‘Dealing with My Emails’: Latent user needs in email management.

Email is a communication channel that provides a number of benefits. It can be stored, retrieved and forwarded. It also allows a recipient to choose when to uptake communication and how to pace it. However, email also incurs one prevalent cost: the feeling of email overload. One of the reasons leading to that feeling lays in the fact that current email clients do not provide an inbox structure that facilitates email prioritization, information structuring and work-flow management. The goal of this study was to understand the latent user needs regarding handling emails. We identified six such needs: three pertaining to email organization (email annotation, reliable structure and no urgency to classify) and three related to email retrieval (informative overview, flexible sorting and efficient search). We further investigated the dominance, importance and dependencies between these needs. The results were then discussed and implications for future inbox design were proposed.     

社交媒体中的信息推荐

近年来社交媒体越来越流行,可以从中获得大量丰富多彩的信息的同时,也带来了严重的"信息过载"问题.推荐系统作为缓解信息过载最有效的方法之一,在社交媒体中的作用日趋重要.区别于传统的推荐方法,社交媒体中包含大量的用户产生内容,因此在社交媒体中,通过结合传统的个性化的推荐方法,集成各类新的数据、元数据和清晰的用户关系,产生了各种新的推荐技术.总结了社交推荐系统中的几个关键研究领域,包括基于社会化标注的推荐、组推荐和基于信任的推荐,之后介绍了在信息推荐中考虑时间因素时的情况,最后对社交媒体中信息推荐有待深入研究的难点和发展趋势进行了展望.     

A method and advisor tool for multimedia user interface design

This paper describes a multimedia user interface design method and a design assistant tool which supports the method. The method covers specification of user requirements and information architecture, selection of appropriate media to represent the information content, design for directing attention to important information and interaction design to enhance user engagement. Guidelines for media selection and design for attractiveness, i.e. usability and user experience, are given. The method was evaluated in a case study design of a crowd control simulation training system, which demonstrated the method was usable and gave good solutions against an expert gold standard design. The tool provides advice on media selection and attention effects that match specification of the information content expressed as information types and communication goals. A usability evaluation was carried out to measure the usefulness and effectiveness of the tool in comparison to the method, and the results showed that the tool has a positive impact on multimedia design.     

You’ve got email! Does it really matter to process emails now or later?

Email consumes as much as a quarter of knowledge workers’ time in organizations today. Almost a necessity for communication, email does interrupt a worker’s other main tasks and ultimately leads to information overload. Though issues such as spam, email filtering and archiving have received much attention from industry and academia, the critical problem of the timing of email processing has not been studied much. It is common for many knowledge workers to check and respond to their email almost continuously. Though some emails may require very quick responses, checking emails almost continuously may lead to interruptions in regular knowledge work. Managing email processing can make a significant difference in an organization’s productivity. Previous research on this topic suggests that perhaps the best way to minimize the effect of interruptions is to process email frequently for example, every 45 min. In this study, we focus on studying email response timing approaches to optimize the communication times and yet reduce the interruptive effects. We investigate previous recommendations by performing a two-phase study involving rigorous simulation experiments. Models were developed for identifying efficient and effective email processing policies by comparing various ways to reduce interruptions for different types of knowledge workers. In contrast to earlier research findings, results indicate that significant productivity improvements could be achieved through the use of some email processing policies while helping attain a balance between email response time and task completion time. Findings also suggest that the best policy may be to respond to email two to four times a day instead of every 45 min or continuously, as is common with many knowledge workers. We conclude by presenting many research opportunities for analytical and organizational IS researchers.     

