One of the main aims of this workshop is to gather email and enterprise computing researchers and practitioners to discuss and propose solutions for email in e-commerce and enterprise contexts.
Topics:
Architecture for enterprise cooperation and interoperability over email
Intelligent email for SMEs
Email-based business task and process management
Email content analysis, message summarization, information extraction
Semantic Email and Semantic Knowledge Extraction
Email social networks for enterprise computing
Email analysis of exchanged documents for semantic alignment via negotiation
Email Workflow Management for Business Processes
Interconnection of email content and enterprise resources (legacy systems, document repositories)
Enterprise resource mashup support for business email
Approaches for email visualization and user interfaces in business contexts
Case studies
Business email datasets
If you’re a researcher working with email, or if your startup or company is in the email space, please consider submitting a paper or demo to the workshop. Full details are available in the Call for Papers.
The focus seems to be on lightweight interaction, which is definitely the right approach. To add a new task, for example, you just click in an empty part of the task list and start typing. This seems pretty similar to the style of task interaction pioneered by Remember the Milk, and I’d be interested to know how it compares with RTM’s GMail services, particularly their recently announced RTM GMail gadget that can be added via GMail Labs. Are there any users out there who have experimented with RTM’s tools and can offer insight on the comparative strengths and weaknesses of the new Labs task addition?
There doesn’t seem to be much in the way of tight interaction between email and tasks (yet), but I’m sure this will be in the pipeline for future enhancements.
On the topic of tasks in email, if you’re interested in learning more about how people phrase tasks in email messages, have a look at my recent paper, Requests and Commitments in Email are Complex: Eight Reasons to be Cautious, which I presented at the Australasian Language Technology conference in Hobart earlier this week.
A series of email messages from the controversial Yahoo! Mail account of US Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin were leakedontotheInternet today.
As with the recently announced Venezuelan government email leak, Wikileaks was again in the scrum, issuing the following press release:
The internet activist group ‘anonymous’, famed for its exposure of unethical behavior by the Scientology cult, has now gone after the Alaskan governor and republican Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin.
At around midnight last night the group gained access to governor Palin’s email account … and handed over the contents to the government sunshine site Wikileaks.org.
Governor Palin has come under media criticism in the past week for using pseudo-private email accounts to avoid Alaskan freedom of information laws.
The zip archive made available by Wikileaks contains screen shots of Palin’s inbox, two example emails, governor Palin’s address box and a couple of family photos. While the emails released so far reveal little, the list of correspondence appears to re-enforce the criticism that Palin is mixing governmental and personal affairs.
The emails quoted in press articles to date seem to show that Palin has improperly used her private email account to conduct government business, thereby avoiding archiving requirements and shielding herself and her government from public scrutiny. It is unclear what if any action will be taken in response. According to the Sydney Morning Herald, the Secret Service contacted The Associated Press and asked for copies of the leaked emails on her Yahoo! account, but AP did not comply.
The Palin email leak is the latest in a string of unauthorised email disclosures. Ironically, it comes almost a year to the day after the MediaDefender email leak. Clearly, our recent discussion about the ethics of email corpora on the email research mailing list is a timely one!
I’ve previously noted my disappointment with the array of trivial trinkets that have so far defined Gmail Labs. One of the most recent additions, however, finally adds something of use.
Quote selected text allows you to selectively quote and reply to one small part of a message. Like other email clients with this feature (Apple Mail springs to mind), you just highlight the text you want to include in your reply, hit the keyboard shortcut “r” to reply, and the compose template will be just what you selected. This is a simple but useful feature. Note that it only works in Firefox and IE right now. Safari and Chrome support is still in progress.
Luckily for us, Gabor is fitting in some travel between finishing up at Xobni and starting his new company, and Sydney is one of the stops on his itinerary. Gabor is an excellent presenter, so if you’re in Sydney, I highly recommend coming along to the seminar that he will be giving on The Future of Email at CSIRO / Macquarie University, starting 11am on Wednesday 15th October. (Here’s details of our location and how to get here if you’re planning to come along).
