{"id":16605,"date":"2022-05-24T09:17:28","date_gmt":"2022-05-24T13:17:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/engineering.jhu.edu\/magazine-archive\/?p=16605"},"modified":"2022-05-31T12:31:49","modified_gmt":"2022-05-31T16:31:49","slug":"finding-the-story-in-the-emails","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/engineering.jhu.edu\/magazine-archive\/2022\/05\/finding-the-story-in-the-emails\/","title":{"rendered":"Finding the Story in the Emails"},"content":{"rendered":"<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-large wp-image-17034\" src=\"https:\/\/engineering.jhu.edu\/magazine-archive\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/05\/shutterstock_1803527689-1024x319.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1024\" height=\"319\" srcset=\"https:\/\/engineering.jhu.edu\/magazine-archive\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/05\/shutterstock_1803527689-1024x319.jpeg 1024w, https:\/\/engineering.jhu.edu\/magazine-archive\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/05\/shutterstock_1803527689-300x93.jpeg 300w, https:\/\/engineering.jhu.edu\/magazine-archive\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/05\/shutterstock_1803527689-768x239.jpeg 768w, https:\/\/engineering.jhu.edu\/magazine-archive\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/05\/shutterstock_1803527689-1536x478.jpeg 1536w, https:\/\/engineering.jhu.edu\/magazine-archive\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/05\/shutterstock_1803527689.jpeg 2015w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px\" \/>\n<p>Office-based employees scrambled to adapt to remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic. Anecdotally, they were successful. But just <i>how <\/i>did they do it?<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p>Check the emails. Microsoft recently gave researchers access to more than 360 billion work-related Outlook email exchanges. These communications from 1.4 billion accounts at 4,361 companies came without content\u2014but with useful information about their frequency and pattern.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p>That\u2019s a lot of emails. And <a href=\"https:\/\/engineering.jhu.edu\/faculty\/carey-priebe\/\">Carey Priebe<\/a>, professor of <a href=\"https:\/\/engineering.jhu.edu\/ams\/\">applied mathematics and statistics<\/a> at the Whiting School of Engineering, helped find the story in them. His work attacking real-world problems ranging from biomedicine to sex trafficking uses statistics and graph theory to unlock how complex networks function.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p>Scholars often have questions for which data can\u2019t supply the answers. \u201cI take that as the \u2018nattering nabobs of negativism,\u2019\u201d says Priebe. \u201cI turn it around: Can we say something useful with the data that we have, even though we can\u2019t answer your question?\u201d<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p>The analysis performed by Priebe and other researchers required 55,000 computer hours and offered a new window into changes in work behaviors driven by a global pandemic. In a working paper published in <a href=\"https:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/2104.00641\"><i>Stat.ML <\/i><\/a>in September 2021, the authors observed that already existing silos in the workplace (and communications within them) intensified as employees worked remotely. Communications within those groups also deepened as a result. The researchers also found that while email did not replace the \u201cserendipitous, in-person interactions\u201d of pre-pandemic office life, the silos created in lockdowns were more \u201cdynamic\u201d\u2014with memberships within them becoming less rigid as employees worked remotely.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe increased siloing we observe need not be feared,\u201d they concluded.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p>Existing relationships with his former Johns Hopkins student and longtime collaborator Christopher White, PhD \u201909, who is the managing director for special projects with Microsoft Research, and with Jonathan Larson, principal data architect at the company, brought Priebe to the project.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p>\u201cI\u2019m their chief academic egghead when it comes to anything related to statistics on graphs,\u201d he says. Priebe adds that he is eager to bring more powerful quantitative resources to bear on the email data, fashioning \u201chypothesis tests\u201d from the paper\u2019s larger conclusions to better interrogate and refine them.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p>\u201cPeople identify with how things changed when the lockdown happened,\u201d Priebe observes. \u201cSo I found that gratifying\u2014and a little bit surprising and very instructive.\u201d<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Office-based employees scrambled to adapt to remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic. Anecdotally, they were successful. But just how did they do it?\u00a0 Check the emails. Microsoft recently gave researchers access to more than 360 billion work-related Outlook email exchanges. These communications from 1.4 billion accounts at 4,361 companies came without content\u2014but with useful information&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":17034,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16605","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-impact","issue-spring-2022"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.7 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Finding the Story in the Emails - JHU Engineering Magazine<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/engineering.jhu.edu\/magazine-archive\/2022\/05\/finding-the-story-in-the-emails\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Finding the Story in the Emails - JHU Engineering Magazine\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Office-based employees scrambled to adapt to remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic. 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