Yahoo! Inc.

Nec Laboratories America, Inc.

David Myer Pennock

Sihem Amer-Yahia

David Christopher Parkes

Stephen R Lawrence

Seung-Taek Park

Yiling Chen

Sebastien Lahaie

Eric J Glover

An improved system and method is provided for making markets for a finite subset of orders across continuous and countably infinite outcome spaces. To do so, a prediction market engine may be provided to support prediction markets by aggregating information about orders specifying a continuous subspace of a continuous outcome space and orders specifying a subset of a countably infinite set of outcomes. The pricing and/or quantities for orders received may be determined, a response may be sent to traders indicating the pricing or quantities of orders for payment, and the amount owed for accepted orders may be collected. Winning accepted orders may be identified and payout may be made for winning accepted orders. Advantageously, the present invention may support aggregation of more information from market participants in a prediction market to forecast the likelihood of the occurrence of a certain event.

System and method of making markets for a finite subset of orders placed across continuous and countably infinite outcome spaces

A method and apparatus are provided for administering a bidding language for online advertising. In one example, the method includes providing an expressive bidding language that allows an advertiser to specify an ad campaign in a tree structure, receiving the ad campaign that is written in the expressive bidding language, translating the ad campaign into scripts, and using the scripts to access appropriate inventory from an ad inventory database.

Method and apparatus for administering a bidding language for online advertising

A method comprising receiving a search query to generate a search result of one or more media items and providing a personalized search rank of the one or more media items on the basis of a user profile and an item relevance for a given media item with regard to the query metadata associated with the search result is identified and used to identify at least one related media item. The at least one related media item is ranked on the basis of the user profile and the metadata.

System and method for identifying media content items and related media content items

The present invention provides a method of speculating on a future event or the value of an asset in a market. The speculating may take the form of trading, hedging or wagering. A plurality of speculations on the outcome of the future event is received. For each one of the speculations in the market, the status of the speculations at the time that the speculation was received in the market is recorded. After a time period for receiving speculations in the market has closed, the pari-mutuel payoff for each correct speculation is calculated using a computer. The pari-mutuel payoff depends at least in part on the status of speculations at the time that the speculation was received in the market.

Dynamic pari-mutuel market

A method automatically determines groups of words or phrases that are descriptive names of a small set of documents, as well as infers concepts in the small set of documents that are more general and more specific than the descriptive names, without any prior knowledge of the hierarchy or the concepts, in a language independent manner. The descriptive names and the concepts may not even be explicitly contained in the documents. The primary application of the invention is for searching of the World Wide Web, but the invention is not limited solely to use with the World Wide Web and may be applied to any set of documents. Classes of features are identified in order to promote understanding of a set of documents. Preferably, there are three classes of features. 'Self' features or terms describe the cluster as a whole. 'Parent' features or terms describe more general concepts. &#x201c;Child&#x201d; features or terms describe specializations of the cluster. The self features can be used as a recommended name for a cluster, while parents and children can be used to place the clusters in the space of a larger collection. Parent features suggest a more general concept, while children features suggest concepts that describe a specialization of the self feature(s). Automatic discovery of parent, self and child features is useful for several purposes including automatic labeling of web directories and improving information retrieval.

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Monroe Township, NJ, United States of America

David Myer Pennock