Today’s post comes to us from Dawn Nafus and Robin Barooah. Together they led an amazing breakout session at the 2014 Quantified Self Europe Conference on the topic of understanding and mapping data access. We have a longstanding interest in observing and communicating how data moves in and out of the self-tracking systems we use…
Alex Tarling starting using the Mappiness app to track his happiness along with other contextual data. Over time the ritual of having to ask himself, “How happy am I?” three times a day started to get him thinking about how he thought about his own happiness and what that meant to him. In this talk,…
Four years ago Morris Villarroel was inspired to start writing things down. He started with a simple Muji notebook and begun adding some structure such as daily logs, life events, and review of books and articles he had read. In the process of filling out over 130 journals his process has evolved to include journaling…
Today’s post comes to us from Cathal Gurrin, Rami Albatal, Dan Berglund, and Daniel Hamngren. Cathal and Rami are researchers at Dublin City University and Daniel and Dan work at Narrative, makers of a small lifelogging camera and application. Together, they led an interesting breakout session at the 2014 Quantified Self Europe Conference on photo lifelogging and…
There are many people in the QS community who are fascinated by understanding productivity. We’ve featured many different talks that explore different methods for tracking and hopefully improving productivity. At the 2014 Quantified Self Europe Conference we were happy to continue this exploration with a show&tell talk by Brian Crain. Brian has been thinking about…
Steve Dean is the co-organizer of our New York City QS meetup group. He’s also an avid self-tracker, using different methods and tools to understand his life. About three years ago Steve started to experience inflammation along his eyelids. After seeing a dermatologist and being diagnosed with atopic dermatitis he was prescribed a treatment regiment….
Max Gotzler wasn’t feeling his best during a long German winter. He decided to visit his physician to see if anything might be going on. This included various blood and micronutrient tests. When he received his results he noticed that his testosterone levels were on the low end of the acceptable range. Intrigued by this,…
Today’s post comes to us from Steven Jonas who led the Spaced Repetition breakout session at the 2014 Quantified Self Europe Conference. Spaced repetition is a common topic in the Quantified Self community and we’ve seen great examples from Jeopardy champion Roger Craig and Steven. In this breakout session, conference attendees discussed reasons for using spaced repetition,…
Yesterday we posted our first opening plenary talk from the 2014 Quantified Self Europe Conference. Today we are happy to post our second talk from the opening plenary session. Kaiton Williams is PhD student at Cornell in the department of Information Science. Over the last few years he’s been interested in how people use technology…
When we host our Quantified Self Conferences we put a lot of effort into our plenary sessions. Those sessions open and close each day and they’re the only time that all the attendees are together to listen and learn from speakers and presenters. Our opening plenary is especially important to us. It sets the stage…
Today’s post comes to us from Alberto Frigo who led the Data Future: Possibilities and Dream breakout session at the 2014 Quantified Self Europe Conference. Alberto started the discussion by asking a few questions: As we passionately gather our data, it is striking to reflect about its destiny. Is it going to end up in an attic? Will…
Today’s post comes to us from Kitty Ireland, who co-led the Telling Stories With Data breakout session at the 2014 Quantified Self Europe Conference. You’re invited to read her description of the session and then join the discussion on the QS Forum. You can also view and download their session presentation here. Telling Stories With Data by Kitty…
On May 10-11th we hosted the 2014 Quantified Self Europe Conference. Hundreds of self-trackers, toolmakers, scientists, and enthusiasts came together to share, learn, and discuss how we can create personal meaning through personal data. The conference featured over 100 different sessions that included Show&Tell talks, Breakouts on a wide variety of topics, and inspirational and…
A core piece of our conferences are the numerous breakout sessions that cover a wide variety of topics from social sciences to hands-on workshops on privacy and data security. These sessions are facilitated by conference attendees and they put in a lot of work to engage their groups in meaningful discussion. This year, starting with…
The 2014 Quantified Self Europe conference is a “carefully curated unconference”. This means that all of our sessions come from the attendees. We are happy to announce that we have more than 100 separate talks and discussions planned. More than 30% of the attendees will be presenting in some way. This conference is for the…
When we organized our very first QS Conference in 2011 we were bombarded with so many proposals from people who wanted to share their projects and self-tracking experiences we decided to add talks to our extended lunch breaks. The lunchtime Ignite session was born and now we can’t imagine a conference without them. Below is…
What did you do? How did you do it? What did you learn? These are the three questions we ask people to answer in their Quantified Self Show&Tell talks. We’re thrilled to see the Show&Tell proposals coming in from registrants for the 2014 Quantified Self Europe Conference, with topics ranging from blood glucose tracking to novel uses…
We organize our QS conferences backwards: First the registrants, then the program. We like to keep things open to the last minute so we can get a sense of what everybody is working on and thinking about before making the final lineup. But eventually the printer’s deadline looms, and we have to say: this is…
We’re fascinated by self-tracking projects that extend over long periods of time, and at the upcoming QS Europe conference we’re going to hear from two artists who have been making work out of novel personal data extending back for years. Since 2004, Alberto Frigo has taken a photograph of every object he holds in his dominant…
We are not alone. No, there haven’t been any extraterrestrial sightings lately, but there have been many advances in understanding the organisms that make up the ecosystem of ourselves. Did you know that you are supporting almost 10 times more bacterial cells than human cells? These bacterial collaborators have a profound affect on health and wellbeing. Jessica…
