Communication Priority Ranking System for Email and Text Messages

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Solution Overview

Problem

Individuals face challenges in managing a high volume of incoming communications, such as emails and text messages, where it is difficult to determine which are important and require timely attention, leading to potential oversight of critical messages.

Innovation Solution

A system that automatically assigns significance levels to incoming communications based on historical data, sender and receiver relationships, keywords, and user instructions, allowing for prioritization and selective presentation of important communications, enabling users to focus on high-priority items while minimizing time spent on less important ones.

Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles

VSEngineering Contradiction Analysis

1Reliability

If a user manually reviews each incoming communication, then the user can determine importance individually, but the user cannot keep up with the volume of communications and may overlook important ones

Engineering Contradiction:

Improveimportance determination accuracyVSAvoidcommunication review speed

Core Design Contradiction:

ReliabilityVSProductivity

Solution Approach 1:

The system performs self-service by automatically analyzing incoming communications and assigning priority levels without requiring manual user intervention for each communication. The system uses historical data, sender-receiver relationships, and communication patterns to autonomously determine importance, allowing the user to focus only on high-priority items that require their attention.

Inventive Principle:

Principle #25Self-service

Solution Approach 2:

The system incorporates feedback mechanisms by monitoring user actions on prioritized communications and using this feedback to refine future priority assignments. When users interact with communications marked as high priority, the system learns from these interactions to improve its automated prioritization algorithm, creating a continuously improving system that adapts to user needs.

Inventive Principle:

Principle #23Feedback

2Productivity

If the system automatically prioritizes communications, then the user can focus on important items, but the system may misclassify important communications as unimportant

Engineering Contradiction:

Improvecommunication review efficiencyVSAvoidpriority classification accuracy

Core Design Contradiction:

ProductivityVSReliability

Solution Approach 1:

The system performs preliminary action by pre-analyzing communication patterns, sender-receiver relationships, and historical data before the user needs to review communications. This preliminary processing establishes priority levels in advance, allowing the user to receive and respond to important communications more quickly without manual analysis for each item.

Inventive Principle:

Principle #10Preliminary action

Solution Approach 2:

The priority classification system is dynamic rather than static, continuously adapting to changing communication patterns, user behavior, and contextual factors. The system adjusts its prioritization algorithms in real-time based on new data, ensuring that important communications are identified accurately even as user needs and communication patterns evolve over time.

Inventive Principle:

Principle #15Dynamics

3Reliability

If the system uses historical data for prioritization, then the system can make more accurate predictions, but the system requires complex data processing and storage

Engineering Contradiction:

Improvepriority prediction accuracyVSAvoiddata processing complexity

Core Design Contradiction:

ReliabilityVSDevice complexity

Solution Approach 1:

The system extracts only the most relevant features from historical data for prioritization decisions, such as communication frequency, time patterns, and sender-receiver relationships. By focusing on key indicators rather than processing all historical data uniformly, the system achieves accurate predictions while reducing processing complexity and resource requirements.

Inventive Principle:

Principle #2Taking out (Extraction)

Solution Approach 2:

The system changes parameters dynamically based on the type of communication, sender importance, and contextual factors. Different weightings and thresholds are applied to historical data parameters depending on the specific communication being analyzed, allowing the system to optimize accuracy for each scenario without requiring uniform complex processing for all cases.

Inventive Principle:

Principle #35Parameter changes

Data Source

PatentUS7885948B2Automatically managing incoming communications between sender and recipient, analyzing factors, selectively applying observed behavior, performing designated action

Publication Date: 2011.02.08 MICROSOFT TECHNOLOGY LICENSING LLC

AI summary

As incoming communications are received, a priority or significance level can be assigned to each communication. A communication determined to have a high priority can be presented to a user at substantially the same time as receiving the communication. A communication having a low priority can be placed in a low priority folder or flagged differently from a high priority communication (e.g., different color-coding). Behavior of a user as it relates to a received communication can be observed for learning purposes or to modify one or more classifications or priority levels.