Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Microsoft Corporation

Benyu Zhang

Zheng Chen

Hua-Jun Zeng

Wei-Ying Ma

Jian Wang

Chenxi Lin

Jun Yan

Ning Liu

Ying Li

Li Erran Li

Tarek Najm

HuaJun Zeng

Lei Li

Weizhu Chen

Teresa Mah

Dou Shen

Gui-Rong Xue

Qiaoling Liu

Hongbin Gao

Min Wang

Min Wu

Daniel B Cook

Hsiao-Wuen Hon

Lei Ji

Xianfang Wang

Ke Tang

Gu Xu

Karen E Fries

Randy Hinrichs

Jeremy Tantrum

Fengping Zeng

Shuzhen Nong

Heng Zhang

Wensi Xi

Dong Zhuang

Xue-Mei Jiang

Guirong Xue

Gabor Hirschler

Kurt Samuelson

Ming Zhou

Hua Li

Ying-Qing Xu

Bing Jiang Sun

Jian-Tao Sun

Long Jiang

Jie Han

Lee Wang

Huan Liu

Yin Li

Abhinai Srivastava

Xuanhui Wang

Zhifeng Yang

Edward A Fox

Dean Carignan

Jilin Chen

Xiaofeng Dai

Shiguang Liu

Qicai He

Guimei Liu

Julie L Hesseltine Richardson

A method and system for identifying information about people is provided. The information system identifies groups of people that have relationships based on their relationships to documents or more generally to objects. The information system initially is provided with an indication of which people have which relationships to which documents. The information system then identifies clusters of people based on having a relationship to the same objects. The information system may also identify clusters of related objects associated with a cluster of people. When a user wants to identify information about a person, the user can provide the name of that person to the information system. The information system then can retrieve and display the names of the other people who are in the same cluster as the person.

Method and system for mining information based on relationships

A method and system for detecting whether an outgoing communication contains confidential information or other target information is provided. The detection system is provided with a collection of documents that contain confidential information, referred to as 'confidential documents.' When the detection system is provided with an outgoing communication, it compares the content of the outgoing communication to the content of the confidential documents. If the outgoing communication contains confidential information, then the detection system may prevent the outgoing communication from being sent outside the organization. The detection system detects confidential information based on the similarity between the content of an outgoing communication and the content of confidential documents that are known to contain confidential information.

Method and system for detecting when an outgoing communication contains certain content

Methods for determining a predictive rating are disclosed. In an embodiment, an active user is compared to a set of clusters. One or more of the clusters are determined to be most similar to the active user. From the one or more clusters, K users are determined to be most similar to the active user. Prior ratings for an item by the K users may be used to predict a rating for the item for the active user.

Cluster-based scalable collaborative filtering

A peer-to-peer advertisement platform is provided to ubiquitously promote products or services supplied by advertisers across content-based applications executing on nodes in a peer-to-peer network. The peer-to-peer advertisement platform may include a registration component to register nodes in the peer-to-peer advertising platform, an advertisement submission component to receive advertisement data from the advertisers, and a distribution component to distribute the advertisement data to the nodes registered in the peer-to-peer advertisement platform. The peer-to-peer advertisement platform also includes a money sharing component to reward nodes based on a contribution level assigned to the node. Accordingly, the peer-to-peer advertisement platform stores the advertisement data locally at the plurality of nodes registered in the peer-to-peer advertising platform and shares a portion of the revenue generated from the advertisement data with the nodes registered in the peer-to-peer advertising platform.

Peer-to-peer advertisement platform

According to embodiments of the invention, an advertisement-generation system generates image-containing advertisements. The advertisement-generation system includes: at least one feature-selection guideline that specifies at least one recommended feature for image-containing advertisements based on advertiser inputs that specify at least one of advertisement-target-audience information, cost information, and advertiser-industry information; an image-clip library from which images are selected for inclusion in the image-containing advertisements; and at least one advertisement template that is based on the at least one feature-selection guideline; wherein the system automatically generates image-containing advertisements that contain one or more suggested colors that are automatically suggested based on one or more colors present on a web page that will host the image-containing advertisement.

Generation of contextual image-containing advertisements

An influential persons identification system and method for identifying a set of influential persons (or influencers) in a social network (such as an online social network). The influential persons set is generated such that by sending a message to the set the message will be propagated through the network at the greatest speed and coverage. A ranking of users is generated, and a pruning process is performed starting with the top-ranked user and working down the list. For each user on the list, the user is identified as an influencer and then the user and each of his friends are deleted from the social network users list. Next, the same process is performed for the second-ranked user, the third-ranked user, and so forth. The process terminates when the list of users of the social network is exhausted or the desired number of influencers on the influential person set is reached.