Business strategic conflict in computer-mediated communication

In this paper, we introduce the concept of business strategic conflict and examine its influence on communication media selection and use in inter-organisational collaborations. In doing so, we show the inherent complexities in the computer-mediated interactions between synergistic companies in the same industry. The work draws on a field study carried out for 5 months in a case of a product design collaboration between two large high-tech corporations in Taiwan and Korea. Findings show that at an early stage of the collaboration, the use of media has shifted substantially from FTF meetings to email, while it is also found that, due to the competitive nature of the inter-organisational collaboration involved, business strategic conflict significantly influences media selection and, in turn, it is influenced by the selected media. Our results contribute to media selection theories that have so far neglected the coopetitive inter-organisational environment.     

Cultural values,media richness and telecommunication use in an organization

This paper deals with adapting the telecommunication services of an organization to the diversity of individual value orientations related to culture. After a discussion of the processes linking telecommunication use to cultural values, we show on empirical grounds the relationship between the preference of the individual for organizational cultures and his or her telecommunication use (fax, email (electronic mail), vmail (voice mail) and telephone). The cultural values were measured for 223 individuals in a French company using Q sort with balanced block design while telecommunication use was measured through a diary method. The final analysis was performed on 799 internal communications of 145 individuals having access to the four telecommunication services. In particular we found that the use of new media was more related to an orientation towards innovation or reactivity or entrepreneurship than the telephone. Email appeared as associated to relation-oriented rather than task-oriented value and suggests that the amount of feedback plays a role in the process of telecommunications media choice. We argue that cultural analysis is not only an interesting complementary approach to information richness theory for understanding telecommunication choices, but can also lead to different decisions. As an example, we examine the decision to withdraw either vmail or email in a downsizing situation.     

A comparison study of user behavior on Facebook and Gmail

Email is one of the most important communication media to date, and millions of Internet users around the world spend the bulk of their time writing and reading electronic messages. The growing popularity of Social Network Sites (SNS) as a communication medium motivated us to explore the relationship between user behavior on SNS and email. In this paper, we collected objective, privacy-preserved behavior data from participants that were both active Facebook and Gmail users. We show that a large proportion of social interactions still occur through email messages, while participants tend to be more emotional on Facebook. We found that producing more content on Facebook does not necessarily decrease or increase the production of emails. By utilizing the quantitative analysis of usage data instead of surveys, we show that user behavior is likely consistent across SNS and email in some aspects, for example, users with more Facebook friends seem to email to more people, Facebook and Gmail share similar trend of “happiness”.     

The Internet and Social Participation: Contrasting Cross‐Sectional and Longitudinal Analyses

The Internet opens new options for communication and may change the extent to which people use older communication media. Changes in the way people communicate are important, because communication is the mechanism people use to develop and maintain social relationships, so valuable for their physical and mental health. This paper uses data from a national panel survey conducted in 2000 and 2001 to examine the influence of Internet use on communication and on social involvement. In doing so, it contrasts the conclusions one can draw from cross-sectional and longitudinal data on these issues. Longitudinal analyses provide stronger evidence of the causal effects of using the Internet than do the cross-sectional ones. The longitudinal data show that heavy use of the Internet is associated with reductions in the likelihood of visiting family or friends on a randomly selected day. Cross-sectional analyses show high correlations between the frequency with which respondents communicate with specific family members by visits, phone calls and email, suggesting that communication in one medium stimulates the others. In contrast, longitudinal analyses suggest that the links between communication media are asymmetric: visits drive more email communication and phone calls drive more visits, but email drives neither phone calls nor visits.     

An approach for temporal analysis of email data based on segmentation

Many kinds of information are hidden in email data, such as the information being exchanged, the time of exchange, and the user IDs participating in the exchange. Analyzing the email data can reveal valuable information about the social networks of a single user or multiple users, the topics being discussed, and so on. In this paper, we describe a novel approach for temporally analyzing the communication patterns embedded in email data based on time series segmentation. The approach computes egocentric communication patterns of a single user, as well as sociocentric communication patterns involving multiple users. Time series segmentation is used to uncover patterns that may span multiple time points and to study how these patterns change over time. To find egocentric patterns, the email communication of a user is represented as an item-set time series. An optimal segmentation of the item-set time series is constructed, from which patterns are extracted. To find sociocentric patterns, the email data is represented as an item-setgroup time series. Patterns involving multiple users are then extracted from an optimal segmentation of the item-setgroup time series. The proposed approach is applied to the Enron email data set, which produced very promising results.     

