Providing relevant information to a user based upon monitored user activities in one or more contexts

• US 9,773,065 B2
• Filed: 09/25/2014
• Issued: 09/26/2017
• Est. Priority Date: 01/16/2014
• Status: Expired due to Fees

• Current Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
• Original Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
• Inventors: Hahn, Timothy J., Lang, Brian J., Small, Joshua M., Srikanth, Viswanath
• Primary Examiner(s): Hershley, Mark E
• Application Number:
  US14/496,413
• Publication Number:
  US 20150199442A1
• Time in Patent Office: 1,097 Days
• Field of Search: 707748
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/951 Indexing; Web crawling techniques
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/9535 Search customisation based on user profiles and personalisation
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 67/306 User profiles
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 67/535 Tracking the activity of the user network monitoring arrangements H04L43/00; recording of computer activity G06F11/34
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 67/55 Push-based network services

Abstract

Techniques are described herein that facilitate monitoring one or more activities performed by a user on one or more devices, determining one or more topics of interest based on the monitored activities, preference information, and information within a user network, retrieving information from one or more network sites relating to the one or more topics of interest, and providing the retrieved information to the user.

Claims

1. A computer-implemented method of retrieving information pertaining to an activity comprising:

monitoring one or more activities performed by a user on one or more devices;

determining one or more topics of interest based on the monitored activities, profile information, and information within a user network;

weighting topics of interest that are related to a category of work being performed higher than other topics of interest when the user is actively working, whether the user is actively working being determined based on the profile information which includes working hours of the user;

weighting non-work-related topics of interest higher than work-related topics of interest when the user is not actively working;

prioritizing the determined one or more topics of interest based upon a plurality of factors including a weight of each of the one or more topics of interest;

retrieving information from one or more network sites relating to the prioritized one or more topics of interest; and

providing the retrieved information to the user.

2. The computer-implemented method of claim 1, wherein determining the one or more topics of interest includes:

updating the one or more topics of interest based on at least one of newly performed activities, environment, time of day, location, proximity of acquaintances, and motion of the one or more devices.

3. The computer-implemented method of claim 1, wherein determining the one or more topics of interest includes:

weighting the monitored activities, the profile information, and the information within a user network and determining the one or more topics of interest based on the weighting.

4. The computer-implemented method of claim 1, wherein providing the retrieved information includes:

filtering the retrieved information based on at least one of relevance, historical data, and user preference information.

5. The computer-implemented method of claim 1, further comprising:

providing feedback for the retrieved information based on user actions associated with the retrieved information.

6. The computer-implemented method of claim 1, wherein:

monitoring comprises continuously monitoring one or more activities performed by a user on one or more devices;

determining comprises continuously determining one or more topics of interest based on the monitored activities, the profile information, and the information within a user network;

retrieving comprises continuously retrieving the information from the one or more network sites relating to the one or more topics of interest; and

providing comprises continuously providing the retrieved information to the user.

7. The computer-implemented method of claim 5, further comprising determining topics of interest based upon the feedback supplied by a user, wherein the feedback comprises user selection of previously provided information.

8. The computer-implemented method of claim 1, further comprising:

determining a frequency for a topic of interest based upon occurrence of the topic of interest in a monitored activity; and

assigning a higher weighting to a topic of interest having a higher frequency than a topic of interest having a lower frequency.