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.