alex.moskalyuk

Marc Smith of Microsoft Research gave a great talk today regarding the digital tracks that individuals are leaving online, and the research that has been done by Smith’s team at Microsoft.

NetScan analyzes the Usenet postings with the goal of deducing the users’ roles. NetScan can figure out who among the group are the active participants, who is adding value to the group by being an answerer, and who is being a spammer, posting frequently, but not on topic. The interesting thing about Smith’s project is that it’s content-independent, i.e. it analyzes the threads, not the actual postings, and therefore could be applied to any Usenet group out there. Looking at the home page for the product, the top Usenet groups by the number of postings are political, and Marc demoed the differences in threads between technical and political groups. While technical groups tend to have a small amount of experts who reply to everybody’s questions, but rarely ask any themselves, the political groups tend to self-organize around oldtimers who discuss every new political development, with occasional newbie jumping into the discussion.

The AURA project allows Smith to carry a smartphone with a built in barcode reader to auto-generate a personal portal of items he’s seen and considered buying. The idea of building product-centered portal combined with personalization has quite a few interesting possibilities for innovation. For one, you can tell the smartphone your diet needs, which are sometimes related to religion, and therefore get information on whether the surveyed product is Kosher, Vegan, low-carb, Atkins-compliant, etc. If I am planning to work on my cholesterol, and therefore need a diet low in saturated fat and high in omega oils, then such a device would quickly allow me to scan the product shelf in the grocery store to choose the right cereal. Second, a product-centered portal would contain reviews and recommendations from the people I trust. Here’s, for example, a review of the Absolut Book. Third, virtually every store out there becomes a physical Amazon storefront - you check out the product, then conduct an instant shopping search, and (most likely) buy it on Amazon.

SNARF is a pretty cool research project from Microsoft that analyzes your Outlook e-mail to find out the relationships of people who are important to you, and separate those letters from the list subscriptions and other not so important messages. Another idea is to seed SNARF with pre-existing information, such as the corporate org chart, so that the e-mail from your immediate bosses and coworkers get prioritized, as opposed to the discussions within other groups, on which you’re CC’ed just out of general interest or your past involvements in the project.

Overall, Microsoft is doing heavy research in social networking area, trying to help users deal with information availability, analyze large amounts of data and make better decisions while dealing with tons of input.