Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Intertrust Technologies Corporation

Andrew V Goldberg

Daniel R Delling

Renato F Werneck

Andrew K Wright

Jason D Hartline

Joshua T Goodman

Robert L Rounthwaite

Robert George Atkinson

Moises Goldszmidt

James M Lyon

Cynthia Dwork

Roy Williams

Khaja Ehteshamuddin Ahmed

Harry Simon Katz

Thomas Pajor

Ilya Razenshteyn

John Charles Krumm

Andreas Georg Nowatzyk

Edith Cohen

Xiang Zhao

Haim Kaplan

Christopher Robert Harrelson

Christopher John Leggetter

Ittai Abraham

Yunhong Zhou

Xia Sharon Wan

Darshan Vishwanath Kantak

Fabian Fuchs

Naiping Liu

Renato Fonseca Furquim Werneck

Aspects of the subject disclosure are directed towards managing sponsored online content based upon advertiser behavior. Defining mini-markets to represent such advertiser behavior may be accomplished by clustering queries that generate revenue from one or more campaigns. Query revenue data between queries and a set of campaigns may be used to determine such mini-markets. To illustrate, a query whose highest revenue is attributed to a campaign may be selected for that campaign's mini-market. When that query is entered as a search term, the campaign's mini-market helps allocate space for advertisements.

Estimating similarity of nodes using all-distances sketches

One or more techniques and/or systems are provided for controlling a travel route planning module associated with a user device. Travel related data, for a user and regarding previously traveled routes by the user, may be indicative of user travel preferences and/or behaviors. The travel related data is evaluated against computed routes derived from different weighting values applied to travel metrics (e.g., a cost associated with a U-turn, a highway, an industrial zone, etc.). For example, weighting values may be iteratively adjusted to generate a plurality of modified computed routes that may be evaluated to identify a target computed route having a similarity to a previously traveled route of the user above a threshold. User preference weighted travel metrics, generated based upon weighted travel metrics of the target computed route, are used to control a travel route planning module to generate a customized travel route for the user.

Controlling travel route planning module based upon user travel preference

Distance query techniques are provided that are robust to network structure, scale to large and massive networks, and are fast, straightforward, and efficient. A hierarchical hub labeling (HHL) technique is described to determine a distance between two nodes or vertices on a network. The HHL technique provides indexing by ordering vertices by importance, then transforming the ordering into an index, which enables fast exact shortest-path distance queries. The index may be compressed without sacrificing its correctness.

Distance queries on massive networks

A point-to-point shortest path technique supports real-time queries and fast metric update or replacement (metric customization). Determining a shortest path between two locations uses three stages: a preprocessing stage, a metric customization stage, and a query stage. Extensions to the customizable route planning (CRP) technique for routing are provided. These extensions include, for example, the computation of alternative routes, faster techniques for unpacking shortcuts, efficient query techniques for batched shortest path (one-to-many, many-to-many, and points of interest) determinations, and determining routes and alternative routes using traffic information.

Query scenarios for customizable route planning

Techniques are described for graph partitioning, and in particular, graph bisection. A lower bound is provided that is computed in near-linear time. These bounds may be used to determine optimum solutions to real-world graphs with many vertices (e.g., more than a million for road networks, or tens of thousands for VLSI and mesh instances). A packing lower bound technique determines lower bounds in a branch-and-bound tree, reducing the number of tree nodes. Techniques are employed to assign vertices without branching on them, again reducing the size of the tree. Decomposition is provided to translate an input graph into less complex subproblems. The decomposition boosts performance and determines the optimum solution to an input by solving subproblems independently. The subproblems can be solved independently using a branch-and-bound approach to determine the optimum bisection.

Determining optimum graph bisection using a tree and pruning the tree using a packing lower bound

Graph partitioning techniques are based on the notion of natural cuts. A filtering phase performs a series of minimum cut computations to identify and contract dense regions of the graph. This reduces the graph size significantly, but preserves its general structure. An assembly phase uses a combination of greedy and local search heuristics to assemble the final partition. The techniques may be used on road networks, which have an abundance of natural cuts (such as bridges, mountain passes, and ferries).

