METHOD FOR FACILITATING A REAL-TIME VIRTUAL INTERACTION

• US 20090193078A1
• Filed: 01/24/2008
• Published: 07/30/2009
• Est. Priority Date: 01/24/2008
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
• Original Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
• Inventors: Gupta, Manish, Dhoolia, Pankaj, Sachindran, Narendran
• Granted Patent: US 8,516,048 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 709/204
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/00 Information retrieval; Database structures therefor; File system structures therefor

Abstract

Techniques for facilitating a real-time virtual interaction between two or more users are provided. The techniques include extracting a dynamically changing context from two or more users, wherein the context comprises at least one of user-provided information and one or more items related to at least one of current activity and past activity of the two or more users, analyzing the context from each user to create a classification for each user, comparing the classification for each user with a classification for each additional user, wherein comparing comprises ordering each user in terms of closeness to each additional user, and using the ordering of each user in terms of closeness to each additional user to facilitate a real-time virtual interaction between two or more users. Techniques are also provided for generating a database of one or more user classifications.

Claims

1. A method for facilitating a real-time virtual interaction between two or mole users, comprising the steps of:

extracting a dynamically changing context from two or more users, wherein the context comprises at least one of user-provided information and one or more items related to at least one of current activity and past activity of the two or more users;

analyzing the context from each user to create a classification for each user;

comparing the classification for each user with a classification for each additional user, wherein comparing comprises ordering each user in terms of closeness to each additional user; and

using the ordering of each user in terms of closeness to each additional user to facilitate a real-time virtual interaction between two or more users.

2. The method of claim 1, further comprising providing each user with privacy control.

3. The method of claim 1, wherein the activity comprises participating in at least one of a web-log (blog), jam, electronic mail (e-mail), wiki, internet browsing, three-dimensional environments, a commerce site, an auction site, content browsing, content manipulation and one or more software development activities.

4. The method of claim 1, wherein each user has an avatar.

5. The method of claim 1, further comprising enabling each user to communicate with each additional user and navigate one or more three-dimensional (3D) environments.

6. The method of claim 5, wherein enabling each user to communicate with each additional user comprises using at least one of instant message, chat and voice capability.

7. The method of claim 1, wherein extracting context occurs at one or more domains.

8. The method of claim 7, wherein the one or more domains comprise at least one of software development environments, e-mail, a work document, electronic commerce and internet.

9. The method of claim 1, wherein creating a classification comprises analyzing the context of a user activity to construct at least one of a frequent-term vector and a feature vector for the user activity.

10. The method of claim 1, wherein extracting context comprises the following steps:

par sing a document object model (DOM) for the current user activity;

using the parsed DOM to obtain one or more words of text from the activity;

removing each word that conveys no context information;

removing each set of equivalent words;

computing a count of one or more unique words from the activity; and

computing a content vector and normalized term-frequency vector of one or more frequently occurring terms.

11. The method of claim 1, further comprising generating a ranking of two or more users for a given context based on a distance function, wherein the distance function depends on a feature vector.

12. A method for generating a database of one or more user classifications, comprising the steps of:

extracting context from a user, wherein the context comprises one or more items of current activity of the user;

analyzing the context from each user to create a classification for each user; and

storing the user classification in a searchable database.