Abstract: A system and method for managing an avatar is provided. The method comprises receiving an initial input from one or more communication interfaces, processing the initial input using one or more processors, determining one or more initial characteristics based on processing the initial input and providing instructions to generate and display the avatar with one or more initial avatar characteristics in response to the one or more initial characteristics.

Abstract: Predicting user responses to items is useful in many application domains, such as personalized information retrieval and recommendation systems. In an embodiment a contacts service identifies contacts of a target user and predictions are elicited from the contacts about the target user's response to an item. In various examples, the predictions are combined taking into account weights of the contacts to produce a prediction of the target user's response. For example, the response may be one or more of: a numerical rating, a word or phrase describing the targets user's opinion of the item and a word or phrase stating a reason that the target user holds the opinion. In examples, accuracy of the predictions is calculated after observing the target user's actual response. The accuracy may be used to calculate and display scores and rankings of the contact's prediction abilities and to update the weights of the contacts.