Using Spam Blockers To Target HIV, Too September 29, 2007
Posted by rahul in Medicine.Tags: AIDS, Computing, diseases, HIV, Medicine 2.0, Microsoft, Research, Spam
add a comment
A Microsoft researcher and his team make a surprising new assault on the AIDS epidemic
Cut-rate painkillers! Unclaimed riches in Nigeria!! Most of us quickly identify such e-mail messages as spam. But how would you teach that skill to a machine? David Heckerman needed to know. Early this decade, Heckerman was leading a spam-blocking team at Microsoft Research. To build their tool, team members meticulously mapped out thousands of signals that a message might be junk. An e-mail featuring “Viagra,” for example, was a good bet to be spam–but things got complicated in a hurry.
Image:The Regents of the University of California
