A few months back, I had a conversation about my PhD work with Kate Stevens, one of the members of the executive for HCSNet, an Australian Research Council funded collaboration network for researchers working on topics in the broad space of Human Communication Science.

Parts of my on-camera conversation with Kate have made it into the recently released HCSNet Promotional video, which is now available on YouTube. It’s always a bit weird seeing yourself on camera, particularly when sound bytes are taken from a much longer conversation! Given the totally unscripted nature of what was recorded though, I think it’s worked out quite well.

Of course, this is also a good opportunity to actually plug the annual HCSNet Summerfest, which will be held at UNSW in Sydney in December. If you’re interested in speech, language, sonics, psychology or any number of topics in between, check out what’s on offer – it’s well worth a few days of your time to meet some inspiring people.

Gabor Cselle and Greg Duffy from Xobni gave an excellent keynote at the AAAI Email Workshop. Amongst other insights and Xobni anecdotes, their combined presentation gave an overview of just how difficult and painful it is to integrate new ideas into existing email clients like Microsoft Outlook. Such pain is, unfortunately, unavoidable if you’d like your ideas to reach any of the 400 million Outlook email users out there in the world.

The exciting news I took away from the Xobni presentation was the plan to open up external access to developer APIs to access and extend Xobni’s sidebar. This is what LinkedIn has had access to in order to achieve the recent integration with Xobni, and might be a less painful path to Outlook integration for other developers in the future.