Email has remained a principal form of communication among people, both in enterprise and social settings. With a deluge of emails crowding our mailboxes daily, there is a dire need of smart email systems that can recover important emails and make personalized recommendations. In this work, we study the problem of predicting user triage actions to incoming emails where we take the reply prediction as a working example. Different from existing methods, we formulate the triage action prediction as a recommendation problem and focus on the content-based approach, where the users are represented using the content of current and past emails. We also introduce additional similarity features to further explore the affinities between users and emails. Experiments on the publicly available Avocado email collection demonstrate the advantages of our proposed recommendation framework and our method is able to achieve better performance compared to the state-of-the-art deep recommendation methods. More importantly, we provide valuable insight into the effectiveness of different textual and user representations and show that traditional bag-of-words approaches, with the help from the similarity features, compete favorably with the more advanced neural embedding methods.
Personalized email prioritization through collaborative filtering has also been studied for broadcast emails @cite_13 , where the prediction is based on the feedback from a small subset of recipients of the same email. Despite showing great performance, the problem scope considered is rather limited. It can only be applied to emails sent to large number of recipients and can not perform the prediction on delivery time since it needs to wait for responses from some subset of the recipients. Therefore, it can not be applied to the general prediction problem including predictions for emails sent to limited number of recipients and time-sensitive situations.
@cite_13
2339136142
Email is one of the most important communication tools today, but email overload resulting from the large number of unimportant or irrelevant emails is causing trillion-level economy loss every year. Thus personalized email prioritization algorithms are of urgent need. Despite lots of previous effort on this topic, broadcast email, an important type of email, is overlooked in previous literature. Broadcast emails are significantly different from normal emails, introducing both new challenges and opportunities. On one hand, lack of real senders and limited user interactions invalidate the key features exploited by traditional email prioritization algorithms; on the other hand, thousands of receivers for one broadcast email bring us the opportunity to predict importance through collaborative filtering. However, broadcast emails face a severe cold-start problem which hinders the direct application of collaborative filtering. In this paper, we propose the first framework for broadcast email prioritization by designing a novel active learning model that considers the collaborative filtering, implicit feedback and time sensitive responsiveness features of broadcast emails. Our method is thoroughly evaluated on a large scale real world industrial dataset from Samsung Electronics. Our method is proved highly effective and outperforms state-of-the-art personalized email prioritization methods. Traditional spam detection systems either rely on content analysis to detect spam emails, or attempt to detect spammers before they send a message, (i.e., they rely on the origin of the message). In this paper, we introduce a third approach: we present a system for filtering spam that takes into account how messages are sent by spammers. More precisely, we focus on the email delivery mechanism, and analyze the communication at the SMTP protocol level. We introduce two complementary techniques as concrete instances of our new approach. First, we leverage the insight that different mail clients (and bots) implement the SMTP protocol in slightly different ways. We automatically learn these SMTP dialects and use them to detect bots during an SMTP transaction. Empirical results demonstrate that this technique is successful in identifying (and rejecting) bots that attempt to send emails. Second, we observe that spammers also take into account server feedback (for example to detect and remove non-existent recipients from email address lists). We can take advantage of this observation by returning fake information, thereby poisoning the server feedback on which the spammers rely. The results of our experiments show that by sending misleading information to a spammer, it is possible to prevent recipients from receiving subsequent spam emails from that same spammer. Hierarchy fundamentally shapes how we act at work. In this paper, we explore the relationship between the words people write in workplace email and the rank of the email's recipient. Using the Enron corpus as a dataset, we perform a close study of the words and phrases people send to those above them in the corporate hierarchy versus those at the same level or lower. We find that certain words and phrases are strong predictors. For example, "thought you would" strongly suggests that the recipient outranks the sender, while "let's discuss" implies the opposite. We also find that the phrases people write to their bosses do not demonstrate cognitive processes as often as the ones they write to others. We conclude this paper by interpreting our results and announcing the release of the predictive phrases as a public dataset, perhaps enabling a new class of status-aware applications. The Email Mining Toolkit (EMT) is a data mining system that computes behavior profiles or models of user email accounts. These models may be used for a multitude of tasks including forensic analyses and detection tasks of value to law enforcement and intelligence agencies, as well for as other typical tasks such as virus and spam detection. To demonstrate the power of the methods, we focus on the application of these models to detect the early onset of a viral propagation without “content-base ” (or signature-based) analysis in common use in virus scanners. We present several experiments using real email from 15 users with injected simulated