Of course, given Gabor’s experience as an entrepreneur, I’m sure he’ll also be happy to talk about life in a Silicon Valley startup and the lessons he’s learned along the way. So, come along for the seminar, and stick around for what’s sure to be some interesting discussion.
Whistleblower website Wikileaks.org, which famously made its debut revealing secret documents about Guantanamo Bay, has announced that they have acquired a corpus of over 8000 diplomatic emails from the government of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. Controversially, WikiLeaks is offering to auction off the corpus to the highest bidder.
The winning bidder will get exclusivity and embargoed access to the documents. However, there is hope for cash-poor email researchers, as Wikileaks claims that they will eventually publish all of the email, after the embargo expires.
The corpus allegedly includes email messages and attachments from 2005 to July 2008 that provide insight into the management of Chavez’s “inner circle”, along with “sentiments about CIA activities in Venezuela, Columbian incursions, the visit of the Pope”, and the Bolivarian revolution. Based on the Wikileaks press release below, the email messages appear to be from a single diplomat’s mailbox.
From: Wikileaks Press Office
Date: Wed, 27 Aug 2008 20:38:47 +0100
Inside Venezuela – over 8, 000 diplomatic emails 2005-2008
Wikileaks has prepared for publication over 8,000 internal and
external emails to and from a senior Venezuelan diplomat and former
speech writer for Hugo Chavez. The emails are dated 2005 to July
2008, and include several thousand attachments. The preparation
includes a “one touch” translation system to over a dozen different
languages.
The material provides a unqiue insight into the Bolivarian revolution,
President Chavez’s manamgement of his inner circle, and affairs
ranging from Cuban and Venezuelan contacts, sentiments about CIA
activites in Venezuela, Columbian incursions, the visit of the
Pope and Venezuelan views on many other countries and events.
Organizations wishing to bid for exclusivity (proceeds to our source
defense fund) and embargoed access contact usa@wikileaks.org for
additional information.
Thanks to Rob McArthur for alerting me to the Wired News article about the auction. If anyone out there knows more about this potential corpus, please comment!
Update (3/8/08): Of course, I assume the email messages are likely to be in Spanish, the official language of Venezuela.
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.
Mark Dredze, Vitor Carvalho and Tessa Lau did an excellent job bringing together a great bunch of people working on a variety of email-related research at the recent EMAIL-08 workshop at AAAI in Chicago. There was a huge amount of energy and enthusiasm amongst the participants, which is a great thing for the future of email research.
Following on from the workshop, we have created a series of new resources to help keep the community connected. The first of these is a new mailing list for those interested in email research. Our intention is for this list to be a central place for people in the email research community to discuss ideas and projects and to announce resources of interest. More information about the list (including subscription information) can be found at http://groups.google.com/group/email-research.
In addition to the list, we have also created a community maintained email research website that we hope will keep a current list of email datasets, published papers and related information. Please get in touch if you have relevant content for the site.
If you are at all involved in email-related research, I strongly encourage you to join the new Email Research mailing list and to take part in the ongoing discussion of the wider email research community. I’m looking forward to hearing your ideas!
I know that Robert Dale (who happens to be one of my PhD supervisors) has been working hard towards this for some time now, along with a host of other people from the ACL and CL boards. So thank you and congratulations to all involved!
For those outside the community, the CL journal is arguably the most prestigious journal for our field. Despite this, I find that work seems far more visible when published in the big CL conferences (ACL, Coling, EMNLP etc.). It will be interesting to see how the move to open access changes this balance.
Of course, not having been in Ohio this year, I still have questions about the details – what’s the funding model?, will there be new sections/types of publications accepted?, will each issue contain more papers than previously now there aren’t physical page limits? – but I’m sure I’ll hear the details in time.
The move is not without challenges, but I think this is excellent news for both our CL/NLP communities and for the research community more generally in making high quality published research more easily available to everyone.
