Lounge lizards and lab rats by David DeJean

Wednesday at Lotusphere the brutal pace slackens a bit, and you can steal a bit of time from the breakout sessions to get around to a few of the technical labs and lounges—one lounge at least, the CLP Lounge in the Swan Hotel.

The CLP Lounge is a good place to sit down, put your feet up for a few minutes, and sip a cold drink—provided you can get through the door.

This year the lounge has been renamed the Jim Adair Lounge, dedicated to the memory of James H. Adair. Jim was the Worldwide Manager of Certification/Assessment Exam Development and Psychometric Services for Lotus. A 10-year veteran of Lotus, he was the developer of the Certified Lotus Professional program. He died last year of cancer. A placard in the lounge commemorates his professional achievements.

Jim was a constant presence in the CLP Lounge during Lotusphere and had many friends in the Lotus community who had worked with him to develop and internationalize the certification program. In addition to the lounge dedication, Jim was commemorated by buttons that appeared on many badge holders and backpacks during the week that carried the CLP logo and the words "Thanks, Jim."

The buttons were the idea of two members of Penumbra, a Business Partner group—Bob Balaban, who is Looseleaf Software, a former Iris developer and still ubiquitous at Lotusphere, and Rob Novak of SNAPPS.

"Rob thought it would be great to do something to remember Jim," said Bob. "He came up with the idea to do the 'Thanks, Jim' button." Bob's wife had a button machine, and she did the artwork. Rob printed them, and Bob and his family put them together.

"We handed a bunch out to Penumbra members and some IBM execs at the Saturday Penumbra dinner," said Bob. "Lots of people asked me about Jim, seeing the buttons on my badge holder and on my backpack. We like to think that Jim would have really liked the idea of several hundred people walking around at Lotusphere saying 'Thanks' to him."

There's one more tribute to Jim still to come this week, according to Will Roaf, who worked with Jim and runs the Certified Lotus Instructor (CLI) program. The CLI group has an annual meeting on the Friday after Lotusphere is over every year. This Friday their awards dinner will include the presentation of the first Dr. James H. Adair Award for Instructor Excellence. Several CLIs have gotten together to bring Jim's widow, Patty Adair, to Orlando for the ceremony.

Researching the research lab
The problem with going into the technical labs is that they're too good, too interesting, and there's too much going on. I set out to visit as many as I could today. I managed to get to four. So many fascinating ideas and projects, so little time.

In the Mobile & Wireless Lab, Jim Cavalier explained how SyncML, an XML-derived standard, is making pervasive computing more pervasive by making it easier to get data from Domino to the proliferating numbers of handhelds and PDAs and WAP phones. Communications that had to be custom-crafted for each device is becoming standards-based, and products like Domino Everyplace can work with more and more devices.

In the Collaborative Application Development Lab, I got Jeff Calow and Beverly DeWitt to do the elevator-speech version of the breakout session on "Lotus Technology Strategy and Lotus Domino Developer's Roadmap," which I managed to miss twice earlier in the week. This lab, and Jeff's and Beverly's current work, are all about the future of IBM Lotus application development. There is a future, and it involves a Rapid Application Development (RAD) tool for WebSphere Studio, which I'll expand on after I see Beverly's "Sneak Preview" session on the RAD tool Thursday morning.

The Mystery Lab No. Lucky 13 I mentioned yesterday turned out to be not such a mystery after all—the "ISSL" in ISSL Hands-On Training Lab stands for IBM Software Services for Lotus, which you cannot possibly say five times fast. Think of it as TTGFKALE, The Training Group Formerly Known As Lotus Education. The lab is subtitled "ISSL Trainings' Extending Domino Applications Tutorial Lab," and it offers five taste spoons of some of its more popular flavors—pithy self-paced CBT tutorials on topics such as "Integrating RDBMS data using DECS and DCR functionality" and "Using XML and XSL in your Web Site."

I spent the most time in the IBM Research Lab, talking with Rich Segal and Jason Crawford of IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, NY, about spam.

