Semantic Emails

Semantic Emails: Agent Technology in Email Systems Debanshu Bhaumik, Debashish Sahu, Dhruv Damle, Vishnu MS National Institute of Design PG Campus, GH-0, Extension Road, Gandhinagar 381020 debanshu_b, debashish.s, dhruv_d, vishnu_m@nid.edu ABSTRACT This paper introduces the concept of semantic email system as our response the OZCHI 24 hours challenge.

We have attempted to look into the problem of categorization, task management, context awareness and aesthetics of email by defining the possible characteristics of the emails. The design solution envisions a scenario where individual emails act as agents interacting with each other within a digital landscape controlled by the user.

We have drawn our inspiration from Agent Technologies which are artificial intelligent systems that are made to learn and automate certain procedures and processes. An agent is a computer system capable of flexible autonomous action in a dynamic, unpredictable and open environment. Agent technologies are a natural extension of current component based approaches, and have the potential to greatly impact the lives and work of all of us and, accordingly, this area is one of the most dynamic and exciting in computer science today [Luck et al., 2003]. We thought of a scenario where emails can become agents and the inbox becomes a community of agents.

Author Keywords Email; Agent technology; Semantic web.

We propose to explore and design the idea of Semantic Email addressing to all the above mentioned concerns.

The Semantic Web promotes this synergy: even agents that were not expressly designed to work together can transfer data among themselves when the data come with semantics [Berners-Lee et al., 2001].

ACM Classification Keywords I.12. Intelligent Web Services and Semantic Web INTRODUCTION To answer the challenge, we decided to look into the past systems of email and the nature in which people use it.

We have tried not to be technologically deterministic but to l o o k into emerging new media p o s s i b i l i t i e s a n d people’s activities which are going to create the whole system.

METHODOLOGY We started with literature review so as to understand the system better. We read through the history of emails and the functionality enhancements that has been made throughout the history. We referred to the social aspects Of e m a i l at organizational hierarchy to get a better scenario. We began listing out the activities that we do in email interfaces and later on brainstorming on the problems associated with those activities. We did precedence studies and explored the existing systems that caters to some of these problems and examined the way they have done it. For example Welovemail application uses a task based interface catering to the problem of categorization and low task orientation in email systems.

Attachments.me an application which is used to share the files in the email system was also interesting as the application has used the activity of saving files on to emails as people consider it, a much safer place than desktops. We drew up on future technologies that is going to affect the whole web and the email systems like cloud computing and agent technologies, with which we started ideation. We refined the idea in to a final concept by examining the concerns of it in the problem areas that we had already identified. Finally, we did a group discussion with the potential users so as to understand the relevance of each feature that was proposed.

To understand the existing and past email systems we started with literature review and examining our own way of interacting with the systems. We listed down the activities that are defined by the interface and those which have evolved with user requirements like using email to make and save rough drafts.

Email has come to play a central role in task management, yet email tool features have remained relatively static in recent years, lagging behind users’ evolving practices [Bellotti et al., 2003]. Email is not a product, it’s a protocol that lets you send and receive information. Changing the functions of the system at the root level can redefine the interface and experience of the interaction in a different way.

Considering the present scenario of convergence in new media our email inboxes have become a habitat of information related to our internet presence. Content categorization is another emerging problem which is the result of this convergence and boom of social media. It also has influenced the way we use our email systems and it has become much more formal in its use.

Emails are primarily asynchronous in nature and are delivered without being aware about the context in which the recipient is. Relevance of emails can change with time and place which is not taken into consideration.

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CONCEPT The concept evolves by bringing the agent technology characteristic into email where each email sent by the user becomes an agent which can interact with the other agents and form communities in our inboxes. The community thus created is constructed by the user and each entity in the agent forms the characteristics of the community which can understand the nature of the user.

To look at it from a broader perspective, the agent email and its community in the inbox will have characteristics that cater to different problems in existing email systems.

Categorization

Categorization is the nature by which agent groups inside the community are differentiated into families. Each family within themselves will have hierarchy. This caters to the problem of prioritizing tasks and collating related items by the user. For example, categorization allows detecting agents which are spams and are not allowed to enter the community. An agent detected as spam can go back to the sender and request for changes.

Since the agent emails are the intelligent they form collective unconsciousness. Various tasks are performed based on unconscious characteristics that are developed by the interaction of the user with the email system.

Hierarchy and categorization by the chaotic interaction between objects can create a natural system specific for each user.

The characteristics of the agent email include: Receptive Nature

Each of the emails or agents which are sent bears certain receptive characteristics. Each entity can share positive characteristics in terms of their content quality and style.

Receptive nature of incoming mail/agent can help understand the nature of inbox of the user and modify itself according to the community to which it belongs inside the inbox.

This receptive nature can be utilized to change the aesthetics of the content according to the characteristics of the community and thus personalize according to the nature of the user for that community.

Task Management

Tasks could be classified into immediate and nonimmediate. Immediate tasks are those which could be completed by agent emails on their own. The agents are intelligent enough to complete those tasks by themselves.

Non-immediate tasks are the ones which need a prompt from the user. The agent emails can suggest a suitable response or reply but they need a final confirmation from the user. For example if a file is requested in in an email, depending on the characteristics of the community an auto response could be generated and the file could be sent or not.

CONCLUSIONS The characteristics proposed in the paper were analyzed with focus group discussions and these were the conclusions.

Automated calendar sync and a to-do list could be achieved without even prompting the user.

Receptive nature of the email was not supported by 60% of the users as they thought it might take over their ability of self-expression while writing an email. The other three, viz. Task Management, Physical Context Awareness and Categorization were largely supported by all the users since they found these as very useful add-ons over existing email features.

Another proposed feature came up with the Focus group discussion was, in changing the functionality of physical context awareness in way that the mail lands in the mail box irrespective of the context but notifies the user based on the space and time.

Physical Context Awareness

Since we are using intelligent agent email we can send email to a physical space where as soon as a person enters they will get the email. For example a man needs to buy groceries from a supermarket after his work. The wife can email the list of the groceries which he gets as soon as he enters the supermarket but not earlier in his office where he can easily forget it due to work pressure.

Through the process we followed for the design challenge, we came to the proposal that use of agent technology would be the future of email, with individual emails behaving in an organic manner. This would Introduce a considerable degree of intelligence to the email system thus making our lives simpler.

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REFERENCES Michael Luck, Peter McBurney and Chris Preist. Agent Technology: Enabling Next Generation Computing. A Roadmap for Agent-Based Computing Version 1.0 ISBN 0854 327886.

Michael Luck, Peter McBurney and Chris Preist, Scientific American: Feature Article: The Semantic Web,2001.

Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler and Ora Lassila. 2001 http://venturebeat.com/2012/07/14/why-email-wont-bereplaced-anytime-soon/#c5hXKLjLhOOpOmv0.99

Victoria Bellotti, Nicolas Ducheneaut, Mark Howard, Ian Smith. Taking Email to Task: The Design and Evaluation of a Task Management Centered Email Tool, Palo Alto Research Center, 2003.

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