So I was busy at the International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces conference earlier this week, and it was a hugely motivating and thought provoking experience. A great bunch of really switched on people doing all kinds of interesting things.

One presentation that particularly caught my interest was from Tessa Lau at IBM Almaden Research lab – not surprising really, given that I’ve read about some of Tessa’s previous work in email management. The work she presented at IUI was on IBM’s Unified Activity Management project (UAM). In that context, one of her points that really rang true for me was about the need to move away from being focused on tools to focus more on the activities people perform when dealing with information management. This should, of course, lead to the development of software applications that do a better job of supporting users, who are (and should be!) more concerned about their tasks and activities than about which tool they used to do what, and how they can integrate work that happens to have been performed using different software tools.

As a simple example, rather than grouping email messages for a given activity in an email client and the Excel documents in a separate folder on the filesystem, can we instead cluster all relevant information together based on the activity which ties the various artifacts together, rather than based on the tool that happened to have been used to create them. Accordingly, a major part of the UAM project is focussed on integrating email content into an overall activity management system that is under development. To do so requires an ability to associate email content with new or existing activities. Obviously, for new activities, this requires a light-weight and simple way of creating activities from email, and of displaying email in the context of existing activities.

When trying to associate incoming email messages with new and existing activities, the IBM team seems to have been inspired by the information retrieval community in using recommendation rather than all-or-nothing mapping of incoming messages to activities. This is a clever way of reducing the likelihood of frustrating users with incorrect categorisations, and is indeed the approach we took in earlier email categorisation work I have been involved with a few years ago at CSIRO.

Tessa also referred to email signatures as ‘noise’ that, by implication, needs to be removed to recover the communication signal conveyed by email – a very simple and logical description of the nature of email signatures (and often quoted material) in the context of automatic processing of emails.

Some weaknesses of the work presented included an implicit assumption that a single email message should be associated with only zero or one activity. Clearly this suffers from a multiple-inheritance style problem – in practice a single email message can often contain content that is relevant to many different activities. In the present system it is not possible to apply multiple activity labels to a single message. This, of course, sounds a lot like the folder vs. labelling problem that has been all the range since GMail appeared on the radar.

Another interesting question is whether classifying email messages into activities is different from the classification of emails into folders (which is a well studied text categorisation problem). There certainly seem to be many similarities between both problems. Perhaps there is a difference of focus (folder classification generally being for archiving, and activity classification more for current work), but this is purely speculation.

Of particular interest for me was that Tessa identified speech act detection in email as a future direction for their research. This is both motivating, given that smart people see some similar value in the kinds of ideas I’m playing with, but also rather intimidating to think who my competitors out there in the research world include!! I think I’d better get a move on with my own research!