Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Amazon Technologies, Inc.

Other

Farookh P Mohammed

Aditya G Bhandarkar

Dharma Kiritkumar Shukla

Israel Hilerio

Raymond Edward Endres

Abhay Vinayak Parasnis

Arash Ghanaie-Sichanie

Nishant Dani

Christo Frank Devaraj

Mahesh Rajagopalan

Brandon V Taylor

Peter Chin

James Alexander Stanton

Karthik Raman

Nishant Gupta

Todd R Manion

Akash Jeevan Sagar

Ori Amiga

Krishnan Ananthanarayanan

Andrey Belenko

Mieszko G Matkowski

Nitin Sharma

Alexey Pikin

Raymond Enders

Techniques for synchronizing communication across devices are described. A system receives an input command corresponding to an announcement and sends data representing the announcement to devices of the system. The system receives responses from the devices and causes the device that originated the announcement to output content corresponding to the responses.

Communicating announcements

Techniques for communicating announcements across devices are described. A system performs speech processing on input audio data to determine a command to output an announcement. The system determines devices outputting indicators representing users are proximate thereto. The system generates output audio data corresponding to at least a portion of the input audio data corresponding to announcement content. The system sends the output audio data to the devices along with instructions to output audio corresponding to the output audio data.

A computer system comprises computer storage holding a plurality of code modules, one or more processors and a communication system. The one or more processors are configured to execute the code modules and thereby implement the bots. The communication system comprises a message relay and an anonymized identifier generator. The message relay is configured to receive a message comprising an identifier of a user and an identifier of a target one of the bots. The anonymized identifier generator is configured to generate an anonymized identifier of the user unique to the target bot, by applying an anonymization function to the user identifier and the bot identifier in the message. The message relay is configured to transmit to the target bot a version of the message, which comprises the anonymized user identifier and does not include the user identifier, wherein the user identifier is not rendered accessible to the target bot.

Anonymized identifiers for secure communication systems

A computer user may use a computing environment comprising a set of computers that respectively feature a web browser having a browser cache containing many types of data objects, including application resources and user-generated data files. However, the contents of a browser cache significantly contribute to the computing environment of a computer, and the computing environments presented by each computer may diverge, providing an inconsistent computing environment. Instead, the contents of browser caches of the computers comprising the computing environment may be synchronized across computers. Additionally, the browser cache may be synchronized with the other data objects of a computing environment (such as relevant portions of the filesystem); the synchronizing may be implemented as an out-of-browser process executing independently of the applications, and even when the browser is not executing; and the synchronization may be exposed through a programmatic access with which web applications may interact.

Programming model for synchronizing browser caches across devices and web services

An application executing in a virtual environment, such as a web browser, may be serviced by an application host, such as a webserver that maintains application resources or provides runtime services to the application. However, it may be difficult to configure the application to operate suitably when the application host is unavailable. Techniques for facilitating such operation include the storing of application resources in a computing environment (such as the local file system or a deployable mesh or cloud environment) while also initiating the application within the virtual environment in the context of the application host, which may reduce difficulties with isolation policies imposed by the virtual environment (e.g., cross-domain restrictions imposed by the web browser.) This configuration may promote the servicing of the application alongside other applications and data objects, e.g., the automated deployment and synchronization of the application among all devices comprising the user's mesh environment.

Programming model for installing and distributing occasionally connected applications

Applications executing on computer systems may execute in a virtual environment, such as a web application executing in a web browser. An application may access the actual computing environment (such as the filesystem), but this accessing may be complicated; e.g., the computing environment may be deployed across many computers and devices, and may be synchronized for offline access via a local cache. A computing environment component may service the complex computing environment (e.g., by managing the cache and retrieving remotely stored data objects) and expose it as a well-organized set of data objects. A virtual environment interface (e.g., a web browser plug-in) may allow applications hosted in the virtual environment to access the computing environment through the computing environment component. Programmatic interfaces may also be implemented to permit such accessing via familiar programming languages and techniques, such as JavaScript libraries exposed to web applications in the web browser.

