digital world. But technological progress means that each individual is currently, or soon will be, generating masses of digital data in their everyday lives. In every interaction with an application, every web page visited, every time your telephone is turned on, you generate information about yourself, Personal Big Data. With the rising adoption of quantified self gadgets, and the foreseeable adoption of intelligent glasses capturing daily life, the quantity of personal Big Data will only grow. In this Personal Big Data, as in other Big Data, a key problem is aligning concepts in the same semantic space. While concept alignment in the public sphere is an understood, though unresolved, problem, what does ontological organization of a personal space look like? Is it idiosyncratic, or something that can be shared between people? We will describe our current approach to this problem of organizing personal data and creating and exploiting a personal semantics.