Methods and architecture for cross-device activity monitoring, reasoning, and visualization for providing status and forecasts of a users' presence and availability

• US 7,739,210 B2
• Filed: 08/31/2006
• Issued: 06/15/2010
• Est. Priority Date: 06/28/2001
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Microsoft Technology Licensing LLC (Microsoft Corporation)
• Original Assignee: Microsoft Corporation
• Inventors: Koch, Paul, Horvitz, Eric J., Apacible, Johnson T., Kadie, Carl M.
• Primary Examiner(s): HOLMES, MICHAEL B
• Application Number:
  US11/469,148
• Publication Number:
  US 20070071209A1
• Time in Patent Office: 1,384 Days
• Field of Search: 706/21
• US Class Current: 706/21
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 10/109 Time management, e.g. calendars, reminders, meetings or time accounting

Abstract

The present invention relates to a system and methodology to facilitate collaboration and communications between entities such as between automated applications, parties to a communication and/or combinations thereof. The systems and methods of the present invention include a service that supports collaboration and communication by learning predictive models that provide forecasts of one or more aspects of a users'"'"' presence and availability. Presence forecasts include a user'"'"'s current or future locations at different levels of location precision and usage of different devices or applications. Availability assessments include inferences about the cost of interrupting a user in different ways and a user'"'"'s current or future access to one or more communication channels. The predictive models are constructed from data collected by considering user activity and proximity from multiple devices, in addition to analysis of the content of users'"'"' calendars, the time of day, and day of week, for example. Various applications are provided that employ the presence and availability information supplied by the models in order to facilitate collaboration and communications between entities.

Claims

1. A system to facilitate communications and collaboration between entities, comprising:

a learning component that is trained according to activity patterns of one or more users; and

a forecasting component that employs the learning component to generate predictions relating to availability states of the one or more users.

2. The system of claim 1, the forecasting component receives one or more queries regarding an identified user'"'"'s availability and generates one or more predictions relating to current or future availability states of the identified user.

3. The system of claim 2, the queries are originated by one or more applications or authorized people in order to obtain answers regarding availability states the identified user, the states comprising at least one of presence, absence, location, communications capability, and device availability.

4. The system of claim 3, the presence states include at least one of a time until a user will arrive at or leave a location, a time until the user will be at a location for at least time t, a time until the user will have access to a device, a time until the user will review an e-mail or other message, a time until the user will finish a conversation in progress, a likelihood the user will attend a meeting, an expected cost of interruption over time.

5. The system of claim 2, the forecasting component selectively reveals prediction information based upon the identified user'"'"'s preferences.

6. The system of claim 1, the forecasting component determines complementary information relating to predictions of how long until changes of states occurs.

7. The system of claim 1, the learning component includes one or more learning models for reasoning about the presence states, the learning models can include at least one of a statistical model, a mathematical model, a Bayesian dependency model, a naï

ve Bayesian classifier, a Support Vector Machine (SVMs), a neural network and a Hidden Markov Model.

8. The system of claim 1, the learning component is trained from a user event data store that aggregates data from a plurality of different data sources associated with the one or more users.

9. The system of claim 8, the data sources include data acquisition components that log user event data, the data sources include at least one of a cell phone, an accelerometer, an acoustical activity recorded by microphone, a Global Positioning System (GPS), an electronic calendar, time information, a vision monitoring device, a wireless device, and a computer desktop activity.

10. The system of claim 1, the forecasting component has a probability threshold parameter the enables users to adjust the amount of certainty associated with predictions.

11. A method for building a forecasting model, comprising:

analyzing multiple properties associated with appointments and integrating observations into an analysis of availability; and

constructing a model that relates multiple attributes of a meeting to determine likelihood that a meeting will be attended.

12. The method of claim 11, the multiple attributes of a meeting include one or more of meeting date, meeting time, meeting duration, meeting subject, meeting location, meeting organizer, number of invitees, organization relationship of invitees, role of invitees, response status of invitees, meeting recurrence, and invitees availability.

13. The method of claim 11, further comprising building a model of attendance by automatically accessing appointment properties from appointments from a commercially available server.

14. The method of claim 13, further comprising employing attendance heuristics to consider an extension of desktop activity into a portion of scheduled meeting as evidence that a meeting was not attended, and considering a lack of activity during a meeting as evidence that a meeting was attended.

15. A system to facilitate communications and collaboration between entities, comprising:

a data collection component that collects information about a user'"'"'s presence and absence at different locations and/or changes over time relating to a user'"'"'s access to different devices and/or communication channels;

a learning component that is trained according to activity patterns of one or more users; and

a forecasting component that employs the learning component to generate predictions relating to states of the one or more users for specific queries about a user'"'"'s current or future availability.

16. The system of claim 15, further comprising a communication agent that determines an optimal communication channel to employ to establish communication between the entities based upon the generated prediction.

17. The system of claim 15, further comprising static and dynamically constructed predictive models that are determined by making queries for information across multiple dimensions of a database including information about a user'"'"'s activities across multiple devices and availability states.

18. The system of claim 17, the models include determining a predictive goal associated with a desired forecast including a time until a communication channel will become available if not currently available.

19. The system of claim 15, the forecasting component further employs the learning components to determine an expected cost of interruption to a user at a current or future time.

20. The system of claim 19, the forecasting component further determines a cost of interruption based upon one or more user defined profiles.