Graph partitioning with natural cuts

Alternative routes to an optimal route may be determined and presented to a user via a computing device. Alternative routes are selected from candidate routes that meet admissibility criteria. In an implementation, admissibility of a candidate route (in order for it to be considered an alternative route) may be determined based on three criteria: 'limited sharing', 'local optimality', and &#x201c;stretch&#x201d; such as &#x201c;uniformly bounded stretch&#x201d;. Limited sharing refers to the amount of difference between the alternative route and the optimal route, local optimality refers to lack of unnecessary detours, and uniformly bounded stretch refers to a length of the shortest path to travel between two points on the alternative route.

Determining alternative routes

Optimum journeys in public transportation networks are determined. The determination of Pareto optimal journeys from one stop to another stop in a public transportation network uses the criteria travel time and minimum transfers. A technique for bi-criteria journey planning using the aforementioned criteria in public transportation networks operates in rounds (K rounds at most), where after round k (k&#x2266;K), arrival times are computed for the stops that can be reached with up to k trips.

Journey planning in public transportation networks

The non-negative single-source shortest path (NSSP) problem is solved on a graph by using a preprocessing phase and then, in a query phase, computing the distances from a given source in the graph with a linear sweep over all the vertices. Contraction hierarchies may be used in the preprocessing phase and in the query phase. Optimizations may include reordering the vertices in advance to exploit locality, performing multiple NSSP computations simultaneously, marking vertices during initialization, and using parallelism. Techniques may be performed on a graphics processing unit (GPU). This makes applications based on all-pairs shortest-paths practical for continental-sized road networks. The applications include, for example, computing graph diameter, exact arc flags, and centrality measures such as exact reaches or betweenness.

Hardware accelerated shortest path computation

Systems and methods are provided for pricing, selling, and/or otherwise distributing electronic content using auction mechanisms. A randomized auction mechanism is used to determine both the number of goods that are sold and the selling price. The auction mechanism automatically adapts to the bid distribution to yield revenue that is competitive with that which could be obtained if the vendor were able to determine the optimal fixed price for the goods. In one embodiment a set of bids is randomly or quasi-randomly partitioned into two or more groups. An optimal threshold is determined for each group, and this threshold is then used to select winning bids from one or more of the other groups. In another embodiment, each bid is compared to a competing bid that is randomly or quasi-randomly selected from the set of bids. If the bid is less than the randomly-selected competing bid, the bid is rejected. Otherwise, the bid is accepted and the bidder buys the auctioned item at the price of the randomly-selected bid.

Systems and methods for pricing and selling digital goods

Some of the embodiments provided herein disclose receiving a plurality of bids, each bid being submitted by a bidder, and each bid having a bid value; assigning a weighting factor to each bid, the weighting factor being based, at least in part, on the bid value; selecting a first bid from the plurality of bids, the first bid having been submitted by a first bidder; selecting a second bid from the plurality of bids, the second bid being selected in a manner that is dependent, at least in part, on the weighting factor assigned to the second bid; performing a comparison of the value of the first bid with the value of the second bid; using the results of the comparison to determine whether to vend a copy of the digital file to the first bidder; and sending a copy of the digital file to the first bidder.

The present invention provides for generating inputs that can be provided to a message classification module to facilitate more reliable classification of electronic messages, such as, for example, as unwanted and/or unsolicited. In one embodiment, a sending messaging server provides an appropriate response to address verification data thereby indicating a reduced likelihood of the sending messaging server using a forged network address. In another embodiment, it is determined if a messaging server is authorized to send electronic messages for a domain. In yet another embodiment, electronic message transmission policies adhered to by a domain are identified. In yet a further embodiment, a sending computer system expends computational resources to solve a computational puzzle and includes an answer document in an electronic message. A receiving computer system receives the electronic message and verifies the answer document.

Reducing unwanted and unsolicited electronic messages by exchanging electronic message transmission policies and solving and verifying solutions to computational puzzles

An algorithm referred to as REAL for the point-to-point shortest path problem combines A* search with landmark-based lower bounds and reach-based pruning. A symbiosis of these techniques is described, which gives a range of time and space tradeoffs, including those that improve both of these complexity measures. Locality is improved and exact reach computation is described.

Enhanced reach-based graph processing using shortcuts

Methods and systems are described for computing shortest paths among a set of locations. A small set of landmarks is chosen and the distance between each location and each landmark is computed and stored. Given source and destination locations, the landmark distances are used to compute lower-bound estimates of distances from locations to the destination. The estimates are then used with a heuristic search to find the shortest path from source to destination.

Growing community of inventors

Redwood City, CA, United States of America

Andrew V Goldberg