to understand the process by which a decision was made over a course of months, this kind of access will be extremely valuable," says Leuski. The same interface can instantly return and display individual pieces of mail in the form of hypertext pages, with links to the people who sent and received the e-mail and with links to similar e-mail messages. "Similar messages" can be defined in terms of recipients, text keywords, or both. In a display produced using this capability, the spheres are the messages themselves. With message-oriented spheres, different colors indicate different topics, creating a map of how the information is distributed among the messages. "What we have in effect is a four-dimensional display, with color added to the three spatial dimensions," says Douglas Oard, an associate professor of com- puter science from University of Maryland's College of Information Studies and its Institute for Advanced Computer Studies. Leuski and Oard have demonstrated the ability to find interesting patterns in collections as small as a few hundred e-mails. The techniques they have developed are now being applied to thousands of e-mails sent and received by a single individual over 18 years. Scaling the system upward to process millions of e-mails involving thousands of people will be the researchers' next challenge. The elements of eArchivarius' flexible and useful interface, says Oard, may someday find their way into everyday e-mail client software. 9.10.1 Simplified Image Retrieval Penn State University has developed software that allows computer users to search for images more easily and accurately by eliminating the need to enter lengthy descriptive phrases. The technology could potentially help mobile device users who currently must deal with cramped displays as well as people who must routinely catalogue or access large numbers of images. The Automatic Linguistic Indexing of Pictures (ALIP) system builds a pic- torial dictionary and then uses it to associate images with keywords. The tech- nology functions