Methods for and applications of learning and inferring the periods of time until people are available or unavailable for different forms of communication, collaboration, and information access
First Claim
1. A system to coordinate at least one of communications, collaboration, and coordination between parties, comprising:
- a user state identifier that determines a user'"'"'s state from at least one context information source, wherein the user state identifier generates an indication of whether a user state change has occurred from the at least one context information source; and
a data log that stores information associated with the at least one context information source at about the time of the user state change to accumulate statistics relating to at least one of an availability and an unavailability of the user.
2 Assignments
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Accused Products
Abstract
A system and methods are provided to learn and infer the time until a user will be available for communications, collaboration, or information access, given evidence about such observations as time of day, calendar, location, presence, and activity. The methods can be harnessed to coordinate communications between parties via particular modalities of interaction. The system includes a user state identifier that determines a user'"'"'s state from background knowledge, the flow of time, or one or more context information sources. A data log can be employed to store information about user state changes and observational evidence to accumulate statistics and build inferential models of the availability and unavailability of users for different kinds of communication, collaboration, and information access. A forecaster is constructed from the accumulated statistics and/or learned models to enable a determination of a user'"'"'s likely return, or, more generally, the probability distribution over a user'"'"'s likely return to particular states of availability. The forecaster can be employed to cache information for offline access, drive displays of availability and unavailability, to send messages that include availability forecasts, and to automatically perform scheduling or rescheduling of communications.
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Citations
80 Claims
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1. A system to coordinate at least one of communications, collaboration, and coordination between parties, comprising:
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a user state identifier that determines a user'"'"'s state from at least one context information source, wherein the user state identifier generates an indication of whether a user state change has occurred from the at least one context information source; and
a data log that stores information associated with the at least one context information source at about the time of the user state change to accumulate statistics relating to at least one of an availability and an unavailability of the user. - View Dependent Claims (2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39)
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40. A method to coordinate communications systems, comprising:
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determining one or more user states;
detecting a change of the one or more user states;
storing user context information at about the time of detecting the change of the one or more user states; and
building a prediction model from the stored context information. - View Dependent Claims (41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 48)
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47. A communications system, comprising:
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means for determining one or more user states;
means for detecting a change of the one or more user states;
means for storing user context information at about the time of detecting the change of the one or more user states; and
means for building a prediction model from the stored context information.
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49. A signal facilitating communications between messaging systems, comprising:
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a signal to communicate automatically generated responses associated with a user'"'"'s availability; and
a predictor constructed from one or more samples of past user actions, the predictor utilized to forecast the user'"'"'s availability and provide information for the automatically generated response.
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50. A system for learning and inferring a user'"'"'s availability, comprising:
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a presence detector that determines a user'"'"'s presence and generates presence data indicating whether the user is present and whether there is a probability of the user'"'"'s presence;
a data log that stores the presence data generated by the presence detector to accumulate statistics relating to availability and unavailability of the user; and
a presence predictor constructed from the accumulated presence data to enable a determination of the user'"'"'s likely return.
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51. A communications system, comprising:
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a logging component to store a user'"'"'s comings and goings over time that relates to one or more states of the user, the one or more states including availability to communicate now via one or more forms of channels of at least one of a communication, goal, attention and focus; and
a prediction component associated with the logging component constructed to predict an amount of time for the user'"'"'s likely return based upon at least one of recent and current evidence that the user has been away from a location associated with at least one of different types of communication channels and availabilities. - View Dependent Claims (52, 53)
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54. A communications system providing fine-grained inferences of a user, comprising:
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a first component to reason about the amount of time until a user will be available for at least one of a type of interaction and a communications based on patterns of at least one of the user'"'"'s availability and context; and
a second component to respond to at least one of a system and a user in relation to the reasoning of the first component. - View Dependent Claims (55, 56, 57, 59, 60, 61, 62)
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58. An information transfer system, comprising:
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a predictive component to estimate when a user will likely be in a setting to review one or more messages; and
an answering component to provide an adaptive message in association with the predictive component relating to when the user is likely to review the one or more messages.
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63. An automated communications system to send information, comprising:
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a forecaster to determine at least one of when a user will likely see a message, be available to see the message, and be available for one or more types of communications; and
a communications component to track at least one of what communications have been sent and to send updates if predictions associated with the forecaster have changed. - View Dependent Claims (64, 65, 66, 68, 69, 70, 71)
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67. An hand-assessed communications system to provide information, comprising:
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an availability profile configurable by a user indicating the user'"'"'s availability for different types of activities; and
a communications component to provide the availability profile to one or more other users to facilitate at least one of communications, collaboration, and coordination between the user and the one or more other users.
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72. An information retrieval system, comprising:
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a forecasting component to determine a user'"'"'s expected return; and
a retrieval component to cache information based upon the user'"'"'s expected return. - View Dependent Claims (73, 74)
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75. A method to retrieve information, comprising;
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determining an expected time a user will be away from a system;
determining information access patterns of the user; and
performing an approximation to extract a maximum value associated with caching information based on the information access patterns and the expected time away of the user. - View Dependent Claims (76, 77, 78, 79, 80)
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Specification