76950results about "Digital data information retrieval" patented technology

A method and system that provides filtered data from a data system. In one embodiment the system includes an API (application programming interface) and associated software modules to enable third party applications to access an enterprise data system. Administrators are enabled to select specific user interface (UI) objects, such as screens, views, applets, columns and fields to voice or pass-through enable via a GUI that presents a tree depicting a hierarchy of the UI objects within a user interface of an application. An XSLT style sheet is then automatically generated to filter out data pertaining to UI objects that were not voice or pass-through enabled. In response to a request for data, unfiltered data are retrieved from the data system and a specified style sheet is applied to the unfiltered data to return filtered data pertaining to only those fields and columns that are voice or pass-through enabled.

An intelligent automated assistant system engages with the user in an integrated, conversational manner using natural language dialog, and invokes external services when appropriate to obtain information or perform various actions. The system can be implemented using any of a number of different platforms, such as the web, email, smartphone, and the like, or any combination thereof. In one embodiment, the system is based on sets of interrelated domains and tasks, and employs additional functionally powered by external services with which the system can interact.

An improved human user computer interface system, wherein a user characteristic or set of characteristics, such as demographic profile or societal “role”, is employed to define a scope or domain of operation. The operation itself may be a database search, to interactively define a taxonomic context for the operation, a business negotiation, or other activity. After retrieval of results, a scoring or ranking may be applied according to user define criteria, which are, for example, commensurate with the relevance to the context, but may be, for example, by date, source, or other secondary criteria. A user profile is preferably stored in a computer accessible form, and may be used to provide a history of use, persistent customization, collaborative filtering and demographic information for the user. Advantageously, user privacy and anonymity is maintained by physical and algorithmic controls over access to the personal profiles, and releasing only aggregate data without personally identifying information or of small groups.

A plurality of data mover computers control access to respective file systems in data storage. A network client serviced by any of the data movers can access each of the file systems. If a data mover receives a client request for access to a file in a file system to which access is controlled by another data mover, then the data mover that received the client request sends a metadata request to the data mover that controls access to the file system. The data mover that controls access to the file system responds by placing a lock on the file and returning metadata of the file. The data mover that received the client request uses the metadata to formulate a data access command that is used to access the file data in the file system over a bypass data path that bypasses the data mover computer that controls access to the file system.

A method of retrieving and manipulating electronic information that relates to a printed document. Each printed document contains an initialization marking that is recognizable by an external sensory device and unique to the printed document. When a reader of the printed document desires to retrieve and manipulate electronic information that relates to the printed document, the reader initializes the system by using the sensory device to recognize the initialization marking. The sensory device transfers a code embedded in the initialization marking to a computing device. This configures the computing device to access the stored data and instruction sets associated with the printed document. In addition to the initialization marking, areas throughout the printed document (e.g., text, tables, figures, etc.) also contain markings that are recognizable by the external sensory device. The reader of the printed document uses the sensory device to recognize the markings and transfer the code embedded in the markings to the computing device. The computing device uses the code to retrieve and display the electronic information that relates to that area of the printed document.

An apparatus, system, and method are disclosed for provisioning database resource within a grid database system. The federation apparatus includes an analysis module and a provision module. The analysis module analyzes a data query stream from an application to a database instance and determines if the data query stream exhibits a predetermined performance attribute. The provision module provisions a database resource in response to a determination that the data query stream exhibits the predetermined performance attribute. The provisioned database resource may be a database instance or a cache. The provisioning of the new database resource advantageously is substantially transparent to a client on the database system.

A watermark system includes an embedder, detector, and reader. The watermark embedder encodes a watermark signal in a host signal to create a combined signal. The detector looks for the watermark signal in a potentially corrupted version of the combined signal, and computes its orientation. Finally, a reader extracts a message in the watermark signal from the combined signal using the orientation to approximate the original state of the combined signal. While adapted for images, video and audio, the watermark system applies to other electronic and physical media. For example, it can be applied to mark graphical models, blank paper, film and other substrates, texturing objects for ID purposes, etc.

A printed object, such as an item of postal mail, a book, printed advertising, a business card, product packaging, etc., is steganographically encoded with plural-bit data. When such an object is presented to an optical sensor, the plural-bit data is decoded and used to establish a link to an internet address corresponding to that object.

