In exciting news, the proposal for an Enhanced Messaging Workshop at AAAI 2008 was recently accepted, thanks to the efforts of Tessa Lau, Vitor Carvalho and Mark Dredze. I’m especially excited to be a member of the program committee for the workshop!

The main aim of the workshop is to provide a focus for people working on email and other messaging technologies. In some ways this is what I think Conference on Email and Anti-Spam (CEAS) could have (and perhaps should have) been, but in recent years, CEAS seems to have been heavily focused on the anti-spam aspect of email, at the apparent expense of work more focused on HCI, NLP, AI and so on. Sensing this gap, the Enhanced Messaging Workshop is also hoping to set a multi-year agenda of important research goals for the field of email research and messaging technologies more generally.

For anyone interested, here’s an introduction to the purposes of the workshop from the Call For Participation:

With the rise of the digital workplace, email has become a ubiquitous tool in the office and a primary means of communication. Email’s growth has created new opportunities and challenges for a large variety of artificial intelligence research, focusing an increasing amount of academic and industrial research on email issues. Research seeks to enhance the email user experience by addressing email overload or to learn from email social patterns. Recent papers have dealt with email triage, activity management, email prioritization, summarization, topic tracking, sorting, leak detection, social network analysis, and enhanced intelligent interfaces. The wide spectrum of email research has appeared in a variety of conferences. The growing interest in email has left a fractured community spread through many sub-areas, a particularly important problem for this type of work since all research is aimed at improving a single application.

The Workshop on Enhanced Messaging at AAAI 2008 brings together researchers working on solutions for email and other forms of web messaging from many subfields of AI as well as soliciting participation from the broader community. We will discuss recent progress in the field and share research experiences. The community will outline existing problems in email and construct major research objectives for the next few years. We expect this workshop to be an important step towards building a community structure that will open channels of communication and collaboration as we move forward.

The workshop is aiming to appeal to both academic and industrial researchers (you might notice that Gabor Cselle, VP of Engineering at Xobni, is on the Program Committee too), so if you work at all in the email or messaging space, please have a look at the Call For Participation and consider submitting a paper, poster or demo.

On the topic of my PhD work, I presented a paper at the Australasian Document Computing Symposium (ADCS) on Monday in Melbourne about how well humans agree on identifying requests and commitments in email message. The bottom line appears to be that there is sufficient agreement to have some hope of automating the task, although there is much more work to do to make this happen. If you’re interested in the details, have a look at the paper.

Excitingly, I ended up winning the best presentation award. I think at least in part this was because I presented 40-odd slides in a 15 minute talk – which seemed impossibly many slides to most folks – and still managed to make my research understandable, which of course is the whole point!

Thanks to the guys at Xobni for finally sending an invite to their Beta program. (They must have readied themselves for a new influx of users since I see others in the email community have also received invites).

I’ve downloaded and installed the Xobni Outlook plugin without a hitch, and so far, their sidebar seems pretty impressive for such an early stage product. I haven’t really explored the Xobni Analytics component yet, since my email messages are still being indexed.

The Xobni plugin also offers an interesting avenue as an interface to further email enhancements – not the least of which might be my own PhD work on requests and promises in email.