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

• US 20050132006A1
• Filed: 01/31/2005
• Published: 06/16/2005
• Est. Priority Date: 06/28/2001
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Microsoft Technology Licensing LLC (Microsoft Corporation)
• Original Assignee: Microsoft Corporation
• Inventors: Horvitz, Eric J., Jacobs, Andrew W., Kadie, Carl M.
• Granted Patent: US 7,490,122 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 709/204
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 10/109 Time management, e.g. calendars, reminders, meetings or time accounting

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.

Claims

1. A communications system providing fine-grained inferences of a user, comprising:

a first component that reasons about the amount of time until a user will be available for at least one of a type of interaction and a communications; and

a second component that responds to at least one of a system and a user in relation to the reasoning of the first component.

2. The system of claim 1, the first component reasons about the amount of time until a user will be available based on patterns of at least one of the user'"'"'s availability and context.

3. The system of claim 1, the first component determining an expected time until a user is available by learning statistics and building models that can infer the availability.

4. The system of claim 1, the first component determining when a user will be available to be interrupted with a particular class of alert or notification.

5. The system of claim 1, the determination based on at least one of patterns of availability, inferences about a workload and associated cost of an interruption.

6. The system of claim 1, the first component determining where the user is and when the user will be available for at least one of a voice and video conference.

7. An automated communications system to send information, comprising:

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.

8. The system of claim 7, the communications component replying to a collaborating party with at least one of the user is currently away, and it will probably be at least x hours before the user will see the message, x being an integer or fraction thereof.

9. The system of claim 7, the forecaster employing a probability distribution over a time until the user returns.

10. The system of claim 7, the forecaster is constructed from accumulated statistics.

11. The system of claim 10, the accumulated statistics enable a determination of the user'"'"'s at least one of availability and unavailability.

12. The system of claim 7, the communications component sending an update if the user has not yet returned.

13. The system of claim 7, the communications component responding with a recommendation relating to at least one of another channel, and changing the nature of the message.

14. A computer readable medium having thereon the system of claim 7.

15. A method to retrieve information, comprising;

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.

16. The method of claim 15, the information access patterns comprising a determination of how long until various items are needed.

17. The method of claim 15, further comprising determining a cost associated with not having an item when needed given that the item is needed at some time t in the future.

18. The method of claim 17, the cost determination is optimized by considering how long until the user has network availability.

19. The method of claim 17, further comprising determining the size of the items.

20. A computer readable medium containing computer executable instructions operable to perform the method of claim 15.