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!