Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Junyan Lin

Vaibhav Girish Parikh

Paul Valentin Borza

Brian Thomas Schwartz

A method for operating a universal casting service is described. The method receives a casting request from a first client; initiates a first casting session to a first casting device; establishes a first queue for the first casting device; adds a first media item to the queue from the first client; receives a casting request from a second client; and adds a second media item to the first queue from the second client.

Universal casting service

Architecture that comprises a mediation component which identifies engaged applications and, gathers and actively monitors information from the engaged applications (e.g., text displayed directly to the user, text embedded in photos, fingerprint of songs, etc.) to infer the working context of a user. The inferred context can then be handed over to one of the applications, such as a browser (in a form which does not cross the privacy barrier) to provide improved ranking for the suggested queries through the preferred search provider. Since the context is inferred into concepts, no PII (personally-identifiable information) is communicated without user consent&#x2014;only very high-level contextual concepts are provided to the search engines.

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Kirkland, WA, United States of America

Junyan Lin