Managing email overload with an automatic nonparametric clustering system

Email overload is a recent problem that there is increasingly difficulty that people have to process the large number of emails received daily. Currently, this problem becomes more and more serious and it has already affected the normal usage of email as a knowledge management tool. It has been recognized that categorizing emails into meaningful groups can greatly save cognitive load to process emails, and thus this is an effective way to manage the email overload problem. However, most current approaches still require significant human input for categorizing emails. In this paper, we develop an automatic email clustering system, underpinned by a new nonparametric text clustering algorithm. This system does not require any predefined input parameters and can automatically generate meaningful email clusters. The evaluation shows our new algorithm outperforms existing text clustering algorithms with higher efficiency and quality in terms of computational time and clustering quality measured by different gauges. The experimental results also well match the labeled human clustering results.

新媒体 新体验 新设计——浅谈基于数字媒体的信息设计与传播

数字媒体是数字计算技术和现代通讯技术发展的产物,数字媒体的出现使信息的传输有了全新的方式和途径,给人们带来了全新的信息体验。同时,针对这一崭新媒体而进行的信息设计也发展成为一个令人兴奋而又富于挑战的新兴设计领域,体现出了不同于传统媒体设计的新特性。本文结合数字媒体的新特性,就基于数字新媒体的信息设计与传播谈了自己的一些初步认识。     

车联网中基于轨迹预测的无人机动态协同优化覆盖算法

针对城市车联网中出现的基站覆盖空洞及局部流量过载等问题,提出了一种基于车辆轨迹预测信息的动态预部署方案。首先,为了训练得到统一的seq2seq-GRU轨迹预测模型,多个携带边缘计算服务器的无人机在分布式联邦学习与区块链的架构下,去除中心聚合节点,采取改进的Raft算法,在每轮训练中根据贡献数据量的大小,选举得到节点来完成参数聚合及模型更新任务。其次,基于模型预测结果,提出了一种改进的虚拟力向导部署算法,通过各虚拟力来引导无人机进行动态地部署以提升车辆的接入率及通信质量。仿真结果表明,提出的训练架构能够加速模型的训练,部署算法在提升车辆接入率的同时提升了车辆与无人机之间的通信质量。     

Identifying interesting Twitter contents using topical analysis

Social media platforms such as Twitter are becoming increasingly mainstream which provides valuable user-generated information by publishing and sharing contents. Identifying interesting and useful contents from large text-streams is a crucial issue in social media because many users struggle with information overload. Retweeting as a forwarding function plays an important role in information propagation where the retweet counts simply reflect a tweet’s popularity. However, the main reason for retweets may be limited to personal interests and satisfactions. In this paper, we use a topic identification as a proxy to understand a large number of tweets and to score the interestingness of an individual tweet based on its latent topics. Our assumption is that fascinating topics generate contents that may be of potential interest to a wide audience. We propose a novel topic model called Trend Sensitive-Latent Dirichlet Allocation (TS-LDA) that can efficiently extract latent topics from contents by modeling temporal trends on Twitter over time. The experimental results on real world data from Twitter demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms several other baseline methods.     

A survey of blind users on the usability of email applications

Blind users face many challenges and obstacles when using computers at home and in the workplace, including difficulties in accessing web sites and using corporate software. A detailed understanding of usability problems in common email applications can inform designs that will provide improved usability. To help understand the challenges faced, a web-based survey on email usage by blind screen reader users was conducted. This paper presents the results of the survey of 129 blind users, which reveal several important facets of email applications that can be improved for blind users. The paper also discusses the specific challenges that are faced by blind users when using desktop and web-based email software.     

