Xerox Corporation

Google Inc.

Natalie S Glance

Bernardo A Huberman

Jean-Luc Meunier

James Edward Pitkow

Stefania Castellani

Lada A Adamic

Manfred Dardenne

Boris Chidlovskii

Jean-Marc Andreoli

Antonietta Grasso

Dave Snowdon

Damian Arregui

Pierre G Bernard

Remo Pareschi

Gunnar Teege

Daniele Pagani

The system comprises an improved document monitoring agent in which user evaluations are used to decide whether a changed document should be saved in the system or not. The evaluation of importance of the change in a document is performed by one or more users who collaboratively monitor a networked document, typically identified by a URL. By providing a user evaluation interface, it is possible for users to indicate their evaluation of the significance of the change. As such, only significantly changed documents, as indicated by the users themselves, are saved. Thus, a more efficient saving is obtained while at the same time reducing the risk of discarding potentially interesting changed documents which would have been discarded by conventional monitoring agents.

Method and apparatus for collaborative document versioning of networked documents

A recommender system employs implicit ratings generated from monitoring user interaction with an item, such as while listening to a music track on a MP3 player or reading an electronic book. A method for generating item recommendations includes: providing an item to a device having an application for engaging a repetitive activity with the provided item, wherein the repetitive activity occurs primarily during standalone operation of the device; generating a history of user interaction with the provided item, wherein user interaction includes engaging in the repetitive activity with the provided item; transforming the history of user interactions into an implicit rating of the provided item; and using the implicit rating of the provided item to generate recommendations of other items.

Recommender system and method for generating implicit ratings based on user interactions with handheld devices

The method of the invention overcomes the problems in a community when the amount of interaction drops off through the use of &ldquo;community crickets.&rdquo; A community cricket monitors the amount of community activity, establishes criteria for deciding when a community is sleeping and uses that criteria for initiating a recovery mechanism for &ldquo;re-awakening&rdquo; the community. A community is &ldquo;sleeping&rdquo; if the level of activity falls below some predetermined level or criteria. By monitoring the community's activity, the community cricket can prevent sleeping communities from dying. Various methods to detect and to re-awaken sleeping communities are defined.

Method for monitoring and encouraging community activity in a networked environment

A method and system to facilitate searching a data collection, such as the World Wide Web, that takes advantage of the collective ability of all users to create queries to the data collection. First, a node-link graph of all queries submitted to a data collection within a given period of time is constructed. In the case of the World Wide Web, the queries would be to a particular search engine. In the graph, each node is a query. There is a link made between two nodes whenever the two queries are judged to be related. A first key idea is that the determination of relatedness depends on the documents returned by the queries, not on the actual terms in the queries themselves. For example, a criterion for relatedness could be that of the top ten documents returned for each query, the two lists have at least one document in common. The invention also describes a way to allow the user to peruse the network of related queries in an ordered way: following a path from a first cousin, to a second cousin to a third cousin, etc. to a set of results. By doing this, the user is exposed to related documents that were not returned as a result of their query. A second key idea is that the construction of the query graph transforms single user usage of the data collection (e.g. search) into collaborative usage: all users can tap into the knowledge base of queries submitted by others. This is because each of the related queries represents the knowledge of the user who submitted the query.

Collaborative searching by query induction

Workflow techniques for coordinating organizational processes by providing flexible representations of work using generalized process structure grammars (GPSG). The techniques take into account that, in reality, work evolves both horizontally, in the co-operation of causally unrelated, but information-sharing tasks, and vertically, in the co-ordination of causally-dependent activities. Process modeling involves (1) viewing documents and tasks as duals of each other, capturing horizontal co-operation; and (2) exploiting constraints to express the soft dependencies among related activities and documents within the framework of generative rule-based grammars for processes, thus handling vertical co-ordination. This alleviates or avoids rigidity arising in conventional workflow solutions in part from viewing work processes as unfolding along a single line of temporally chained activities.