Identifying influential persons in a social network

Techniques for identifying similar queries based on their overall similarity and partial similarity of time series of frequencies of the queries are provided. To identify queries that are similar to a target query, the query analysis system generates, for each query, an overall similarity score for that query and the target query based on the time series of the query and the target query. The query analysis system also generates, for each query, partial similarity scores for the query and the target query based on various time sub-series of the overall time series of the queries. The query analysis system then identifies queries as being similar to the target query based on the overall similarity scores and the partial similarity scores of the queries.

Identification of similar queries based on overall and partial similarity of time series

Systems and methods for implementing diverse topic phrase extraction are disclosed. According to one implementation, multiple word candidate phrases are extracted from a corpus and weighed. One or more documents are re-weighed to identify less obvious candidate topics using latent semantic analysis (LSA). Phrase diversification is then used to remove redundancy and select informative and distinct topic phrases.

Diverse topic phrase extraction

A system and method are disclosed for providing documents related to a search request. The search request may include a search query of one or more keywords, or the search request may be a demographic search query including one or more demographic attributes. An index containing data crawled from publisher's websites, demographic information of registered users, along with the search history of the registered users can be created. Once a search request is received, the search request can be compared to the information stored in the index, and one or more documents related to the request can be provided.

Advertising service based on content and user log mining

A method and system for prioritizing communications based on classifications of sentences within the communications is provided. A sentence classification system may classify sentences of communications according to various classifications such as 'sentence mode.' The sentence classification system trains a sentence classifier using training data and then classifies sentences using the trained sentence classifier. After the sentences of a communication are classified, a document ranking system may generate a rank for the communication based on the classifications of the sentences within the communication. The document ranking system trains a document rank classifier using training data and then calculates the rank of communications using the trained document rank classifier.

Method and system for prioritizing communications based on sentence classifications

Representing queries and determining similarity of queries based on an autoregressive integrated moving average ('ARIMA') model is provided. A query analysis system represents each query by its ARIMA coefficients. The query analysis system may estimate the frequency information for a desired past or future interval based on frequency information for some initial intervals. The query analysis system may also determine the similarity of a pair of queries based on the similarity of their ARIMA coefficients. The query analysis system may use various metrics, such as a correlation metric, to determine the similarity of the ARIMA coefficients.

Representing queries and determining similarity based on an ARIMA model

Described herein is technology for, among other things, mining pair-based data on the web. The technology involves an online pair-based data mining system as well as an offline SVM training system. By subjecting a pair-based input data to the systems, one may grow a pool of pair-based data which share characteristics of the pair-based input data in more efficient manner.

Web content mining of pair-based data

A method and system for use in information retrieval includes, for each of a plurality of terms, selecting a predetermined number of top scoring documents for the term to form a corresponding document set for the term. When a plurality of terms are received, optionally as a query, the system ranks, using an inverse document frequency algorithm, the plurality of terms for importance based on the document sets for the plurality of terms. Then a number of ranked terms are selected based on importance and a union set is formed based on the document sets associated with the selected number of ranked terms.

Efficient retrieval algorithm by query term discrimination

A method and system for calculating the importance of persons based on interpersonal relationships and prioritizing communications based on importance of participants in the communications is provided. A prioritization system identifies relationships between persons and identifies the importance of a person to other persons based on these relationships. After the prioritization system identifies the importance of persons, the prioritization system can prioritize communications based on the importance of the senders or recipients.

Method and system for prioritizing communications based on interpersonal relationships

Systems and methods are described for an Internet visualization system and related user interfaces. In one implementation, the system analyzes Internet search logs to determine most popular search queries across the world at a current time. A user interface displays a keyword of each of the most popular queries in a single visual display that relates each query to a geographical location of greatest popularity. The system can also filter queries according to demographics. In one implementation the user interface provides a 3-dimensional Internet visualization that adopts an ocean or seascape theme. The ocean floor displays a map of the world, and query bubbles rise from geographical locations on the map. The size and duration of each query bubble denotes the relative popularity of a given query.

Internet visualization system and related user interfaces

Growing community of inventors

Beijing, China

Benyu Zhang