Visualizing Social and Temporal Structures in Email: Recent Work in SOYLENT and SNARF

Email has become a \"habitat\", a place where we not only communicate, but manage our tasks and personal information. Indeed, in many ways, email logs are a record of a user\'s social interaction patterns. We can use these logs to begin to understand the social structure of our interactions, and then to present new interfaces to both email itself, and to the rest of the computer system, that are more responsive to these social structures

In this talk, I present two different approaches to this information. The Soylent project, part of my dissertation work at UC Irvine, examines social networks and the temporal shifts within email, and uses them as a way of connecting different forms of interaction. The Snarf project, at Microsoft Research, is more narrowly focused on the email triage task. Snarf exposes some of the most important attributes of recent email in order to place it within a context so that the reader can quickly choose and review it.

SPonsored by the Interactive Systems Research Group.