This Just In! Your Life in the Newspaper

Abstract. It is not uncommon for computer users to work on several things at once. However, to the computer, all documents, emails and applications are considered equal, regardless of why they were created or used. Little support is provided when trying to recall important information about a particular project or subject at a later time. What is more, there is no effective way to help users review their past activities to identify when a particular subject was of importance, what were their concerns at a given moment in the past, or simply review their activities during a period of time at a glance. In this paper we describe PersonalNews, a system in which users are presented with a personal newspaper, in which the news articles describe the subjects they were concerned with in a given period of time. Those articles are automatically generated from the users ’ documents, grouped according to their subject and analyzed for relevant passages describing them. We show that PersonalNews is able to recognize the subjects and projects the users were involved in, and even help them recall some they had forgotten about. Also, it can be used effectively to help retrieve documents on particular subjects, even when the usual hints of filename and location in the filesystem