Rich is one of the developers of SwiftFile, the intelligent assistant for organizing your email into folders that is included with Notes 6. SwiftFile classifies your email and offers suggestions on which folder you might sort it into, giving you one-button filing in any of the suggested folders. It learns from analyzing the contents of your mail file and watching what you do with it.

Rich was demoing an extended version of SwiftFile that uses its classification engine to identify spam in your incoming mail. Jason was showing off his work on a server-based application that uses a similar classification approach that's being called MailGuru.

Just as SwiftFile analyzes your email and learns to predict where you would file a message, the anti-spam version of the program learns what you think is spam and what is good mail. Where the SwiftFile interface gives you three folder buttons, the anti-spam version adds a "Vote spam" button—highlight a message and click it, and the offending mail is thrown into your spam folder. (It's interesting, said Rich, that his research revealed people don't necessarily want to delete spam, they just want to segregate it.) When you inspect your spam folder, you get a "Vote good" button that restores messages to good repute in your Inbox. And the more mail you handle, the better the system gets at automatically segregating your spam.

MailGuru applies this same approach to spam to a server-based application. The same analytical technology analyzes message content and tallies user behavior as "votes." MailGuru benefits from the greater experience of a group of email users: If several people have classified a recognizable type of message as spam, MailGuru can sort it to a junk-mail folder with a much higher degree of confidence.

The problem for Jason is that server-based spam control would be most valuable if the application could simply throw away the messages it classifies as spam, saving on network traffic, disk storage, and processing cycles. But users, not computers, are still the final judges of what's spam and what's not. Currently the only way to deal with "false positives," messages the application classifies as spam that the user actually wanted to see, is to let the user decide. And that means storing it and routing it.

Rich talked about balancing the accuracy of filtering spam against false positives. SwiftFile can correctly predict which folder you'll want to put a message in 80 to 90 percent of the time (and give you a one-click button to put it there), Rich said. An anti-spam program would be a success with much lower numbers, he thinks, as long as it could keep false positives down around nonexistent—one in 1,000 messages. The best answer, they say, may be a combination of server and client applications that protect the user against false positives by using conservative classification rules at the server that would still take out maybe 60 percent of spam, and letting the client application deal with the tougher 40 percent where false positives could still be corrected. But, they caution, this is just research, not product announcements. SwiftFile, on the other hand, is a real product, and has its own home page at SwiftFile for Notes.

The Research Lab was also showing off several projects from the Watson Research Center at Cambridge, the former Lotus Research organization. The Cambridge group presented some of its recent work in a session led by the center director Irene Greif and Dan Gruen on Monday. The presentation included an update on the "Reinventing Email" project, which was first shown as a vision piece last year, and has been turned into a real prototype. You can read more about that project, and the center's other very interesting work, at the IBM Watson Research Center.

Holy shirt, Batman!
It hasn't been a great year for tchotchkes. Maybe it's the weak economy. Maybe there's just a dip in the curve of tchotchke technology innovation. But this year's Cult Shirt has made up for the lack of general tchotchke buzz at Lotusphere 2003.

The Cult Shirt is one of those nearly instant Lotusphere traditions that seems a lot older than it actually is. It started just three years ago, when Henry Newberry and Rocky Oliver created a Notes-geeky T-shirt and gave a few to their friends at Lotusphere. The next year they handed out a few more. This year's Cult Shirt, the fourth, comes in two versions and has superhero themes—the Collaboration League on a gray shirt and the Just-Us League on black. The Collaboration League shirt features characters like The Six Million Zollar Man, the Encryptable Hulk (Charlie Kaufman), and Secret Agent Woman (Julie Kadeshevich). You can see the rest and catch up with the history of the Cult Shirt, naturally, at the Cult-Shirt Web site, powered by Domino.

Quote of the day
Bob Balaban, who is a fast man with a quote, said this in his session "Building Blended Applications for Lotus Domino and WebSphere:" "In theory, theory and reality are the same thing. In reality, they're different."

Maybe you had to be there.

Coming Up: Thursday, the last day of Lotusphere 2003
It just started and it's almost over. Tomorrow it's the last few breakout sessions, the rough-and-tumble Ask the Developers session, and the Closing General Session—events we'll cover here on Friday.