Barry Leiba

I'm retiring at the end of February, 2009, as a Senior Technical Staff Member at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research center, working on Internet Messaging Technology. I've been spending most of my time working on antispam technology and standards, and still keeping a finger or two in context services technology, aiming to connect users better to their important (non-spam) messages while avoiding inundation by unimportant (and even annoying) messages.
 

This web site won't be updated after February, 2009. You may find me in the future at the Internet Messaging Technology web site.

AntiSpam Technology and Standards

My work in antispam is further divided into technology and standards. On the technology side, IBM Research is developing more effective antispam techniques, some of which have made their way into IBM's Lotus software products, some of which are on their way into the product line from IBM Internet Security Systems, and some of which are still under experimentation and development.

On the standards side, I am working with the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) on a number of messaging-related standards, some of which directly address antispam. In March 2007 I was appointed to the Internet Architecture Board. I'm working with the following IETF working groups:

• DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM), which is finishing the development of a standard for having the originating domain digitally sign email messages to make it harder to "spoof" the originating address. I am one of the co-chairs of the DKIM working group.
• Sieve Mail Filtering Language (sieve), a language for writing portable email filters. This working group is updating the existing Sieve standard, and is standardizing a number of useful extensions to it, including one specifically for spam filtering.
• Internet Message Access Protocol Extension (imapext)./ Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) is one of the two Internet-standard protocols used for email access and retrieval (the other is POP3). The imapext working group is standardizing some useful extensions to IMAP.
• Enhancements to Internet email to support diverse service environments (lemonade). The name of this working group used to be a fanciful acronym for "License to Enhance Messaging Oriented Network Access for Diverse Endpoints", but that long name has since been dropped. The goal of the lemonade group is to standardize changes to email protocols to enable more efficient operation on mobile phones, PDAs, kiosks, and other devices with varying capabilities and varying levels of network connectivity. The lemonade group works very closely with the imapext group.
• Email Address Internationalization (eai). This working group has developed an experimental proto-standard for allowing international characters (including non-Western scripts, such as Hebrew and Chinese) in email addresses and email headers. The group will move versions of those experimental documents to the standards track after some successful experimentation.

I am on the editorial board for IEEE Internet Computing magazine, and I edit the Standards department of the magazine.

I was a program chair for the Conference on Email and AntiSpam (CEAS) in 2008.

Context Services Technology

In Context Services, we're emphasizing three areas:

For the messages themselves, we're tying together e-mail, instant messaging, alerts, calendar alarms, and other similar things that can broadly be grouped into the category of "messaging". It's obvious that if you've defined e-mail from your boss to be "important", you want to be informed quickly about new e-mail from your boss. But also, if you've set your calendar to give you an alarm ten minutes before an important meeting, it does little good if that alarm pops up on your desktop computer when you're not in your office. That alarm is a "message" too, and we'll handle it as one.

For connecting you, we handle your desktop and laptop computers, of course, but we also handle a variety of wireless/handheld devices, including cell phones (through SMS), BlackBerry(tm) handhelds, personal digital assistants (PDAs) connected through wireless modems, and other similar devices.

For winnowing important messages from the chaff of all the unimportant ones, we're using advanced filtering technology that takes into account general user preferences, specific targeted filters, and user context.

User context refers to information obtained dynamically about where the user is, what she's doing, and how she's relating to the people around her. Is the user at home, at work, in a public place? On vacation? In a meeting? Seeing a Broadway show? Has she specified that she's not to be disturbed? Will she be available for interruption in 30 minutes, or not for 3 hours? Is she out of town? Returning tomorrow, or not for two weeks? All this information can be used both in the filtering, to change the definition of what "important" means (perhaps mail from my boss is important, but not if I'm on vacation unless it's marked "urgent"), and in the delivery, deciding how to deliver a message at a particular time (if I'm at home, don't sent alerts to my desktop computer in the office; if I'm at a show, don't ring my cell phone). Much of our work has been focused on the context information -- obtaining it, using it effectively, securing it to protect the user's privacy.

More about me outside of work...

Project pages:

• Internet Messaging Technology.
• Barry Leiba's recent publications.
• IBM Research AntiSpam Technology
• IBM Research Context Services

References:

• IBM Research: IBM Research's home page.
• IBM Research: IBM T. J. Watson Research Center's home page.