Visual summarization of activity data of a computing session

• US 20080046218A1
• Filed: 08/16/2006
• Published: 02/21/2008
• Est. Priority Date: 08/16/2006
• Status: Abandoned Application

• Current Assignee: Microsoft Technology Licensing LLC (Microsoft Corporation)
• Original Assignee: Microsoft Corporation
• Inventors: Dontcheva, Lubomira A., Drucker, Steven M., Cohen, Michael F.
• Application Number:
  US11/504,834
• Publication Number:
  US 20080046218A1
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 702/186
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 11/32 with visual or acoustical indication of the functioning of the machine

Abstract

Architecture for tracking, capturing, and visually summarizing information related to user activities and interactions of a network or web computing session. Documents or pages accessed during the session are tracked and presented graphically as miniature images that illustrate a history of the session of documents deemed important by the user. Activities tracked can be related to the dwell time at a web page, scrolling event(s) in the page, click-through activity, impression activity, referencing information of that page to other pages, the information sought, user intentions, goals, etc. The history of session documents are illustrated as a set of reduced images which can be manually and automatically filtered to graphically emphasize one subset of images more than another subset of images based on user criteria.

Claims

1. A computer-implemented system that facilitates summarization of user computing activity, comprising:

a tracking component for tracking user activity data of a computing session; and

a visualization component for summarizing the user activity data as a historical visual presentation.

2. The system of claim 1, wherein the tracking component stores user activity data associated with the session for sharing with and visualization by another user.

3. The system of claim 1, wherein the tracking component tracks the user activity data that relates to user interaction with a web page.

4. The system of claim 1, wherein the tracking component tracks the user activity data that relates to user interaction with a local application and local data.

5. The system of claim 1, further comprising a conversion component for converting the user activity data to a thumbnail graphic for presentation by the visualization component.

6. The system of claim 1, wherein the visualization component facilitates annotation of the user activity data with annotation data and conversion of the annotation data and the user activity data into a miniature graphical representation for presentation.

7. The system of claim 1, further comprising an organization component for clustering related data, hiding unrelated data, and emphasizing related data of particular interest.

8. The system of claim 1, wherein the tracking component tracks user activity data related to duration that a user interfaces to at least one of data and an application.

9. The system of claim 1, further comprising a machine learning and reasoning component that employs a probabilistic and/or statistical-based analysis to prognose or infer an action that a user desires to be automatically performed.

10. The system of claim 1, wherein the visualization component facilitates manually navigating through the historical visual representation of the user activity data via manual controls of a user interface.

11. A computer-implemented method of summarizing user computing activity, comprising:

recording activity data associated with an online computing session;

representing the activity data as a set of thumbnail images;

displaying the thumbnail images via a user interface in a historical arrangement; and

managing presentation of the historical arrangement of thumbnail images based on user criteria.

12. The method of claim 11, further comprising controlling the user interface to graphically emphasize images that are deemed more important.

13. The method of claim 11, further comprising controlling the user interface to graphically de-emphasize images that are deemed less important.

14. The method of claim 11, further comprising displaying a priority set of the images separately from the historical arrangement of images.

15. The method of claim 11, further comprising annotating content associated with a document of the activity data.

16. The method of claim 11, further comprising clustering the images based on temporal information associated with the activity data.

17. The method of claim 11, further comprising expanding one of the images to view an associated web document accessed during the session.

18. The method of claim 11, further comprising dynamically changing visual presentation of the historical arrangement of images by manually interacting with the user interface to effect graphical emphasis of a subset of the images.

19. The method of claim 11, further comprising processing the activity data with a decision-theoretic algorithm that learns and reasons about characteristics of the session to cluster and present the images according to a desired arrangement.

20. A computer-executable system, comprising:

computer-implemented means for recording user activity data associated with a network-based computing session;

computer-implemented means for representing the user activity data as a set of thumbnail images that illustrate a history of the user activity data computing session;

computer-implemented means for displaying the history of thumbnail images via a user interface; and

computer-implemented means for filtering the history of thumbnail images by graphically emphasizing one subset of the images more than another subset of images.