An interactive and enhanced digital Instant Catalog of products, services, and information that is personalized or personally profiled, to each unique user of the catalog. The catalog instantly and intelligently captures, stores, manages, and processes self-selected, reusable and "re-distributable" catalog groupings anonymously, for personalizing, enhancing, monitoring, tracking, and peer sharing through multiple mediums and platforms by intelligent agents for a variety of user and vendor specified purposes. The personally profiled cataloged information can be viewed instantaneously and simultaneously by each effected component or member of a supply chain, at the time the product or service has been cataloged, without identifying the cataloger. The user, who preferably employs a Web browser over the Internet, personalizes the interactively produced intelligent catalog content. Products, services, and information groupings are digitally captured and stored by an intelligent catalog agent for enhanced personalized interaction and networking through a peer sharing network, or through an open catalog exchange. The user has the ability to create their own individualized world of products, services, and information that is contextually tailored to each user's unique environment in real-time. Web services hosted within a personal Extranet can anonymously assist and facilitate a context specific task or service insightfully and spontaneously. Through the selective cataloging of multi-vendor products, services, and information, a user is able to fully control, personalize, enhance and share, any lifestyle interest captured from ITV, print, the World Wide Web, businesses, and peers.

An improved human user computer interface system, wherein a user characteristic or set of characteristics, such as demographic profile or societal “role”, is employed to define a scope or domain of operation. The operation itself may be a database search, to interactively define a taxonomic context for the operation, a business negotiation, or other activity. After retrieval of results, a scoring or ranking may be applied according to user define criteria, which are, for example, commensurate with the relevance to the context, but may be, for example, by date, source, or other secondary criteria. A user profile is preferably stored in a computer accessible form, and may be used to provide a history of use, persistent customization, collaborative filtering and demographic information for the user. Advantageously, user privacy and anonymity is maintained by physical and algorithmic controls over access to the personal profiles, and releasing only aggregate data without personally identifying information or of small groups.

A method for providing automatic, personalized information services to a computer user includes the following steps: transparently monitoring user interactions with data during normal use of the computer; updating user-specific data files including a set of user-related documents; estimating parameters of a learning machine that define a User Model specific to the user, using the user-specific data files; analyzing a document to identify its properties; estimating the probability that the user is interested in the document by applying the document properties to the parameters of the User Model; and providing personalized services based on the estimated probability. Personalized services include personalized searches that return only documents of interest to the user, personalized crawling for maintaining an index of documents of interest to the user; personalized navigation that recommends interesting documents that are hyperlinked to documents currently being viewed; and personalized news, in which a third party server customized its interaction with the user. The User Model includes continually-updated measures of user interest in words or phrases, web sites, topics, products, and product features. The measures are updated based on both positive examples, such as documents the user bookmarks, and negative examples, such as search results that the user does not follow. Users are clustered into groups of similar users by calculating the distance between User Models.

A system and method of interactive cataloging of products and services by end users across multiple sales and marketing channels provide each end user with access to domain-independent catalog data from a plurality of vendor organizations through a catalog server system. Anonymous end user cataloging actions of products and / or services across multiple manufacturing, distribution, and retailing channels create personalized profile instances that are based on stored vendor catalog profile templates in the catalog server system, and stored in the end user's personalized electronic catalog as pre-sale digital receipts. An end user's personalized electronic catalog(s) can be shared with peers using mutual agreement permissions as managed by the catalog server system. Pre-sale digital receipts are used to provide a safe, secure, and convenient method for modifying an end user's actionable cataloged items from a pre-sale status to purchased status when purchased and to provide a traceable audit trail for each cataloged item or purchased item in order to facilitate respective pre-sales channel activities and post-sales channel support and services.

Streaming compressed digital hypervideo received upon a digital communications network is decoded (decompressed) and played in a client-computer-based "video on web VCR" software system. Scene changes, if not previously marked upstream, are automatically detected, and typically twenty-one past scenes are displayed as thumbnail images. Hyperlinks within the main video scene, and / or any thumbnail image, show as hotspots, with text annotations typically appearing upon a cursor "mouse over". All hyperlinks-as are provided and inserted by, inter alia, the upstream network service provider (the "ISP")-may be, and preferably are, full-custom dynamically-resolved to each subscriber / user / viewer ("SUV") upon volitional "click throughs" by the SUV, including retrospectively on past hypervideo scenes as appear within the thumbnail images. Hyperlinking permits (i) retrieving information and commercials, including streaming video / hypervideo, from any of local storage, a network (or Internet) service provider ("ISP"), a network content provider, and / or an advertiser network site, (ii) entering a contest of skill or a lottery of chance, (iii) gambling, (iv) buying (and less often, selling), (v) responding to a survey, and expressing an opinion, and / or (vi) sounding an alert.

