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 providing fine-grained inferences of a user, comprising:
- a processor communicatively coupled to a memory having stored therein 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 or a communications with a message sender, the first component reasons by learning statistics about at least a state of the user from one or more context information sources and building one or more prediction models from the statistics, wherein the one or more prediction models infer the user availability;
a second component that automatically responds to the message sender in relation to the reasoning of the first component, tracks the automatic responses communicated to the message sender and based on identity of the message sender provides updates with a recommendation about another channel of communication to the message sender if the reasoning of the first component fails;
wherein the first component determining when a user will be available to be interrupted with a particular class of alert or notification; and
wherein the determination is based on at least one of patterns of availability, inferences about a workload or associated cost of an interruption.
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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.
73 Citations
13 Claims
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1. A communications system providing fine-grained inferences of a user, comprising:
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a processor communicatively coupled to a memory having stored therein 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 or a communications with a message sender, the first component reasons by learning statistics about at least a state of the user from one or more context information sources and building one or more prediction models from the statistics, wherein the one or more prediction models infer the user availability; a second component that automatically responds to the message sender in relation to the reasoning of the first component, tracks the automatic responses communicated to the message sender and based on identity of the message sender provides updates with a recommendation about another channel of communication to the message sender if the reasoning of the first component fails;
wherein the first component determining when a user will be available to be interrupted with a particular class of alert or notification; and
wherein the determination is based on at least one of patterns of availability, inferences about a workload or associated cost of an interruption. - View Dependent Claims (2, 3, 4, 5, 6)
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7. An automated communications system to send information, comprising:
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a processor communicatively coupled to a memory having stored therein a forecaster that determines at least one of when a user will likely see a message, be available to see the message, or be available for one or more types of communications by employing a probability distribution over a time until the user returns and current contextual information regarding the user; a communications component to track what communications have been sent to a contactor and based on the contactor to automatically send updates to the contactor regarding an alternate communication channel for contacting the user if predictions associated with the forecaster have changed;
wherein the forecaster is constructed from accumulated statistics; and
wherein the accumulated statistics enable a determination of the user'"'"'s at least one availability or unavailability. - View Dependent Claims (8, 9, 10)
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11. A computer readable storage medium containing computer executable instructions for performing a method of retrieving information to facilitate intelligent caching of information, the method comprising;
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determining an expected time a user will be away from a system; determining information access patterns of the user; 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; determining if it is favorable to cache the information based at least in part on the value of the approximation crossing a predetermined threshold and caching the information where it is favorable and not caching the information where it is not favorable;
the method 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; and
the cost determination is optimized by considering how long until the user has network availability. - View Dependent Claims (12, 13)
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Specification