Gabor Cselle on the Future of Email
As many in the email community will know, Gabor Cselle, VP of Engineering at Email startup Xobni, announced a month or so ago that he was leaving Xobni to start his own email company.
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.
Requests and Promises in Email
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!
Spam, Egg, Sausage and Spam
According to stats from CSIRO’s Information Management and Technology people, there were just shy of 81 million spam and virus-laden email messages blocked during September 2006, representing more the 96% of all email traffic. In fact, less than 3.5% of all email represented legitimate messages, which paints an even bleaker picture of the email world than the numbers presented at VNUNet.com. Even other academic institutions such as Rutgers University show an average of 7% legitimate email over the past month.
In contrast with spam, virus-laden messages continue to represent a relatively small proportion of messages – there were roughly 2500 spam messages blocked for every virus-laden email that was detected, with less than 0.05% of all messages carrying virus payloads, almost an order of magnitude less than the 0.41% rate for emails processed by SoftScan. Interestingly, the CSIRO results are down from a peak in December 2005, when virus emails accounted for 0.5% of email messages.
Looking back over the past 12 months, there were close to 1 billion spam email messages received – an astounding figure for an organisation the size of CSIRO. This represents more than 150,000 spam email messages per employee per annum, or more than 400 spam email messages per employee per day. From the numbers released, we can also determine that the average number of non-spam messages received per employee is less than 20 per day. This starts to demonstrate just how significant the spam problem really is: there are at least 20 spam messages received for every legitimate email message.
To the credit of CSIRO IM&T people, very little spam is actually delivered through to my work email address – less than 10 spam messages a week on average. So, kudos to the combination of technology and resources that are applied, which I know includes IronPort Anti-Spam, and almost certainly a whole suite of other tools and techniques.
The bottom-line, however, seems to be that email protocols are broken – what other technology or infrastructure demonstrates such overwhelming mis-use to the degree that we see in email traffic?
Research Seminar Podcast
So I’ve taken the plunge and created my first podcast which is also available through iTunes. Don’t be afraid though – you won’t hear much from me except the occasional speaker introduction – it’s a podcast of recorded seminars from the research seminar series that I’ve been jointly running with Cecile Paris at the CSIRO ICT Centre for the past 5 years. The seminar series itself pre-dates my time at CSIRO however – 2006 is its 10th consecutive year!
Anyway, if you’re at all interested in human factors, artificial intelligence or language technology, take a moment to tune in – we have some excellent talks coming up in the near future. As you can see from our collection of past seminars, topics range widely including research and applications in usability, human-computer interaction, user modelling/personalisation, novel interfaces, natural language processing, linguistics, information retrieval, speech processing, system evaluation, computer supported cooperative work, cognitive science and more.
Using Context to Deliver Useful Information to People
As Mitch Kapor, founder of Lotus Development Corporation, once said, Getting information off the Internet is like taking a drink from a fire hydrant
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On September 19th, I will be presenting a seminar to the NSW branch of CHISIG - the Computer-Human Interaction Special Interest Group of Australia – about our research in CSIRO that focuses on controlling the flow of information to deliver the right content to the right people at the right time in the right form.
Our research approaches the problem by using knowledge about users and their interaction to tailor the information that is gathered and to present it appropriately. The context information that is captured and reasoned about can include user preferences and characteristics, as well as details of a user’s current task, their previous history of interaction and their environment. This context can determine which information should be retrieved, and how that content should be aggregated, organised, and presented, in order to best support the user.
My presentation will cover work that builds on concepts and techniques from a variety of different fields, including: natural language generation, information extraction, information retrieval, discourse analysis, user modelling, task analysis and HCI, so if any of those topics spark interest (and you happen to be in Sydney) you might consider coming along to PTG Global on Tuesday 19th.
Invention versus Innovation
I work in a research organisation where the word innovation
is thrown around with gay abandon, especially by management folks. We’re under constant pressure to be inventing and innovating, though the two words are often used interchangeably But, how should we judge when innovation has occurred? What about invention? What’s the difference?
In the midst of their recent article on “Innovation as Language Action” in CACM, Peter Denning and Robert Dunham propose an answer that I find both simple and compelling: innovation occurs where we observe that a group or community has adopted a new practice. Invention is something different – it means to create something new, but it does not require that anyone accept or adopt it.
I should also point out that Denning and Dunham’s article is interesting for many other reasons than the distinction it draws between innovation and invention. In particular, their work takes inspiration from the earlier work of Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores (whose ideas are very influential in my own research), in looking at the specific skills and steps involved in taking new technology inventions into the broader market from a language-action perspective.