A community media playlist sharing system is disclosed, wherein system users can upload media playlists which are automatically converted to a standardized format, media playlists can be shared with other users of the community media playlist sharing system, users can link to other playlists and obtain media from playlists automatically from third party points of purchase, users can provide recommendations, ratings and rankings relative to other playlists by system users and receive recommendations from other users and an editorial staff, participate in social networking functions including forums, discussions, weblogs, playlist topic groups and inter-user communications based on affinity for similar playlists, create playlists manually, automatically, or in real time, and wherein system users can obtain points for participation and popularity in the system and obtain profit by meta-affiliate sharing of profit for purchases of music made through playlists submitted by that user as well as through playlist toolbars distributed to third party websites.

The invention can enable monitoring of the display of content by a computer system. Moreover, the invention can enable monitoring of the displayed content to produce monitoring information from which conclusions may be deduced regarding the observation of the displayed content by an observer. The invention can also enable monitoring of the display at a content display site of content that is provided by a content provider site over a network to the content display site. Additionally, the invention can enable the expeditious provision of updated and / or tailored content over a network from a content provider site to a content display site so that the content provider's current and appropriately tailored content is always displayed at the content display site. Aspects of the invention related to transfer of content over a network are generally applicable to any type of network. However, it is contemplated that the invention can be particularly useful with a computer network, including private computer networks (e.g., America Online TM ) and public computer networks (e.g., the Internet). In particular, the invention can be advantageously used with computer networks or portions of computer networks over which video and / or audio content are transferred from one network site to another network site for observation, such as the World Wide Web portion of the Internet.

A method for recognizing an audio sample locates an audio file that most closely matches the audio sample from a database indexing a large set of original recordings. Each indexed audio file is represented in the database index by a set of landmark timepoints and associated fingerprints. Landmarks occur at reproducible locations within the file, while fingerprints represent features of the signal at or near the landmark timepoints. To perform recognition, landmarks and fingerprints are computed for the unknown sample and used to retrieve matching fingerprints from the database. For each file containing matching fingerprints, the landmarks are compared with landmarks of the sample at which the same fingerprints were computed. If a large number of corresponding landmarks are linearly related, i.e., if equivalent fingerprints of the sample and retrieved file have the same time evolution, then the file is identified with the sample. The method can be used for any type of sound or music, and is particularly effective for audio signals subject to linear and nonlinear distortion such as background noise, compression artifacts, or transmission dropouts. The sample can be identified in a time proportional to the logarithm of the number of entries in the database; given sufficient computational power, recognition can be performed in nearly real time as the sound is being sampled.

A distributed, web-services based storage system. A system may include a web services interface configured to receive, according to a web services protocol, a given client request for access to a given data object, the request including a key value corresponding to the object. The system may also include storage nodes configured to store replicas of the objects, where each replica is accessible via a respective unique locator value, and a keymap instance configured to store a respective keymap entry for each object. For the given object, the respective keymap entry includes the key value and each locator value corresponding to replicas of the object. A coordinator may receive the given client request from the web services interface, responsively access the keymap instance to identify locator values corresponding to the key value and, for a particular locator value, retrieve a corresponding replica from a corresponding storage node.

Disclosed herein are various exemplary systems and methods for linking entity references to entities and identifying associations between entities. In particular, a method for identifying an entity from a plurality of entity references, each entity reference being linked with a separate ghost entity, is provided. The method comprises the steps of comparing an entity reference of a first ghost entity with an entity reference of a second ghost entity to determine a match probability between the entity reference of the first ghost entity and the entity reference of the second ghost entity, linking the entity reference of the first ghost entity additionally with the second ghost entity and the entity reference of the second ghost entity additionally with the first ghost entity when the match probability is greater than or equal to a match threshold and repeating the steps of comparing and linking for one or more ghost entity pairings possible from the ghost entities. The method further comprises determining, for one or more entity references linked to a ghost entity, a score for the entity reference based at least in part on a match probability between the entity reference and a value representing the one or more entity references linked to the ghost entity and identifying the ghost entity as an actual entity based at least in part on one or more scores for the one or more entity references linked to the ghost entity.

