It assigns the appropriate priority to these so that you won't be interrupted when messages you consider low priority arrive. It can send the highest-priority messages to your cell phone when you're soaking in the sun on a beach in Mexico and leave the rest in your inbox. Vladimir Vapnik first proposed SVMs in 1979, but they have only become popular recently. The Adaptive Systems and Interaction group meshed the SVM approach with methods for performing decision-making under uncertainty to develop a methodology for reasoning about the importance of email. An SVM is similar to a neural network.
Neural networks attempt to function like a human brain.
Various parts of the human brain work in parallel to recognize symbols. When you look at a dog, for instance, your brain goes through some speedy summing up to determine that it is indeed a dog, based on prior knowledge. The brain is simultaneously saying yes, no, no, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes to these features, and weighing the outcome to come up with an answer. Platt's code helps the SVM assign the most likely weights and thresholds that determine the probability that an email message is high or low, based on training examples. Around 150 Microsoft employees are testing the research prototypes of Priorities and LookOut.