Innovation as the adoption of new practices seems nicely consistent with the ideas of Peter Drucker, who himself linked innovation to the adoption of new practices back in the 1950s. Of course, another definitional question that then arises is: what exactly is meant by practice
? Denning and Dunham suggest that practice
refers to habits, routines, and other forms of embodied recurrent actions taken without conscious thought, and to me this seems largely to capture the concept.
But is Denning and Dunham’s definition of innovation widely accepted?
(more…)
CeBIT Australia 2006
After returning from leave, I was immediately immersed in last minute preparations for CeBIT Australia 2006. After spending much of Monday afternoon assisting with the construction and setup of the CSIRO stand, I then spent 2 days this week at CeBIT show-casing ICT research from across a range of CSIRO divisions. Our main demonstration was again SciFly, our tailored brochure generation system – with much improved robustness and performance from last year. I had several interesting discussions with interested people about applying SciFly and the underlying technology to a range of problems across a variety of industries. For me, this was the most satisfying success metric of my time at CeBIT.
As well as demonstrating our technology at the CSIRO booth, I also gave a short seminar on Contextualised Information Retrieval and Delivery as part of the Future Parc seminar series. The environment was a challenging one for speakers, with much background noise, unreadably small plasma screens for displaying slides, and no less than 6 parallel sessions of seminars at various points around CeBIT to compete with. Despite this, I think I managed to engage at least some of the people in the audience, based on the couple of thoughtful follow-up discussions that I had after the seminar.
Good Times for CSIRO ICT Research
The ICT Centre has been a big winner in CSIRO’s recent revision of research priorities, with a substantial increase in research dollars being directed our way. In dollar terms, the CSIRO ICT Centre will see its budget increase by over 14% to $48M in 2006/07, which includes a substantial increase in its involvement in CSIRO National Research Flagships ($5.3M to $12.7M) to address research issues of national significance.
Of course, this new funding is in addition to the recently announced Intelligent Island funding that will be invested into establishing an ICT Centre presence in Tasmania.
I actually spent much of today interviewing candidates for our most recent software engineering position; if our growth continues at its recent pace (and the increased funding almost ensures this) I should probably get used to spending a lot more time interviewing people.
R&D Software Engineer Wanted
Ok, so if you’re a software engineer looking for new challenges in 2006, here’s a great opportunity for you. My research team within the CSIRO ICT Centre (the Information Delivery team) is seeking to recruit a highly competent, motivated, and energetic software engineer to our Sydney laboratory.
You will contribute to software engineering, R&D and commercialisation activities within our small but highly productive team carrying out leading-edge research in the area of information engineering and the development of advanced search and delivery technology. This role will have a particular focus on mobile phone and PDA technology.
A degree in Software Engineering or a related discipline is essential; an honours degree or higher qualification would be an advantage, but not essential.
We need you to demonstrate excellent programming expertise in at least Java (preferably other languages too), familiarity with Web services, and preferably have exposure to mobile phone or PDA software development platforms. The development
projects underway need you to work on both research prototypes and on commercial products. Your willingness to provide technical support, an ability to write high quality documentation, and a capacity to talk to customers are important.
Finally, you should enjoy working in teams, be honest, trustworthy, and ethical, with an ability to contribute creative ideas to our projects.
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Reference Number: |
2006/63
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Position Title: |
Software Engineer – Information Delivery
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Division: |
CSIRO ICT Centre
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Location: |
North Ryde, NSW
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Classification: |
CSOF4 to CSOF5
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Salary Range: |
$58k – $72k + superannuation
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Tenure: |
12 month term
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Applicants: |
International Applicants Welcome
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Relocation Assistance: |
May be offered to the successful applicant.
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Applications Close: |
27 Jan 2006
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Job Category: |
Computer Software/Scientific Research
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For further details, selection criteria and to apply for this position, please visit: http://recruitment.csiro.au/asp/job_details.asp?RefNo=2006/63
If you have any questions about this position, please post a comment here, or feel free to email me (Andrew.Lampert@csiro.au).
Seeing into the future takes a team focus
If you’re interested in knowing a little more about the CSIRO ICT Centre (where I work) take a look at this profile of our director, Alex Zelinsky in the Sydney Morning Herald. I certainly don’t mind being counted among “200 of the nation’s brightest computing and engineering researchers” 
I also like Alex’s philosophy that “Talent attracts talent”. Google is of course the most extreme example of this right now, to the point that I’ve read several recent articles lamenting that all other tech companies in the US are currently suffering a brain drain to the search behemoth.
While we’re not quite at the same scale as Google, if you feel like joining our local pool of talent, you’ve only got one more day to apply for the software engineering position that closes tomorrow.