Mobile systems and methods that overcomes the deficiencies of prior art speech-based interfaces for telematics applications through the use of a complete speech-based information query, retrieval, presentation and local or remote command environment. This environment makes significant use of context, prior information, domain knowledge, and user specific profile data to achieve a natural environment for one or more users making queries or commands in multiple domains. Through this integrated approach, a complete speech-based natural language query and response environment can be created. The invention creates, stores and uses extensive personal profile information for each user, thereby improving the reliability of determining the context and presenting the expected results for a particular question or command. The invention may organize domain specific behavior and information into agents, that are distributable or updateable over a wide area network. The invention can be used in dynamic environments such as those of mobile vehicles to control and communicate with both vehicle systems and remote systems and devices.

A system and method for using a user profile to order placed content in search results returned by a search engine. The user profile is based on search queries submitted by a user, the user's specific interaction with the documents identified by the search engine and personal information provided by the user. Placed content is ranked by a score based at least in part on a similarity of a particular placed content to the user's profile. User profiles can be created and / or stored on the client side or server side of a client-server network environment.

The present invention relates to a system and method for recommending tags and / or content items in response to requests received from remote computing devices. In one aspect, a content item recommendation system comprises a database configured to store an identifier of a first content item, a first tag and information from which a tag density associated with the first tag and with the first content item may be derived. The tag density may be a measure of times a tag has been associated with a content item by any user of a plurality of users who are members of a community. The system also comprises a recommendation engine configured to receive search results containing the first tag from a search engine and to correlate the first tag with information stored in the database. The recommendation engine may be further configured to determine a recommended tag, based on a recommendation threshold and a tag density, the tag density associated with both the recommended tag and the first content item.

Peer-to-peer redundant file server system and methods include clients that determine a target storage provider to contact for a particular storage transaction based on a pathname provided by the filesystem and a predetermined scheme such as a hash function applied to a portion of the pathname. Servers use the same scheme to determine where to store relevant file information so that the clients can locate the file information. The target storage provider may store the file itself and / or may store metadata that identifies one or more other storage providers where the file is stored. A file may be replicated in multiple storage providers, and the metadata may include a list of storage providers from which the clients can select (e.g., randomly) in order to access the file.

Systems and methods for social networking. Location-related data and other behavioral and exogenously generated characteristics are used to replace or supplement self-generated profiles in order to enhance the quality and trustworthiness of the matches made using the system and facilitate the inputting of profile information.

An adaptive search engine (1) having a plurality of data items (4) from one or more data sources (5) stored in at least one database searchable by a search query (6) of a least one keyword (7) to produce a corresponding ranked search result listing (8) of data items (4), said search engine having a plurality of selectable filters (9) applicable by the search engine and / or the user to filter at least a portion (10) of the data items (4) of the search result listing (8), characterised in that said search engine records an association between a filter (9) applied to a search query (6) and a data item (4) selected by a user from said filtered portion (10) of the corresponding search result listing (8), wherein each recorded association contributes to the weighting given by the search engine (1) to application of said filter (9) in a subsequent search for at least one keyword (7) of said search query (6).

A file system shell is provided. One aspect of the shell provides virtual folders which expose regular files and folders to users in different views based on their metadata instead of the actual physical underlying file system structure on the disk. Users are able to work with the virtual folders through direct manipulation (e.g., clicking and dragging, copying, pasting, etc.). Filters are provided for narrowing down sets of items. Quick links are provided which can be clicked on to generate useful views of the sets of items. Libraries are provided which consist of large groups of usable types of items that can be associated together, along with functions and tools related to the items. A virtual address bar is provided which comprises a plurality of segments, each segment corresponding to a filter for selecting content. A shell browser is provided with which users can readily identify an item based on the metadata associated with that item. An object previewer in a shell browser is provided which is configured to display a plurality of items representing multiple item types.

A system is described for maintaining synchrony of operations among a plurality of devices that have independent clocking arrangements. The system includes a task distribution device that distributes tasks to a synchrony group comprising a plurality of devices that are to perform the tasks distributed by the task distribution device in synchrony. The task distribution device distributes each task to the members of the synchrony group over a network. Each task is associated with a time stamp that indicates a time, relative to a clock maintained by the task distribution device, at which the members of the synchrony group are to execute the task. Each member of the synchrony group periodically obtains from the task distribution device an indication of the current time indicated by its clock, determines a time differential between the task distribution device's clock and its respective clock and determines therefrom a time at which, according to its respective clock, the time stamp indicates that it is to execute the task.