viral emails and describe how the combination of different behavior models improves overall detection rates. The performance results vary depending upon parameter settings, approaching 99 p true positive (TP) (percentage of viral emails caught) in general cases and with 0.38 p false positive (FP) (percentage of emails with attachments that are mislabeled as viral). The models used for this study are based upon volume and velocity statistics of a user's email rate and an analysis of the user's (social) cliques revealed in the person's email behavior. We show by way of simulation that virus propagations are detectable since viruses may emit emails at rates different than human behavior suggests is normal, and email is directed to groups of recipients in ways that violate the users' typical communications with their social groups. To find interesting, personally relevant web content, people rely on friends and colleagues to pass links along as they encounter them. In this paper, we study and augment link-sharing via e-mail, the most popular means of sharing web content today. Armed with survey data indicating that active sharers of novel web content are often those that actively seek it out, we developed FeedMe, a plug-in for Google Reader that makes directed sharing of content a more salient part of the user experience. FeedMe recommends friends who may be interested in seeing content that the user is viewing, provides information on what the recipient has seen and how many emails they have received recently, and gives recipients the opportunity to provide lightweight feedback when they appreciate shared content. FeedMe introduces a novel design space within mixed-initiative social recommenders: friends who know the user voluntarily vet the material on the user's behalf. We performed a two-week field experiment (N=60) and found that FeedMe made it easier and more enjoyable to share content that recipients appreciated and would not have found otherwise. Limiting the frequency of checking email throughout the day reduced daily stress.Lower daily stress predicts greater well-being (e.g., higher positive affect).The frequency of checking email did not directly impact other well-being outcomes. Using email is one of the most common online activities in the world today. Yet, very little experimental research has examined the effect of email on well-being. Utilizing a within-subjects design, we investigated how the frequency of checking email affects well-being over a period of two weeks. During one week, 124 adults were randomly assigned to limit checking their email to three times a day; during the other week, participants could check their email an unlimited number of times per day. We found that during the limited email use week, participants experienced significantly lower daily stress than during the unlimited email use week. Lower stress, in turn, predicted higher well-being on a diverse range of well-being outcomes. These findings highlight the benefits of checking email less frequently for reducing psychological stress. The standard assumption of identically distributed training and test data is violated when the test data are generated in response to the presence of a predictive model. This becomes apparent, for example, in the context of email spam filtering. Here, email service providers employ spam filters, and spam senders engineer campaign templates to achieve a high rate of successful deliveries despite the filters. We model the interaction between the learner and the data generator as a static game in which the cost functions of the learner and the data generator are not necessarily antagonistic. We identify conditions under which this prediction game has a unique Nash equilibrium and derive algorithms that find the equilibrial prediction model. We derive two instances, the Nash logistic regression and the Nash support vector machine, and empirically explore their properties in a case study on email spam filtering. We describe the Pynchon Gate, a practical pseudonymous message retrieval system. Our design uses a simple distributed-trust private information retrieval protocol to prevent adversaries from linking recipients to their pseudonyms, even when some of the infrastructure has been compromised. This approach resists global traffic analysis significantly better than existing deployed pseudonymous email solutions, at the cost of additional bandwidth. We examine security concerns raised by our model, and propose solutions. Every day, thousands of people make donations to humanitarian, political, environmental, and other causes, a large amount of which occur on the Internet. The solicitations for support, the acknowledgment of a donation and the discussion of corresponding issues are often conducted via email, leaving a record of these social phenomena. In this paper, we describe a comprehensive large-scale data-driven study of donation behavior. We analyze a two-month anonymized email log from several perspectives motivated by past studies on charitable giving: (i) demographics, (ii) user interest, (iii) external time-related factors and (iv) social network influence. We show that email captures the demographic peculiarities of different interest groups, for instance, predicting demographic distributions found in US 2012 Presidential Election exit polls. Furthermore, we find that people respond to major national events, as well as to solicitations with special promotions, and that social connections are the most important factor in predicting donation behavior. Specifically, we identify trends not only for individual charities and campaigns, but also for high-level categories such as political campaigns, medical illnesses, and humanitarian relief. Thus, we show the extent to which large-scale email datasets reveal human donation behavior, and explore the limitations of such analysis. Let G be a planar graph with n vertices and with a partition of the vertex set into subsets V"0,...,V"k"-"1 for some positive integer [email protected][email protected]?n. Let S be a set of n distinct points in the plane with a partition into subsets S"0,...,S"k"-"1 with |V"i|=|S"i| ([email protected][email protected]?k-1). This paper studies the problem of computing a planar