Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Dimitris Achlioptas

Frank David McSherry

Christian Herwarth Borgs

Jennifer Tour Chayes

Henry J Robinson

James R Tierney

Eric J Horvitz

Sean B House

Galen Clyde Hunt

John Charles Krumm

Robert Victor Welland

The present invention provides for systems and methods that facilitate conveying user information between and among users effectively to thereby create a collaborative filtering environment with maintained user privacy. More specifically, the present invention allows user-profile building to occur coincident with user-browsing, for example. This can be accomplished in part by incorporating an input component on the user interface used for browsing and/or searching. A user who has opted-in to construct a personal profile makes declarations regarding his relationship with at least a portion of the information being currently viewed. The declarations are annotated to the user's profile. At the user's discretion, the user's profile can be disseminated to others in whole or in part such that other people can make use of the user's expertise, experience or opinions. In addition, the user profiles can be machine-readable and searchable.

Smart button

Systems and methods are provided that enable searches of social networks by acting as a 'compass' that assists users in navigating the social network. Individual user participation is not required in response to queries from other users. The systems and methods offer navigational assistance or information as opposed to a traditional search which returns requested information, thus currently acceptable social mechanisms for arbitrating trust can be exploited. As a result, users do not make their personal information publicly searchable, while at the same time, they are protected from potential misrepresentations of facts.

System and method for employing social networks for information discovery

The claimed subject matter provides systems and/or methods that facilitate automatically maintaining a database of base stations. A location component can obtain a query that includes a listing of detected base stations. Additionally, the location component can identify whether the detected base stations are included in a base station database. Further, the location component can generate an estimated location related to the query. Moreover, a database update component can modify the base station database based at least in part upon the query.

Queries as data for revising and extending a sensor-based location service

The invention relates to an architecture that facilitates load balancing among a plurality of hosts and preserve session affinity to a given host. An incoming stream of data packets that include packet sessions is input to one or more forwarding mechanisms for forwarding to one or more hosts. The forwarders generate a routing function that takes into consideration host availability, and distributes session packets according to the routing function. A session is distributed to the same host to preserve session affinity. When host availability changes, a new routing function is generated, such that any new session is routed according to the new routing function and existing sessions are routed according to the old routing function. When the old routing function becomes irrelevant, it is phased out. An optimization utilizes a maximally backward compatible hash function to minimize the differences between the old and new routing functions.

Stateless, affinity-preserving load balancing

Systems and methods that facilitate dimensional transformations of data points are disclosed. In particular, the subject invention provides for a system and methodology that simplifies dimensional transformations while mitigating variations of a distance property between pairs of points. A set of n data points in d dimensional space is represented as an n&#xd7;d input matrix, where d also corresponds to the number of attributes per data point. A transformed matrix represents the n data points in a lower dimensionality k after being mapped. The transformed matrix is an n&#xd7;k matrix, where k is the number of attributes per data point and is less than d. The transformed matrix is obtained by multiplying the input matrix by a suitable projection matrix. The projection matrix is generated by randomly populating the entries of the matrix with binary or ternary values according to a probability distribution. Unlike previous methods, the projection matrix is formed without obtaining an independent sample from a Gaussian distribution for each entry in the projection matrix, without applying a linear algebraic technique to generate the projection matrix and without employing arbitrary floating point numbers. Processes and/or algorithms can utilize the reduced transformed matrix instead of the larger input matrix to facilitate computational efficiency and data compression.

System and method adapted to facilitate dimensional transform

The present invention provides a unique system and method that facilitates reducing network traffic between a plurality of servers located on a social-based network. The system and method involve identifying a plurality of vertices or service users on the network with respect to their server or network locations. The vertices' contacts or connections can be located or determined as well. In order to minimize communication traffic, the vertices and their connections with respect to their respective server locations can be analyzed to determine whether at least a subset of nodes should be moved or relocated to another server to facilitate mitigating network traffic while balancing user load among the various servers or parts of the network. Thus, an underlying social network can be effectively partitioned. In addition, the network can be parsed into a collection of nested layers, whereby each successively less dense layer can be partitioned with respect to the previous (partitioned) more dense layer.

Partitioning social networks

Methods and systems of testing software and modeling user actions are described. In some embodiments, multiple different algorithms are provided for operating on a software model. The software model describes behavior associated with software that is to be tested. Different sets of algorithms can be selected for operating on the software model to produce a sequence of test actions that are to be used to test the software. The algorithms can be mixed and matched to achieve a desired testing result. In some embodiments, the different algorithms comprise deterministic algorithms, random algorithms, and various types of algorithms therebetween. In one embodiment, the software model comprises a state graph having nodes that represent state, and links between the nodes that represent actions. The different algorithms that are available for selection can have different graph traversal characteristics such that the state graph can be traversed in different manners.

Methods and systems of testing software, and methods and systems of modeling user behavior

A system is provided that facilitates information processing for a user. The system includes an analyzer to automatically determine one or more states of a user's availability based on patterns of the user's interruptability. A deferral component generates or forwards messages or alerts to the user in accordance with a cost-minimization analysis and determined availability. For example, the deferral component can process interrupts to the user and determine at least one of optimal and approximately optimal deferral times in which to direct an information item to the user, the information item being one of an email message, an incoming phone call, a push-to-talk message, an instant message, an alert, requests, offers of assistance, status or error reports, or a task from another application or autonomous system.

Principals and methods for balancing the timeliness of communications and information delivery with the expected cost of interruption via deferral policies

Methods and systems for finding a low rank approximation for an m&#xd7;n matrix A are described. The described embodiments can independently sample and/or quantize the entries of an input matrix A, and can thus speed up computation by reducing the number of non-zero entries and/or their representation length. The embodiments can be used in connection with Singular Value Decomposition techniques to greatly benefit the processing of high-dimensional data sets in terms of storage, transmission and computation.

Methods and systems for computing singular value decompositions of matrices and low rank approximations of matrices

Methods and systems of testing software and modeling user actions are described. In some embodiments, multiple different algorithms are provided for operating on a software model. The software model describes behavior associated with software that is to be tested. Different sets of algorithms can be selected for operating on the software model to produce a sequence of test actions that are to be used to test the software. The algorithms can be mixed and matched to achieve a desired testing result. In some embodiments, the different algorithms comprise deterministic algorithms, random algorithms, and various types of algorithms therebetween. In one embodiment, the software model comprises a state graph having nodes that represent state, and links between the nodes that represent actions. The different algorithms that are available for selection can have different graph traversal characteristics such that the state graph can be traversed in different manners. For example, algorithms that are more local in their traversals can be teamed with algorithms that are more global in their traversals, thus covering a wider area of the state space with good local coverage in some areas.

A procedure identifies a program image and generates a basic block flow graph associated with the program image. Execution of the program image is benchmarked and the basic block flow graph is annotated with the results of the benchmarking of the program image. Basic blocks of the program are then grouped into bins. When the program image is executed, a drafting scheduler stops threads before they leave a bin and schedules any threads queued for the same bin.

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Seattle, WA, United States of America

Dimitris Achlioptas