SCOUT contextually organizes user tasks

We explore ways to alleviate the current information explosion with an emphasis on organizing the abundance of legitimate (non-SPAM) emails that typical users receive daily. Our approach is to use information about the tasks implied by email message content along with context information about the environment of the message recipient. We focus on machine generated emails associated with workflow processes. We validate our approach by presenting the SCOUT portal application. This paper presents an overview of the SCOUT architecture together with results from a pilot user study that we have performed to assess the strengths and weaknesses of this system