Email overload: Using machine learning to manage messages, commitments - Microsoft Research

As email continues to be not only an important means of communication but also an official record of information and a tool for managing tasks, schedules, and collaborations, making sense of everything moving in and out of our inboxes will only get more difficult. The good news is there's a method to the madness of staying on top of your email, and Microsoft researchers are drawing on this behavior to create tools to support users. Two teams working in the space will be presenting papers at this year's ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining February 11–15 in Melbourne, Australia. "Identifying the emails you need to pay attention to is a challenging task," says Partner Researcher and Research Manager Ryen White of Microsoft Research, who manages a team of about a dozen scientists and engineers and typically receives 100 to 200 emails a day. "Right now, we end up doing a lot of that on our own."