4. Stanford University SEAmail

Posted on 15 Apr 2009 at 11:37

Stanford professor Michael Genesereth has developed a semantic mail project called SEAmail, which aims to ensure email arrives at the right inbox more reliably. Instead of addressing a message using an email address, you describe the attributes of that person, such as their job title. This way, the message reaches the person regardless of whether they change their email address.

One interesting side-effect is that the technique could reduce spam. When junk messages are sent they use a library of known email addresses, but they're not "semantic": they're simple lists and not tagged with rich data such as "professor in the engineering department". SEAmail works both ways in that it understands the sender metadata as well: that a student at Stanford sent the message, and not a spammer.

Genesereth said the project is still to address some of the big challenges. "Getting good data for SEAmail becomes a much harder problem on the broader internet than it is within an organisation," he said. "Although there are semantic standards that can allow systems to extract information about people from web pages, incomplete and/or inconsistent data could degrade the quality of the system."

Next: 5. MIT robotic clam

Back to "10 amazing research projects"

Author: John Brandon