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 communications system, comprising:
- a logging component that stores a user'"'"'s comings and goings over time that relates to one or more states of the user; 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.
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Accused Products
Abstract
A system and method 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
20 Claims
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1. A communications system, comprising:
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a logging component that stores a user'"'"'s comings and goings over time that relates to one or more states of the user; 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 (2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7)
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8. 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; and
storing user context information at about the time of detecting the change of the one or more user states. - View Dependent Claims (9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15)
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16. 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; and
a data log that stores the presence data generated by the presence detector to accumulate statistics relating to availability and unavailability of the user. - View Dependent Claims (17, 18, 19, 20)
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Specification