Systems and methods providing flexible representations of work

A document recommendation system incorporating a document change monitoring agent. For a document recommendation system to be effective, it is desirable to enable users to be cognizant of changes that may occur to the document. The present invention addresses this issue by coupling a document change monitoring agent, which automatically detects changes in referenced documents, with a recommender system, which helps users share and evaluate information in a collaborative way. One advantage of the invention is that it brings human judgement into the relevance evaluation of the detected changes and allows the results to be shared with other people likely to be interested, in such a way that redundant work is decreased. Another advantage of the invention is that it enables Systems Administrators of a document recommendation system to be more efficient in the management of the system.

System for providing document change information for a community of users

A decentralized network system provides for the distribution and collection of information (or messages) without the constraints of a large physical infrastructure. A decentralized network system includes a plurality of first nodes, each first node having a memory for storing messages, a processor for processing messages in accordance with a predetermined relationship and a communications port for transmitting and receiving messages. The first nodes are attached to some physical device or to a location. A plurality of mobile second nodes is also provided. Each second node includes a memory for storing messages, a processor for creating messages in response to user input and for processing messages in accordance with a predetermined relationship and a communications port for transmitting and receiving messages. Preferably, each second node is a personal digital assistant (PDA). The mobile second nodes are moved by users, who provide the means for transmitting messages from one first node to another first node. Transmission of a message from one node to another node is accomplished through a sequence of message exchanges between pairs of first nodes and second nodes.

Decentralized network system

A system and method of caching uses quality or value attributes, provided for example, by a recommender system or by a dynamical analysis of site accesses, which are attached to cached information to prioritize items in the cache. Documents are prioritized in the cache according to the relative value of their content. Value data may be provided from a recommender system which provides a value for a document according to user recommendations (using explicit recommendations) or from statistical analysis of site visits from unique users (implicit recommendations) or a combination of the two to identify the higher value documents.

System and method for caching

A system and method of caching uses quality or value attributes, provided for example, by a recommender system or by a dynamical analysis of site accesses, which are attached to cached information to prioritize items in the cache. Documents are prioritized in the cache according to the relative value of their content. Value data may be provided from a recommender system which provides a value for a document according to user recommendations (using explicit recommendations) or from statistical analysis of site visits from unique users (implicit recommendations) or a combination of the two to identify the higher value documents. The caching method may also be used to improve performance of a recommender system.

A system and method of predicting a user's rating of a new item in a collaborative filtering system in which an initial set of correlation coefficients for the intended users is used to bootstrap the system is described. The users are members of a predetermined organization and the initial correlation coefficient for each pair of users is based on the organizational relationship between the users. Prior organizational relationship information pertaining to the strength of ties, such as a formal organization chart and social network maps built using interviews or deduced from observed (online and/or offline) interaction patterns between potential users, is used to bootstrap the filtering system. Correlation coefficients can be updated as users rate or rerate items in the system.

System and method for bootstrapping a collaborative filtering system

A system for ranking search results obtained from an information retrieval system includes a search pre-processor, a search engine and a search post-processor. The search preprocessor determines the context of the search query by comparing the terms in the search query with a predetermined user context profile. Preferably, the context profile is a user profile or a community profile, which includes a set of terms which have been rated by the user, community, or a recommender system. The search engine generates a search result comprising at least one item obtained from the information retrieval system. The search post-processor ranks each item returned in the search result in accordance with the context of the search query.

System and method for collaborative ranking of search results employing user and group profiles derived from document collection content analysis

A system and method of providing predicted user ratings includes calculating the accuracy of predictions based on the variance of distribution of the predicted user's rating. The system and method present and rank the results by treating the variance as a source of noise. The decision to present or not to present an item is made by sampling the probability distribution of the predicted rating and comparing the result to some user-set threshold (e.g., &ldquo;show me all results that the system predicts I will score 3 or higher&rdquo;) or a system default value.

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Meylan, France

Natalie S Glance