Programming model for application and data access and synchronization within virtual environments

A unified data access mechanism can provide transparent access to data that is either stored locally or remotely. Application programs can direct data requests and data modifications to this singular component without foreknowledge of where the data is stored. The unified data access mechanism can work in concert with a synchronization mechanism that can maintain data synchronization between local data and remote data. Requested or modified data can be identified as stored locally or remotely based on the namespace of the data. If the data is stored remotely, the user credentials associated with the user's process space within which the application program is executing can be utilized to identify, and then provide, relevant authentication information to the remote data store, should it be required.

Transparent access mechanism for local and remote data

A back-end locator service can be utilized to identify a specific computing device, from among multiple computing devices in a domain, that is the most appropriate computing device to handle a particular type of request for data or other resources. The data or resources hosted by the domain can be divided among multiple computing devices. The domain can expose a network-based application program interface where successive requests by a client computing device become more specific as to the data or resources requested. Responses from the computing devices in the domain can, at some point in time, be informed by the back-end locator service and can comprise location-specific resource identifiers. The client computing device can utilize such location specific resource identifiers to direct further communications to the appropriate, specific computing device without having to incur redirection inefficiencies.

Context-specific network resource addressing model for distributed services

A method for determining a load distribution for a plurality of servers is disclosed. A total user count during a predetermined interval of time is received from each server of a plurality of servers for all channel resources associated with each respective server of the plurality of servers. A present load distribution is determined for the predetermined interval of time for each respective server of the plurality of servers based on the total user count received from each server. A load gradient is determined for the predetermined interval of time from each server of the plurality of servers. A future load distribution is determined for each respective server based on the total user count for each server and each respective load gradient. Lastly, a load distribution for each respective channel resource is distributed among the plurality of servers based on the determined future load distribution for each respective channel resource. The predetermined interval of time is a sliding window of time having a predetermined number of timeslots each having a predetermined timeslot interval. Additionally, a load gradient for a server is based on a difference between the total number of users connected to the server at the end of the predetermined interval of time and the total number of users connected to the server at the beginning of the predetermined interval of time. When a new channel resource is created, an initial estimated weight is assigned to the new channel resource. The new channel resource is then assigned to a selected server of the plurality of servers based on the initial estimated weight associated with the new channel resource and a load distribution associated with each respective server of the plurality of servers.

Load balancing of chat servers based on gradients

A failover algorithm implemented in software, without any failover-specific hardware, that allows servers in a cluster to determine whether a primary or secondary controller is active without requiring communication between the primary and secondary controllers. A server cluster includes several servers coupled to two servers, which are designated as a primary controller and a secondary controller. While the server cluster is operational, either the primary controller or the secondary controller will be actively controlling the cluster. Software running on the servers of the cluster, on the primary controller, and on the secondary controller, cooperates to ensure that each server will properly identify which controller is active at any particular time, including, but not limited to, upon starting up the server cluster, upon adding one or more servers to a cluster that is already operation, and upon failure of an active controller, a server, or a link between an active controller and a server. The failover algorithm includes the following steps performed by each of a group of servers in the cluster for identifying which controller is active: making the server's own assessment of the active controller; and identifying either the primary controller or the secondary controller as a consensus active controller based upon a majority vote of the own assessments by each server in the cluster as to which controller is the active controller.

Identification of active server cluster controller

A technique for maintaining server cluster consistency is disclosed. When a front-end server of a plurality of servers detects that the front-end server has reconnected to a backend server or in the situation of a backend server failover, the front-end server sends resource ownership information to a backend server. The resource ownership information relates to ownership information for each respective resource owned by the front-end server. The back-end server verifies the ownership information for contention with static resources and dynamic resources owned by other servers and sends back verification information to the server. The backend maintains resource ownership information for all the servers in the cluster than sent resources for verification. Based on the received verification information, the server maintains ownership information at the server for each respective resource indicated in the verification information to be owned by the server. The server discards ownership of resources that were verified by the backend server to be not owned by the server. According to another aspect, resource ownership information is received at a backend server from a server of a plurality of servers. The received resource ownership information contains resource ownership information for the server. The received resource ownership information is compared to resource ownership information stored at the backend server. The backend server resolves any contention for a resource and sends verification information to the server. The verification information contains information verifying ownership for each resource indicated by the backend server that is owned by the server.

Growing community of inventors

Bothell, WA, United States of America

Farookh P Mohammed