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For more technology stories, visit newscientist.com/technology 12 January 2013 | NewScientist | 19 Human email assistant could streamline your life IT’S one of the luxuries of the corporate elite: a personal assistant who takes your overflowing inbox and turns it into a simple to-do list. Many people would love such help, if only they could afford it. But what if the cost was less than $2 a day? That’s the idea behind software that uses crowdsourced workers to manage email overload. GmailValet, developed by Nicolas Kokkalis and colleagues at Stanford University in California, works by connecting a Gmail account with oDesk, a crowd-labour web platform that draws upon a relatively skilled workforce. Users can deal with privacy fears by deploying filters that limit the access given to oDesk workers. All emails from family members can be excluded from the system, for example. Once the workers are in, they examine new emails and, if appropriate, extract a task from the message, which appears in a to-do list that sits alongside the inbox on the GmailValet website, such as reminding the user to respond to a meeting request, for example. Users are encouraged to provide feedback on the tasks, so that the assistants can better understand their needs. In initial tests, the assistants were paid the California minimum wage of $8 per hour. The researchers suggest that a single assistant could monitor dozens of inboxes simultaneously, though. If that proves to be the case, the service could end up costing each user as little as $1.80 per day. The tests also revealed that users benefited from the to-do lists: the task-completion rate for those who worked with assistants was nearly 60 per cent, compared with less than 30 per cent for control participants, who had to create their own task lists. One user described the appearance of the tasks as “like magic”. “This is an important step forward in enabling the crowd to work on private and sensitive information,” says Aniket Kittur, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. “It opens the door for the crowd helping us with our personal lives in ways we wouldn’t have imagined even a few years ago.” The work will be presented next month at the Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing conference in San Antonio, Texas. The system is available to try out for free at gmailvalet.com. Jim Giles n “It opens the door for the crowd to help us in ways we wouldn’t have imagined even a few years ago” –Lest you forget– YO OURA/PLAINPICTURE Don’t want to diet? Try a stomach pump It’s a stomach-turning idea – but an alternative to gastric bypass surgery, detailed in a US patent application, could let overweight people eat and drink as much as they want and still lose weight. The idea is to surgically install a valve into a patient’s stomach and through their abdominal wall. This allows them to pump out some of their food 20 minutes after they eat. The system, built by Aspire Bariatrics of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is now in clinical trials. It has helped people lose an average of 20 kilograms in a year, and some nearly twice that. Kill your speed before it kills you “You would die if you crashed right now!” Would you take your foot off the accelerator at that warning? That’s the idea behind an in-car alert system that aims to deter speeding drivers. Developed by engineers at Fukuoka Institute of Technology and UD Trucks, both in Japan, the “safe driving promotion system” uses the radar, ultrasound and laser sensors in modern vehicles to monitor speed and distance to the vehicle in front and behind. If the driver is speeding, the warnings that flash up could vary from images of a whiplash injury because of a rear-end shunt, to a fatal, car-crushing collision complete with flames. Roach-bot is born runner Don’t stomp on this little robot. VelociRoach, a hexapod modelled on a cockroach can run at 2.7 metres per second, making it one of the world’s fastest robots. Presented this week at the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology in San Francisco, the secret to VelociRoach’s speed is its thin, C-shaped legs, which act as springs as they hit the ground 15 times per second. To stay stable, Duncan Haldane at the University of California, Berkeley, and colleagues designed the robo-roach to keep three legs on the ground at all times, forming tripods. ONE PER CENT LAWRENCE MANNING/CORBIS For breaking tech news go to: newscientist.com/onepercent
