Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

James H Lewallen

William L Portnoy

Lili Cheng

Thomas Matthew Laird-McConnell

Daniel James Driscoll

Craig Jensen

Todd D Newman

Qi Lu

Richard Ignacio Zaragoza

Steve Ickman

Justin Brooks Cranshaw

Eric J Horvitz

Heung-Yeung Shum

Xuedong D Huang

Christopher Clayton McConnell

Tom Laird-McConnell

Rajeev V Karunakaran

Colleen G Estrada

David Shigeru Taniguchi

Will Portnoy

Thomas Matthew Laird-Mcconnell

The techniques discussed herein allow an agent that provides dialog-based services to converse with a user via any mode. A central service programmed to be able to communicate via any mode collects information from agents necessary to act on the agents' behalf. In order to ensure that an agent has a maximal presence across modes, the central service provides auxiliary services such as language translation, fidelity upgrading and/or downgrading, modal constraint conformation, etc. Moreover, the central service provides session tracking via user profiles stored at the intercom so that if a user changes a mode by which the user is conversing with an agent, the central service can keep the context of the conversation across the new mode. Furthermore, agents can communicate with other agents via the central service, allowing other agents to provide services to agents or to add their services to an ongoing dialog with a user.

Multi-modal conversational intercom

In an example, a method includes receiving a data package, the data package including a contact identification and a message payload; in response to determining that a key for the contact identification does not exist in a contact table: generating a key for the contact identification; and updating the contact table with the generated key to indicate an association between the key and the contact identification; calculating a hashed identification based on the generated key and contact identification; and associating the message payload with the hashed identification in a message table.

Keyed hash contact table

Aspects of the subject disclosure are directed towards increasing a community of interest group users of an interest group, e.g., a network site having a feed of posts generally related to a particular topic. Many newly created interest groups do not have enough content to keep users interested and attract new users. The technology described herein automatically obtains content that backfills such an interest group with additional related content. The backfilled content may be found by keywords search and/or by crawling general public data, data from specific sites, historical conversation data, and/or more widely scoped data. Also described is creating a new interest group and seeding the group with content based upon backfilling technology.

Adaptable real-time feed for site population

A social network system (or other type of hosting system) is described herein which allows different types of applications to interact with the common resources of the system via respective application-specific channels. Through an application-specific channel, a user may obtain a filtered set of content items (e.g., posts) and notifications that pertain to a particular application with which the user is currently interacting. But the user may also obtain items and notifications that do not necessarily have an affiliation with the particular application. The social network system may maintain a single identity for each user across all application channels hosted by the system.

Multi-faceted social network system for use with plural applications

Various technologies pertaining to generation of a client collage are described herein. A creator can construct a computer-implemented collage by selecting a plurality of computer-implemented objects from a respective plurality of network-accessible storage locations, and arranging the computer-implemented objects in a desired manner. Responsive to receiving an indication that the computer-implemented collage is suitable for publication, a server can render the collage and capture a backdrop image of the rendered collage. The server can further generate metadata that are packaged with the backdrop image as a client collage. When a client computing device requests the collage, the client collage is provided to the client computing device, which renders the backdrop image and processes the metadata. The metadata causes a click overlay to be placed upon the backdrop image, wherein functionality of the click overlay is defined by the metadata.

Generating a collage for rendering on a client computing device

A unified search service may collect information related to an enterprise from at least one of publicly available data and private enterprise data. In some implementations, crowd sourcing may be used to determine a source list of one or more sources of information. Authored content can be generated, such as by combining one or more items of information from the public data with one or more items of information from the private enterprise data. Further, in some implementations, a public index may be generated from the public data, and one or more affiliation indexes may be generated from the private enterprise data. For example, a first affiliation index may contain confidential enterprise information, while a second affiliation index may contain non-confidential enterprise information. A user's affiliation to the enterprise may be taken into consideration when determining which indexes to use when responding to a search request from the user.

Enterprise search over private and public data

Growing community of inventors

Fall City, WA, United States of America

James H Lewallen