polyline drawing of G, such that each vertex of V"i is mapped to a distinct point of S"i. Lower and upper bounds on the number of bends per edge are proved for any [email protected][email protected]?n. In the special case k=n, we improve the upper and lower bounds presented in a paper by Pach and Wenger [J. Pach, R. Wenger, Embedding planar graphs at fixed vertex locations, Graphs and Combinatorics 17 (2001) 717-728]. The upper bound is based on an algorithm for computing a topological book embedding of a planar graph, such that the vertices follow a given left-to-right order and the number of crossings between every edge and the spine is asymptotically optimal, which can be regarded as a result of independent interest. A study of email responsiveness was conducted to understand how the timing of email responses conveys important information. Interviews and observations explored users' perceptions of how they responded to email and formed expectations of others' responses to them. We identified ways in which users maintain and cultivate a responsiveness image for projecting expectations about their email response. We also discuss other contextual cues people use to discover email responsiveness, which include using other tools such as the calendar and phone, accounting for the amount of work time overlap available, and establishing a pacing between email correspondents. These cues help users develop a sense of when to expect a response and when breakdown has occurred, requiring further action. Random perturbation is a popular method of computing anonymized data for privacy preserving data mining. It is simple to apply, ensures strong privacy protection, and permits effective mining of a large variety of data patterns. However, all the existing studies with good privacy guarantees focus on perturbation at a single privacy level. Namely, a fixed degree of privacy protection is imposed on all anonymized data released by the data holder. This drawback seriously limits the applicability of random perturbation in scenarios where the holder has numerous recipients to which different privacy levels apply. Motivated by this, we study the problem of multi-level perturbation, whose objective is to release multiple versions of a dataset anonymized at different privacy levels. The challenge is that various recipients may collude by sharing their data to infer privacy beyond their permitted levels. Our solution overcomes this obstacle, and achieves two crucial properties. First, collusion is useless, meaning that the colluding recipients cannot learn anything more than what the most trustable recipient (among the colluding recipients) already knows alone. Second, the data each recipient receives can be regarded (and hence, analyzed in the same way) as the output of conventional uniform perturbation. Besides its solid theoretical foundation, the proposed technique is both space economical and computationally efficient. It requires O (n+m) expected space, and produces a new anonymized version in O (n + log m) expected time, where n is the cardinality of the original dataset, and m the number of versions released previously. Both bounds are optimal under the realistic assumption that n » m. We develop and implement an optimal broadcast algorithm for fully connected processor networks under a bidirectional communication model in which each processor can simultaneously send a message to one processor and receive a message from another, possibly different processor. For any number of processors p the algorithm requires [email protected][email protected]? communication rounds to broadcast N blocks of data from a root processor to the remaining processors, meeting the lower bound in the model. For data of size m, assuming that sending and receiving data of size m^' takes time @[email protected]^', the best running time that can be achieved by the division of m into equal-sized blocks is ((@[email protected]?-1)@[email protected])^2. The algorithm uses a regular, circulant graph communication pattern, and degenerates into a binomial tree broadcast when the number of blocks to be broadcast is one. The algorithm is furthermore well suited to fully connected clusters of SMP (Symmetric Multi-Processor) nodes. The algorithm is implemented as part of an MPI (Message Passing Interface) library. We demonstrate significant practical bandwidth improvements of up to a factor 1.5 over several other, commonly used broadcast algorithms on both a small SMP cluster and a 72 node NEC SX vector supercomputer. We consider the statistical analysis of a collection of unipartite graphs, i.e., multiple matrices of relations among objects of a single type. Such data arise, for example, in biological settings, collections of author-recipient email, and social networks. In many applications, clustering the objects of study or situating them in a low dimensional space (e.g., a simplex) is only one of the goals of the analysis. Begin able to estimate relational structures among the clusters themselves is often times as important. For example, in biological applications we are interested in estimating how stable protein complexes (i.e., clusters of proteins) interact. To support such integrated data analyses, we develop the family of “stochastic block models of mixed membership”. Our models combine features of mixed-membership models (Erosheva & Fienberg, 2005) and block models for relational data (, 1983) in a hierarchical Bayesian framework. We develop a novel “nested” variational inference scheme, which is necessary to successfully perform fast approximate posterior inference in our models of relational data. We present evidence to support our claims, using both synthetic data and biological case study. There are many applications available for phishing detection. However, unlike predicting spam, there are only few studies that compare machine learning techniques in predicting phishing. The present study compares the predictive accuracy of several machine learning methods including Logistic Regression (LR), Classification and Regression Trees (CART), Bayesian Additive Regression Trees (BART), Support Vector Machines (SVM), Random Forests (RF), and Neural Networks (NNet) for predicting phishing emails. A data set of 2889 