Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Kancheng Cao

Ayman Malek Abdel Hamid Kaheel

Pragyana K Mishra

Edward F Reus

Rajeev Prasad

Jeffrey S Roberts

Avneesh Sud

Manoj Rameshchandra Thakur

Gururaj Seetharama

Barbara Harder

Narayana Mahankali

Sumit Amar

Anna Magdalena Hester

Mike Zoran

Kun Liu

Bita Gorjiara

David Pardoe

Mahmood Ahmed Dhalla

Haishan Liu

Jan Schellenberger

Bill Bi Lun Kuang

Nan Zhou

Yizhen Zhao

Padma Priya Gaggara

Prakash Asirvatham Arul

Chongzhe Li

Mohammad Adil Hafeez

Dhananjay Dilip Kulkarni

Dakan Wang

Anna M Hester

The present disclosure describes various embodiments of methods, systems, and machine-readable mediums which may be used in conjunction with a campaign for distributing content to users of the social network. Among other things, embodiments of the present disclosure provide a number of advantages over conventional systems for content distribution, including a simplified targeting process and increased reach (i.e. distribution) for content providers among users of a social network, as well as improving the utilization of an inventory of content and higher and more efficient engagement with such content by users of the social network.

Audience expansion for online social network content

Systems, methods, and computer storage media for discovering authoritative images of people entities are provided. Selections of person entities are received. Authoritative URLs and authoritative images for the person entities are identified. Once the authoritative images are identified, features are extracted. Queries for the person entities are identified by mining search engine logs. The queries and features can be utilized to construct candidate queries to identify and retrieve candidate image URLs. Candidate features are extracted for each candidate image associated with the candidate image URLs. Training data may be utilized to train a classifier that can be run on each candidate image. Each candidate image can then be tagged with an entity ID tag. Images with the entity ID tag can be ranked higher in search engine results page than images without the entity ID tag.

Discovering authoritative images of people entities

A system, method, and apparatus are provided for migrating contacts (e.g., records identifying contacts) from one domain to another. Each record includes various fields corresponding to a single contact or other entity known within the first domain. The migration process may involve configuring multiple queries from the field data, for querying the second domain or system to identify (or to attempt to identify) matching entities known within the second domain. One or more exact queries may be configured to identify specific entities within the second domain, based on entity-specific data, for example. Other queries may be more general and may match multiple entities known within the second domain. For records for which no exact query identifies an entity, one or more general queries may be executed to identify multiple entities, which may be subsequently ranked based on the likelihood that they are the entity that corresponds to the record.

Matching entities during data migration

Techniques and a system are provided for a profile manager system that stores multiple profiles. These profiles are used by a content selection system to match entities to content for which the entities would be best suitable. The profile manager system allows a content selection system to identify, in response to a request associated with an entity, different pieces of data from different data sources and match the different pieces of data when the difference pieces of data refer to the same entity. The profile manager system may also provide merging of the different pieces of data, when they are matched as referring to the same entity.

Scalable management of composite data collected with varied identifiers

Systems, methods, and computer-readable storage media for web-scale visual search capable of using a combination of visual input modalities are provided. An edgel index is created that includes shape-descriptors, including edgel-based representations, that correspond to each of a plurality of images. Each edgel-based representation includes pixels that depicts edges or boundary contours of an image and is created, at least in part, by segmenting the image into a plurality of image segments and performing a multi-phase contour detection on each segment. Upon receiving a search query having a visual query input, the visual query input is converted into shape-descriptors, including an edgel-based representation, and the shape-descriptors, including the edgel-based representation, of each of the plurality of images is compared with the shape-descriptors, including the edgel-based representation, of the visual query input to identify at least one image of the plurality of images that matches the visual query input.

Visual search using multiple visual input modalities

Example embodiments allow a local network client to access information about a shared gateway to determine its actual amount of bandwidth consumption. The client can also obtain the total capacity of such shared gateway. Using its knowledge of its own bandwidth consumption, it can determine the other local network clients' usage of the shared gateway. With all of this information, i.e., total capacity of the shared gateway, the actual usage of the shared gateway, and the usage by other clients within the local network, the client can adjust or throttle background file transfers in order to keep the actual data transfers across the shared gateway within a reasonable percentage of the total capacity available. That is, a client will give priority to other local network computing machines' usage of the shared gateway by adjusting data transfers for its own background transfer system based on usage across a shared gateway.

Background network bandwidth sharing behind gateway devices

Distributed caching and download of file. A method is described that includes building a peer list comprising a listing of potential peer servers from among one or more networked computers. The peer list includes no more than a predetermined number of potential peer servers. Potential peer servers in the peer list are queried for a file or portion of a file. A message from a peer server in the peer list is received indicating that the peer server has the file or portion of a file available for download. The computer system downloads the file or portion of a file from the peer server.

Distributed caching of files in a network

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Bothell, WA, United States of America

Kancheng Cao