Patent ID: 8643876

Claim:
A method of localizing elements in a device infrastructure comprising: mapping a structure in which elements of a device infrastructure are located, the elements comprising shared devices and users of the shared devices, wherein probable locations of fewer than all of the elements in the structure are mapped, at least some of the elements being initially assigned to an unknown location; acquiring usage logs for a plurality of the shared devices, the acquired usage log for each device comprising a user identifier for each of a set of uses of the device, each of the uses having been initiated from a respective location within the mapped structure by one of the users; with a processor of a computing device, based on the acquired usage logs and the input probable locations of some of the elements, predicting a location of at least one of the elements initially assigned to an unknown location, the prediction being based on a model which infers that for each of a plurality of the users, a usage of at least some of the shared devices by the user is a function of respective distances between the user and each of those devices; and outputting the predicted locations.