Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Microsoft Corporation

Hua-Jun Zeng

Zheng Chen

Benyu Zhang

Wei-Ying Ma

Jian Wang

Ying Li

Li Erran Li

Tarek Najm

Gui-Rong Xue

Chenxi Lin

Jun Yan

Hua Li

Lu Xun

Dou Shen

Hongbin Gao

Muralidhar Krishnaprasad

Ning Liu

Daniel B Cook

Hsiao-Wuen Hon

Jian-Tao Sun

Jian Hu

Xianfang Wang

Karen E Fries

Ke Tang

Gu Xu

Xuanhui Wang

Randy Hinrichs

Ankur Agrawal

Radhakrishnan Srikanth

Fengping Zeng

Balachandar Pavadaisamy

Shuzhen Nong

Wensi Xi

Dong Zhuang

Xue-Mei Jiang

Guirong Xue

Gabor Hirschler

Kurt Samuelson

Min Wang

Yang Li

Tie-Yan Liu

Ying-Qing Xu

Shen Huang

Bing Jiang Sun

Jie Han

Duo Zhang

Huan Liu

Xiaoming Sun

Li Tao

Anurag Gupta

Yin Li

Teresa Mah

Gopal Kakivaya

Matthew Snider

Zhifeng Yang

Jeremy Tantrum

Edward A Fox

Heng Zhang

Dean Carignan

Xiaofeng Dai

Shiguang Liu

Han Peng

Qicai He

Guimei Liu

Benya Zhang

Ji-Dong Wang

In various implementations, methods and systems resource balancing in a distributed computing environment are provided. A client defined resource metric is received that represents a resource of nodes of the cloud computing platform. A placement plan for job instances of service applications is generated. The placement plan includes one or more movements that are executable to achieve a target placement of the job instances on the nodes. It is determined that the placement plan complies with placement rules. Each placement rule dictates whether a given job instance of the job instances is suitable for placement on a given node of the nodes. The placement plan is executed based on determining that the target placement of the job instances improves balance of resources across the nodes of the cloud computing platform based on the resource represented by the client defined resource metric.

Balancing resources in distributed computing environments

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

Version indicators within an existing range can be associated with a data partition in a distributed data store. A partition reconfiguration can be associated with one of multiple partitions in the data store, and a new version indicator that is outside the existing range can be assigned to the reconfigured partition. Additionally, a broadcast message can be sent to multiple nodes, which can include storage nodes and/or client nodes that are configured to communicate with storage nodes to access data in a distributed data store. The broadcast message can include updated location information for data in the data store. In addition, a response message can be sent to a requesting node of the multiple nodes in response to receiving from that node a message that requests updated location information for the data. The response message can include the requested updated location information.

Location updates for a distributed data store

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

An implicit links enhancement system and method for search engines that generates implicit links obtained from mining user access logs to facilitate enhanced local searching of web sites and intranets. Embodiments of the implicit links search enhancement system and method includes extracting implicit links by mining users' access patterns and then using a modified link analysis algorithm to re-rank search results obtained from traditional search engines. More specifically, embodiments of the method include extracting implicit links from a user access log, generating an implicit links graph from the extracted implicit links, and computing page rankings using the implicit links graph. The implicit links are extracted from the log using a two-item sequential pattern mining technique. Search results obtained from a search engine are re-ranked based on an implicit links analysis performed using an updated implicit links graph, a modified re-ranking formula, and at least one re-ranking technique.

Search engine enhancement using mined implicit links

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

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

Computer-readable media having computer-executable instructions and apparatuses provide a keyphrase navigation map (KNM) for a document page. Keyphrases are extracted from the document page. Keyphrase clusters are subsequently formed by a measure of relevancy, and a salient keyphrase is determined for each cluster. A thumbnail is formed with tags corresponding to the salient keyphrases. A selected tag is expanded with associated keyphrases. An associated keyphrase may be further selected in order to facilitate the navigation of the document page. The displayed tags on the thumbnail are positioned in accordance with locations of associated keyphrases in the document page.

Key phrase navigation map for document navigation

A method and system for adapting search results of a query to the information needs of the user submitting the query is provided. A search system analyzes click-through triplets indicating that a user submitted a query and that the user selected a document from the results of the query. To overcome the large size and sparseness of the click-through data, the search system when presented with an input triplet comprising a user, a query, and a document determines a probability that the user will find the input document important by smoothing the click-through triplets. The search system then orders documents of the result based on the probability of their importance to the input user.

Method and system for adapting search results to personal information needs

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Beijing, China

Hua-Jun Zeng