An Operable Email Based Intelligent Personal Assistant

The recent phenomena of email-function-overloading and email-centricness in daily life and business have created new problems to users. There is a practical need for developing a software assistant to facilitate the management of personal and organizational emails, and to enable users to complete their email-centric jobs or tasks smoothly. This paper presents the status, goals, and key technical elements of an Email-Centric Intelligent Personal Assistant, called ECIPA. ECIPA provides various assisting functions, including automated and cost-sensitive spam filtering based on corresponding analysis, ontology-mediated email classification, query and archiving. ECIPA can learn from dynamic user behaviors to effectively sort and automatically respond email. Techniques developed in Web Intelligence (WI) are adopted to implement ECIPA. In order to facilitate cooperation of ECIPAs of different users, the concept of operable email, an extension of traditional email with an operable form, is introduced. ECIPA can in fact be viewed as a family of collaborative agents working together on the operable email.