Activity-Centric Email: A Machine Learning Approach

Abstract

Our use of ordinary desktop applications (such as email, Web, calendars) is often a manifestation of the activities with which we are engaged (Moran, Cozzi, & Farrell 2005). Planning a conference trip involves sending travel expense forms, and visits to airline and hotel sites. Renovating a kitchen involves sketches, product specifications, emails with the architect and spreadsheets for tracking expenses. Every enterprise has (often implicit) processes for manag-ing customer queries, requesting maintenance, hiring a new employee, purchasing equipment, and so on. Unfortunately, ordinary desktop applications do not know anything about these activities. Within an enterprise, many activities have been formalized into business workflows such as hiring or ordering equipment. However, the way peo-ple interact with these workflows is often through email and