Patent ID: 7389351

Claim:
A system embodied on a computer readable storage medium for facilitating communication between entities, comprising: one or more communication modalities that respectively provide for communication between at least two entities, and a communication manager that analyzes a first communication data set associated with a first entity and a second communication data set associated with a second entity, where at least one of the first entity or the second entity is a human being, the communication manager identifying a subset of the one or more communication modalities based at least in part on analysis of the first and second communication data sets utilizing at least one of reasoning under uncertainty and deterministic processing, the communication manager determining one or more current expected utilities associated with a communication between the first entity and second entity based, at least in part, on current contactor data, current contactee data and current communication modality data, where the current contactee data comprises current state data and the current contactor data comprises current state data, the communication manager determining one or more predicted expected utilities associated with a communication between the first entity and second entity based, at least in part, on predicted contactor data, predicted contactee data and predicted communication modality data, where the predicted contactee data comprises predicted state data and the predicted contactor data comprises predicted state data; the communication manager comparing one or more current expected utilities to one or more predicted expected utilities and ranking the current expected utilities with the predicted expected utilities, wherein the ranking of the predicted expected utilities is weighted by one or more costs associated with delaying the communication to a point in time associated with the predicted expected utility, and the communication manager establishing a communication between the entities via at least one modality of the subset based upon the ranking.