IF YOU regularly embarrass yourself by forgetting to attach files to emails, help is at hand.
Fernando Pereira and colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia are developing software to scan emails for characteristics typical of those that contain attachments. If it suspects the sender intends to attach a file, a pop-up reminder appears on the screen before the email is sent.
Pereira’s team took 8000 publicly available emails exchanged by employees at the company Enron before it collapsed. They taught an algorithm to pick out patterns in the words and phrases contained in emails with attachments. When they tested the algorithm on a new…
