Avaya Experts to Demonstrate the Business Benefits of New "Tagging" Software Technology

Presentation during International Conference on Collaborative Computing will explore how searching and retrieving phone interactions can help businesses operate more effectively

In a presentation today during the Third International Conference on Collaborative Computing, scientists from Avaya Labs will demonstrate how “tagging” conversations can help businesses search and retrieve interactions and access information they need to operate more effectively.

Now underway in White Plains, N.Y., the Collaborative Computing conference is jointly sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society, Create-Net and the International Communication Sciences and Technology Association.

Avaya Labs scientist Doree Seligmann, director, Collaborative Applications Research, a featured speaker at the conference, and Avaya Labs research scientists Ajita John and Shreeharsh Kelkar, will present a paper and video demonstration on the business benefits of sophisticated new algorithms they developed to “tag” key information and make voice calls searchable.

“Tagging” - which is also called “social bookmarking” or “collaborative tagging” - is an increasingly popular way to locate, classify, rank and share Internet resources through the use of shared lists of user-created Internet bookmarks. Users store lists of personally interesting Internet resources, and typically make these lists publicly accessible. They also classify their resources by the use of informally assigned, user-defined keywords or tags.

“Conversations provide a rich source of information that can be tapped to help businesses operate more efficiently and effectively,” said Seligmann. “By using sophisticated new algorithms and models that ’reason’ about the ’who, what, when, where and why’ of communications, we can capture and mine conversations, just as we do by searching email and other electronic documents.”

Seligmann says tagging holds the potential to help businesses readily identify subject-matter experts who can serve customers and support strategic initiatives. For example, a field technician could find individuals with the expertise needed to troubleshoot a customer problem. A marketing director could identify those familiar with an emerging market trend. Human Resources executives could determine existing pockets of company expertise, which in turn could drive staffing and training investments.

“By storing, searching and retrieving information from conversations, which are the most important resources for collaborative work of any kind, we can mine a previously untapped resource and drive intelligent communications capabilities throughout a company’s operations,” Seligmann said.

Seligmann will show examples of a pilot visualization tool the team designed to help employees archive, tag, share, search, and retrieve conversations to create a knowledge repository for the enterprise.

Since joining Avaya, Seligmann has filed more than 50 patents, most involving technologies designed to help people communicate more efficiently and effectively and to have a higher-quality experience while doing so. In addition to “tagging,” she and her team have developed a number of breakthrough collaborative technologies – including a “personalized customer relationship management” application that tells how, when and how often a caller has tried to reach someone and pops up pertinent notes for the caller to use during the conversation.