Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Andi Fabian Rusu

Felix G T I Andrew

Patrick Michael Halvorsen

Scott Andrew Borton

Eric Youngstrom

Anson Ho

Entities such as hotels, restaurants, resorts, houses, vehicles, and other places and things, are associated with images of each entity. The images are tagged using machine learning to identify what aspects of the associated entity are captured by each image. When a user is requested to select an entity from a set of entities, a user preference model is used to determine what tags the user is interested in. The tags are used to select images associated with the entities from the set of entities, and the selected images are displayed to the user. The user can then provide indicators that show which of the displayed images the user likes or dislikes. Based on the indicators, one or more entities from the set of entities is presented to the user. The model may also be updated based on the indicators.

System and method for recommending entities based on interest indicators

Environmental signals are used to determine when to prompt a user to enable location sharing on their computer devices. These environmental signals may include the current location of the user being an unusual location for the user or a location that is tagged as a known social location such as a concert venue, stadium, or park. The environmental signals may also include one or more friends of the user being near the user. If the user chooses to enable location sharing in response to the prompt, the location of the user may be shared with some or all of their friends, or just the friends that have been determined to be near the user. After some amount of time has passed, or the environmental signals have changed, the location sharing may be automatically disabled for the user.

Enabling and disabling location sharing based on environmental signals

A map application is provided that allows orientations to be assigned to images such as photographs. The orientation is the direction that a real or hypothetical photographer that took the image was facing when the image was taken or created. The orientation for an image may be specified by the user, determined based on metadata associated with the image, and/or may be determined based on known features or landmarks that may be visible in the image. When an image is rendered on a map, it is displayed perpendicular to a surface of the map with the determined orientation. The amount of the image that is visible to the user depends on the orientation of the map. As the user rotates the orientation of the map, the rendered images are rotated in proportion to the rotation of the map.

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Seattle, WA, United States of America

Andi Fabian Rusu