OFFERING TASKS TO USERS BASED ON THEIR COMPETENCE AND ON THEIR CURRENT ACTIVITY

摘要

The pervasive visibility of television (116) and other screens (110, 118) is leveraged to present (308) task offers to users. A task broker (106) gives (314) the user an incentive if he accepts and successfully performs the task. To be effective, the task broker (106) first collects (300, 400) profile information about the user. Some of the profile information is used to determine what tasks are appropriate for a given user based, for example, on that user's competencies. Other profile information characterizes the user's current level of activity and, based on that, his "interruptibility." Tasks and incentives can be chosen (302a) based on user-profile information including, for example, demographics and the user's previous interactions with the task broker (106). Information about the user's successful completion of a task can be used to update (316) the user's profile, and future task offers are based (318) on this updated profile information.