Network-based filtering for large email collections in E-Discovery

The information overload in E-Discovery proceedings makes reviewing expensive and it increases the risk of failure to produce results on time and consistently. New interactive techniques have been introduced to increase reviewer productivity. In contrast, the techniques presented in this article propose an alternative method that tries to reduce information during culling so that less information needs to be reviewed. The proposed method first focuses on mapping the email collection universe using straightforward statistical methods based on keyword filtering combined with date time and custodian identities. Subsequently, a social network is constructed from the email collection that is analyzed by filtering on date time and keywords. By using the network context we expect to provide a better understanding of the keyword hits and the ability to discard certain parts of the collection.     

Using mobile communication technology in high school education: Motivation,pressure, and learning performance

Motivation and pressure are considered two factors impacting vocational senior high school student learning. New communication technology, especially mobile communication technology, is supposed to be effective in encouraging interaction between the student and the instructor and improving learning efficiency. Social presence and information richness theory was applied to analyze the media and their impacts on the instruction process firstly. Then the author observed firstly the impact of using individual communication technologies – namely Short Message Service (SMS), email, and online forum – on student learning motivation, pressure, and performance, based on a comparative investigation of 176 students. Then the impacts of using combination of mobile and Internet communication technology – SMS + email, SMS + online forum – were examined with another experiment of 45 students. The result showed that instant messaging helps bonding the two roles – student and instructor – in the instruction process effectively. When combined with Internet communication media, it can significantly increase student extrinsic motivation without causing higher pressure. Additionally, communication media demanding public expression rather than private dialogue should be adopted with careful consideration, since they may raise student pressure.     

A critical review of research on electronic mail

This paper reviews the literature on email (including computer conferencing) and discusses the most important current issues in the field. Though it will be of interest to researchers working specifically in the email field, it is intended mainly as a summary for IS researchers in other areas. Email research is part of a wider field, computer-mediated communication (CMC), which includes some areas not covered here, such as the Internet, video conferencing and EDI. Most research on email has concerned itself with the issues of media choice and media effects. Despite a great deal of published work though, the field still has an unsatisfactory, piecemeal feel to it. Much of the work that has been published is unsatisfactory in being based upon unrealistic, laboratory-like simulations, and a positivist epistemology. Most of the work concerns the use of email and the effects of using email on individuals and groups; little has been done on the effects at an organizational level. The paper concludes with some suggestions for future avenues of research.     

基于P2P协作的垃圾邮件发送行为识别技术研究

在分析目前垃圾邮件过滤技术的基础上,并根据垃圾邮件大量发送行为特征,提出了一种基于P2P协作的垃圾邮件发送行为识别技术。该技术将各邮件服务器组成一个反垃圾邮件（Anti-Spam）P2P网络,每个邮件服务器储存可疑邮件信息并将这些信息共享在Anti-Spam P2P网络上,然后根据可疑邮件信息在Anti-Spam P2P网络上进行协作识别垃圾邮件。实验结果表明,该技术是针对垃圾邮件的群发特征而不依赖于邮件内容、语言类型或格式分析,在MTA阶段就能过滤大量垃圾邮件,提高了处理速度和准确率并节省大量的系统资源,具有良好的过滤性能。     

To email or not to email: The impact of media on psychophysiological responses and emotional content in utilitarian and romantic communication

Lean asynchronous computer mediated communication is often considered poor for communicating emotion, yet individuals continue to use it for business, personal, and even romantic communication. We used a lab experiment to investigate the influence of media (email and voicemail) and task type (romantic and utilitarian) on both the psychophysiological responses of senders and the content of the resulting messages. Message senders had more arousing physiological responses when sending emails than when leaving voicemails. An interaction exists between media and task such that the content of romantic email messages was more positive than romantic voicemails; while the opposite was true for utilitarian tasks. Thus the choice of media triggers different emotional responses in the sender and leads to different message content.