Fergie's Tech Blog

e-Mail Analysis Snooping in Your In-Box

Esther Schindler writes on CIO.com:

A researcher working at the Air Force Institute of Technology (AFIT) in Ohio has found a new use for an open-source algorithm, reports New Scientist in its December 1 issue. While the software was originally used to analyze the topics people talk about, researcher Gilbert Peterson and his colleagues have found a new use: snooping through company e-mail.

Author-Topic, developed by researchers at the University of California, Irvine, is essentially a data mining tool that chews on textual information. If it's fed academic journal articles, New Scientist suggests, Author-Topic "examines the frequency with which words appear in each and uses that to infer which topic that document is about. It then identifies topics that each person writes on most.

posted by Fergie @ 11/30/2007 06:49:00 PM