My Hack

This Hack was presented as part of the Yahoo! Hackday

Transcript

1. -­‐  Subhendra  Basu  
2. The  Hack   —  People  often  want  to  insert  inline  images,  smileys  and   text  snippets  while  they  are  composing  an  email  or  an   html  page   —  My  hack  makes  this  job  easier  by  highlighting   relevant  images  (annotated  with  relevant  tags),   smileys  and  text  snippets  as  the  user  composes  his   mail.   —  This  is  achieved  by  incorporating  text-­‐to-­‐text   matching  software  which  uses  techniques  similar  to   standard  NLP  (Natural  Language  Processors)  
4. Current  state  and  next  steps   —  The  text  matching  software  has  been  setup  on  a  RHEL  5   box.  This  needs  to  be  plugged  in  to  a  mail  client/html   editor.  Also  at  present,  it  uses  SQLite  to  store  the  common   sense  corpus.  This  needs  to  be  moved  to  a  PostgreSql   database  for  better  performance   —  This  hack  has  a  potential  application  in  Web  Email  (like   Yahoo!  Mail)    where  the  user  can  import  pics  from  flickr/ picasa  and  draft  his  email  keeping  in  mind  the  image/ smiley/text  suggestions  thus  delivering  a  wow  experience   to  the  end  user.   —  At  present  such  fancy  email  editors  exist  but  they  don’t   have  the  ‘suggest’  feature  which  can  allow  users  to  pick   and  choose  his  object(image)  depending  on  the  context  of   his/her    email  content