phishing and legitimate emails is used in the comparative study. In addition, 43 features are used to train and test the classifiers. Email worms constitute one of the major Internet security problems. In this paper, we present an email worm model that accounts for the behaviors of email users by considering email checking time and the probability of opening email attachments. Email worms spread over a logical network defined by email address relationship, which plays an important role in determining the spreading dynamics of an email worm. Our observations suggest that the node degrees of an email network are heavy-tailed distributed. We compare email worm propagation on three topologies: power law, small world and random graph topologies; and then study how the topology affects immunization defense on email worms. The impact of the power law topology on the spread of email worms is mixed: email worms spread more quickly on a power law topology than on a small world topology or a random graph topology, but immunization defense is more effective on a power law topology than on the other two In a phishing attack, an unsuspecting victim is lured, typically via an email, to a web site designed to steal sensitive information such as bank credit card account numbers, login information for accounts, etc. Each year Internet users lose billions of dollars to this scourge. In this paper, we present a general semantic feature selection method for text problems based on the statistical t-test and WordNet, and we show its effectiveness on phishing email detection by designing classifiers that combine semantics and statistics in analyzing the text in the email. Our feature selection method is general and useful for other applications involving text-based analysis as well. Our email body-text-only classifier achieves more than 95 accuracy on detecting phishing emails with a false positive rate of 2.24 . Due to its use of semantics, our feature selection method is robust against adaptive attacks and avoids the problem of frequent retraining needed by machine learning classifiers. We present an algorithm for isolating all roots of an arbitrary complex polynomial p that also works in the presence of multiple roots provided that (1) the number of distinct roots is given as part of the input and (2) the algorithm can ask for arbitrarily good approximations of the coefficients of p. The algorithm outputs pairwise disjoint disks each containing one of the distinct roots of p and the multiplicity of the root contained in the disk. The algorithm uses approximate factorization as a subroutine. For the case where Pan's algorithm (Pan, 2002) is used for the factorization, we derive complexity bounds for the problems of isolating and refining all roots, which are stated in terms of the geometric locations of the roots only. Specializing the latter bounds to a polynomial of degree d and with integer coefficients of bitsize less than @t, we show that [email protected]?(d^3+d^[email protected][email protected]) bit operations are sufficient to compute isolating disks of size less than 2^-^@k for all roots of p, where @k is an arbitrary positive integer. In addition, we apply our root isolation algorithm to a recent algorithm for computing the topology of a real planar algebraic curve specified as the zero set of a bivariate integer polynomial and for isolating the real solutions of a bivariate polynomial system. For polynomials of degree n and bitsize @t, we improve the currently best running time from [email protected]?(n^[email protected]+n^[email protected]^2) (deterministic) to [email protected]?(n^6+n^[email protected]) (randomized) for topology computation and from [email protected]?(n^8+n^[email protected]) (deterministic) to [email protected]?(n^6+n^[email protected]) (randomized) for solving bivariate systems. This paper introduces privacy and accountability techniques for crowd-powered systems. We focus on email task management: tasks are an implicit part of every inbox, but the overwhelming volume of incoming email can bury important requests. We present EmailValet, an email client that recruits remote assistants from an expert crowdsourcing marketplace. By annotating each email with its implicit tasks, EmailValet's assistants create a task list that is automatically populated from emails in the user's inbox. The system is an example of a valet approach to crowdsourcing, which aims for parsimony and transparency in access con-trol for the crowd. To maintain privacy, users specify rules that define a sliding-window subset of their inbox that they are willing to share with assistants. To support accountability, EmailValet displays the actions that the assistant has taken on each email. In a weeklong field study, participants completed twice as many of their email-based tasks when they had access to crowdsourced assistants, and they became increasingly comfortable sharing their inbox with assistants over time. We deterministically compute a @D+1 coloring and a maximal independent set(MIS) in time O(@D^1^ ^2^+^@Q^(^1^ ^h^)+log^*n) for @D"1"+"[email protected][email protected]^1^+^i^ ^h, where @D"j is defined as the maximal number of nodes within distance j for a node and @D:[email protected]"1. Our greedy coloring and MIS algorithms improve the state-of-the-art algorithms running in O(@D+log^*n) for a large class of graphs, i.e., graphs of (moderate) neighborhood growth with h>=36. We also state and analyze a randomized coloring algorithm in terms of the chromatic number, the run time and the used colors. Our algorithm runs in time O([email protected]+log^*n) for @[email protected][email protected](log^1^+^1^ ^l^o^g^^^*^nn) and @[email protected]?O(@D log^1^+^1^ ^l^o^g^^^*^nn). For graphs of polylogarithmic chromatic number the analysis reveals an exponential gap compared to the fastest @D+1 coloring algorithm running in time O([email protected]+logn). The algorithm works without knowledge of @g and uses less than @D colors, i.e., (1-1 O(@g))@D with high probability. To the best of our knowledge this is the first distributed algorithm for (such) general graphs taking the chromatic number @g into account. We also improve on the state of the art deterministic computation of (2,c)-ruling sets.