I’ve been experimenting with using our latest ML/NLP tools. One basic thing I’d like is to have a system that alerts me if a question I sent out in email didn’t get answered after a certain time. It’s a slightly tricky problem. A student at last year’s Wolfram Summer School made a decent “is it a question” classifier, but one has to trace through issues of email threading etc.

Another thing I’d really like is an automated “computational history” tool: to be able to take thousands of files or emails about a particular subject and create some kind of meaningful summary timeline/visualization/narrative. I’d like to be able to answer e.g. “what happened with this?”, and automatically get the kind of answer that a good historian/analyst could give me.

Of course, ultimately I’d just like a “bot of myself” that can suggest e.g. how I should respond to this AMA question 🙂