DriftCatcher: The Implicit Social Context of Email

This work uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) in an electronic communication interface to improve people’s ability to focus on important communications. Many social cues that allow people to function naturally with their social networks offline are not obvious in Computer Mediated Communication (CMC). This work uses automatic social network analysis to bring some cues to CMC that foster the user’s coherent understanding of the resources of their personal communication network. The DriftCatcher email client analyzes and presents some social qualities of messages, presenting users with the main idea, letting them catch the drift of the social undertones of their email. Our user study shows that social context in an email browser significantly increases a person’s ability to make decisions about the value and importance of messages, demonstrating the value of AI techniques in improving human-human communication.