The Future of Spam Filtering

When:

Thursday, December 11, 2003 - 7:00pm

Venue:

MIT Building NE43 (200 Tech Square)

Room:

8th fl

Lecturer(s):

Paul Graham, independent software developer and spam filtering guru

(Note that this meeting is being held on the SECOND THURSDAY of the month.) Spammers are working hard to get past filters, but so far the filters are winning. Is this because Bayesian filters are unbeatable, or because not all users have them yet? As good filters become more widespread, how will spam evolve, and what will filters have to do to keep up? In addition to GBC/ACM, this meeting is co-sponsored by the IEEE Communications Society, the IEEE Computer Society, and the IEEE Social Implications of Technology (SIT) Society. The talk is open to the public. After the meeting there will be an own-pay dinner, possibly with the speaker, at a nearby restaurant. Directions to the restaurant will be given at the meeting.

Lecturer Biography:

Paul Graham is the designer of the Arc programming language. He inadvertently became a spam filter hacker when the filter he wrote to test Arc turned out to work. He most recently worked for Yahoo, and before that was president of Viaweb (now Yahoo Store). He has a PhD in Computer Science from Harvard, and has written two books on Lisp. There is an article on "Saving Private E-mail" that discusses Paul's work and puts it in the context of other industry developments on pp. 40-44 of the August issue of IEEE Spectrum. More information can also be found on Paul's website at http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html.