System and Method for Clock Aware Generation of Speed Call Lists for Cell Phones

Publication Summary

Inventors - Deergha Sahni, Asim Kadav IBM Disclosed is a system to generate a speed dial list in cell phones towards the end of providing an enhanced user-experience. The list is customized to the user's routine-based usage patterns. This usage pattern is mapped from the time of the day the call is made, its frequency and recentness of call. The system is adaptive in nature and takes into consideration gradual time shifts, weekend patterns, unanswered calls and pattern aging. This invention can be extended to chat IMs and other services where usage pattern can be tapped for enhanced user experience and/or resource optimization.

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Language	English (United States)

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System and Method for Clock Aware Generation of Speed Call Lists for Cell Phones

Inventors - Deergha Sahni, Asim Kadav IBM

The present invention provides a system and method for generating a speed call list. This is a list of contacts, sorted in an order that the user is most likely to dial, at that point of time in the day.

This involves:
a) Tracking all answered calls made by the user and recording properties including, the time slot and contact called.
b) Each

pair registered, is associated with a frequency value. This gives us how often this contact was called in this time-slot. If there is no contact associated with the number, we display the number dialed.
c) When the user intends to make a call, this data is analyzed with respect to the current time.
d) This analysis yields weights for each contact; these weights are a measure of the probability of the associated contact being called.
e) The speed list is then generated which is simply an enumeration of the contacts in decreasing order of the assigned weights (probability).
f) The system is flexible to time shifts within configurable variable ranges and is adaptive to changing call patterns.
g) It incorporates the concept of ageing to reduce the relevance of less recently called contacts (even though their frequency count may be high). It does this by recording a timestamp value for the last time the call was made.
h) Special adjustments are made for weekend patterns to make the system closely follow user routine.
i) Unanswered calls are not blindly disregarded; a set of unanswered calls to a contact, localized in time, lead to registering the call once.

A method entailing a detailed collection of data and a complex prediction procedure may not be advisable for devices with the constraints of a phone. However many lightweight but accurate implementations are possible; features may be selectively included and excluded as per preferences of detail.

Keywords

Speed List, Contacts, Frequency, Clock Aware, Intelligent Systems, Aging, Time-Slots, Last-Dialed Timestamp.

Related Work

Existing solutions provide ways that make this access easier. Two features frequently found on most phones include:

1) Contact List - typically an alphabetically sorted, allowing searches on alphabetic strings.
2) Recently Dialed List - sorted in a Most Recently Dialed fashion, wherein the number dialed last, is made available first.

Prior art in this area, uncovers the following suggested ideas:

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1) List sorted on frequency of dialed number - This proposes to augment each contact's information with an additional attribute tracking the total number of calls it has been used for. Most frequently dialed numbers appear on top of the list. [1]

2) Frequency of outgoing calls as a factor in assigning automated speed dials. [2]

3) Building an affinity database, with the callee/contact, his number and affinity information. Affinity information to each callee/co...

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