Sunil Vemuri's homepage

My name is pronounced like soo-neel vay-moo-ree. Also, for some reason, people often misspell my last name. It is spelled V-E-M-U-R-I. Not VERUMI, not VERMURI, not VERMEIL.

vemuri [at] media [dot] mit [dot] edu
| Current Work | Press | Media Lab Work | Past Work | Publications & Patents | Personal |

Current Work:

I graduated and co-founded QTech, Inc. where I work on reQall, a new memory aid. My mission remains to help people remember better.

Media Lab Work:

I received my Ph.D. from the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts where I worked with Walter Bender in the Electronic Publishing Group. Some have asked why I moved from sunny San Francisco to Boston. Comparing the weather between the two, I wonder myself sometimes :-)

Project Name: "What Was I Thinking?" a.k.a., iRemember

I'm building technology to help people remember. Sometimes called a "personal memory aid" or a "memory prosthesis." Here is a brief, non-technical overview of the project.

In general, my research interests include Human Memory Assistance, Contextual Information Retrieval, Information Extraction, Knowledge Acquisition, Collaborative Technologies, Organizational Memory, Interface/Interaction Design. I know, lots of words, not saying much.

Press:

2008–present   Please see the reQall Press Page.
November 14, 2007   "Don't Forget to Back Up Your Brain" in FoxNews.com. by Corinna Underwood.
December 2006   "Digital Memory Aids Remember When You Don't" in Info Today. By Jamie Babbitt.
October 16, 2006   "Digital age may bring total recall in future". CNN.COM, by Gandossy, T.
July 28–30, 2006   "Immortal Memories." a segment on CNN TV's Explorers. Aired on CNN and CNN Headline News
[video, CNN Explorers Website, click on "Innovation on the Horizon"].
September 21, 2005   "Immortal Memories." a segment on CNN TV's Explorers. Aired on CNN and CNN Headline News
[video].
March 27, 2005   "Memory: A Dr. Sanjay Gupta Special," on CNN TV. Produced by David Martin and Stefanie Smith.
[video, ref, transcript1, transcript2]
September 2004   "Life Recorder" in MIT Technology Review.
August 19, 2004   "Slices of life" in Spiked, by Appleton, J.
May 11, 2004   "What's Next for Consumer Gadgets?" in PCWorld, by Cassavooy, L. [brief mention on last line].
April 18, 2004   "Mark Your Words" (cached) in Boston Globe Magazine, by Swidey, N.
March 25, 2004   "Removable Media For Our Minds" in The Feature, by Pescovitz, D.
December 14, 2003   "Offloading Your Memories" (cached) in New York Times Magazine, by Johnson, S. p. 85.
June 30, 2003   "Truly Total Recall" (cached) in Newsweek International, by Kuchment A.
June 9, 2003   "The Time of Your Life" in Newsweek, by Kuchment A. p. E2

Past Work:

I worked in the Apple Technology Group of Apple Computer. Fun place, interesting research.

I was a student in the Knowledge Systems Lab of the Computer Science department at Stanford University; my advisor was Richard Fikes.

I worked in the Beckman Research Institute of the City of Hope hospital near Los Angeles, CA. There, I worked with Terry Lee to create MacProMass.

Projects

Publications & Patents

  • Vemuri, S., Schmandt, C., Bender, W. iRemember: A Personal Long-term Memory Prosthesis. In Proc. of CARPE 2006 (October 2006). [pdf]
  • Vemuri, S., Bender, W. "Next-generation personal memory aids." In BT Technology Journal. 22(4) 125–138 (October 2004). [pdf]
  • Vemuri. S. Personal long-term memory aids. Ph.D. Dissertation. MIT Media Lab. (September 2004) [pdf]
  • Vemuri, S., Schmandt, C., Bender, W., Tellex, S., Lassey, B. "An audio-based personal memory aid." In Proceedings of Ubicomp 2004: Ubiquitous Computing. September 7–10, 2004. Nottingham, UK. 400–417. (2004). [pdf]
  • Vemuri, S., DeCamp, P., Bender, W., Schmandt, C. "Improving Speech Playback Using Time-Compression and Speech Recognition," In Proceedings of CHI 2004. [pdf]
  • Borovoy, R., Martin, F., Vemuri, S., Resnick, M., Silverman, B., and Hancock, C. "Meme Tags and Community Mirrors: moving from conferences to collaboration," in Proceedings of Computer Supported Cooperative Work. 159–168. (1998). [pdf]
  • Gruber, T., Vemuri, S., Rice, J., "Model-Based Virtual Documents," in International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 46(6), 687–706. (June 1997).
  • 1999 Patent 6,243,090 for "FAQ Linker". Machiraju, N.R., Graves, M., Vemuri, S., Chandhok, R., Lofgren, C.
  • 1997 Patent 6,028,601 for "FAQ link createion between user's questions and answers". Machiraju, N.R., Graves, M., Vemuri, S., Chandhok, R., Lofgren, C.
  • 1996 Patent 5,873,107 for "System for automatically retrieving information relevant to text being authored". Borovoy, R., Machiraju, N.R., Graves. M., Vemuri. S.
  • Ferrell, B., Grant., M., Padilla, G., Vemuri, S., Rhiner, M. "The Experience of Pain and Perceptions of Quality of Life Validation of a Conceptual Model" in The Hospice Journal, 7(3), 9–24, (1991). [ref]
  • Lee, T.D. and Vemuri, S. "MacProMass: A Computer Program to Correlate Mass Spectral Data to Peptide and Protein Structures," in Biomedical and Environmental Mass Spectrometry. 19, 639–645, (1990).

Personal

I've been known to dance/teach Bhangra, dance Salsa, tennis, softball, and Kenpo Karate. One of these days, I plan to learn sailing, get my pilot's license, work on my chess and bridge games, help my father with his Telugu Dictionary, and an assortment of other things.

I was a Residential Computer Consultant in Escondido Village .

But, despite any scientific achievements, my claim to fame is the infamous Stanford WWW Icons that you may see on a variety of Stanford web pages (including the bottom of this page).

Here's a link to my father's homepage.

Random Quotes

Stanford Home PageCS Dept.Residential ComputingKenpo Karate
Last Updated: May 2008