A University College Dublin (UCD) scientist has filed a patent application for a new technology that he believes can turn email into a much more effective business tool.
US-born Dr Nicholas Kushmerick, a senior lecturer in the Department of Computer Science at UCD, has developed the technology over the past year during his part-time position as visiting scientist on IBM’s Centre for Advanced Studies (CAS) initiative. This is a programme that aims to forge links between the computer maker’s Dublin software lab and the academic community in order to turn new technology into marketable products.
Kushmerick developed the technology, known as Active Email Manager (AEM), in concert with New York-based IBM researcher Tessa Lau. Together they developed a machine-learning algorithm that automatically keeps track of tasks and associated emails, in order to build up a work flow for each task.
“The vision is that rather than come in and download all your emails, you could just call up your to do list and manage your activities,” Kushmerick explains.
At the same time, the computer program has the intelligence to distinguish between these work-related tasks and other types of email such as personal correspondence.
Nine months into the project, Kushmerick and Lau have developed a prototype and conducted a series of experiments to measure its accuracy and effectiveness. Patent applications have been filed by IBM lawyers in a number of countries. The two scientists have also presented their findings at the Intelligent User Interfaces conference in California in January — a leading international event for this area of research — where their paper was voted one of the two best papers at the event.
The technology is currently being appraised by two separate research groups within IBM, with the aim of turning into a commercial product. One of these is the Massachusetts-based product development team that develops IBM’s suite of collaboration software, Lotus Workplace. “There are some pretty intensive discussions going on now to see if we can get enough attention and convince them that our idea is feasible and that they would put it into their product pipeline,” says Kushmerick.
Kushmerick has lived in Ireland since 1998. Having completed his PhD at the University of Washington in Seattle the previous year, he was pondering his next career move along with his Canadian-born wife. They chose Ireland randomly, he says, by “throwing a dart on a map”. At the time Irish science was poorly funded but the advent of Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) has changed all that and made Ireland one of the best places in the world to do research, according to Kushmerick, who doubts whether he would still be in Ireland were it not for SFI. “When I arrived in Dublin there was a modest amount of funding for computer science. With SFI it’s completely changed. SFI gives some of the biggest research grants anywhere in the world … the equivalent funding agencies in the US don’t give anything similar to the level of funding that’s available from SFI now. It’s really a fantastic opportunity for Ireland.”
As an SFI principal investigator, Kushmerick has received five-year funding of €1m (2002-2007) to build a team of nine scientists who conduct research in the area of machine learning and information extraction and retrieval. This focuses on the computational analysis of ‘natural text’ such as email messages and news articles.
“Natural text contains a lot of content but it’s all loosely structured,” he explains. “Computers understand structured data, where you have rows and columns of data with very well-defined meaning. Most of my work involves taking that unstructured data and somehow massaging into a structured format so that a machine can take some action and make decisions.”
By Brian Skelly
