Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Richard Harper

James William Scott

Philip Charles Gosset

Dinan Srilal Gunawardena

Eno Thereska

Abigail Jane Sellen

Kenton Paul Anthony O'Hara

Michael Anthony Massimi

Matthew Kay

Richard Malcolm Banks

Richard M Banks

Stephen Edward Hodges

Min Wang

Chunhui Zhang

Bozidar Radunovic

Christos Gkantsidis

Peter Bernard Key

Thomas Karagiannis

Chunshui Zhao

Tong Yuan

Timothy Regan

Xiangwei Zhu

Philip Charles Gossel

Ilias Raftopoulos

Dharmaiah Manjunath

Julian Gebhardt

Methods and systems are described for managing a user's contact data which use evolving sequential sets of rules where the applicability of each set depends upon adherence or proper application of a prior set. In an embodiment, an initial set of restrictions are generated based on input from a first user, the restrictions relating to contact made by a second user to the first user. These initial restrictions are subsequently modified in response to the second user contacting the first user based on the contact made and a characteristic of the contact. The methods may apply to any form of contact between the first and second users and in an embodiment applies to contact made by the second user to a cellular telephone number belonging to the first user.

Evolving rule based contact exchange

A distributed file system for devices is described. In an embodiment, each data element stored on one of the devices has an associated location and availability attribute. The location attribute is stored co-located with the data element. The availability attribute and a copy of the location attribute are stored by a metadata service. When a client on a device needs to access a data element, it sends a request to the metadata service to find the location of the data element. If the data element is available, this information is provided to the client and this may involve waking a dormant device which holds the data element. Where the data element is not available, read only access may be granted to a cached copy of the data element. Where replication is used and one of the devices holding a replica is unavailable, the system may use write off-loading.

Distributed file system

In some implementations, an access device may sense movement in six degrees of freedom for interacting with information in a user interface. In some implementations, a security feature may be included for verifying an authorization of a user to use the access device. Additionally, in some implementations, the access device may establish communication with an available computing device for accessing and interacting with information that may include remotely stored information, cloud data, cloud services, and the like.

Accessing and interacting with information

Methods and apparatus for displaying and interacting with messages are described. Messages are displayed using one of a number of different visualization schemes provided. A user can interact with messages or change the selected visualization scheme using gestures and the mapping of gestures to particular actions is different for different visualization schemes. In an embodiment the messages are received via integrated messaging channels and messages are classified using a number of properties. Each of the visualization schemes has a different way of graphically representing messages and each scheme is adapted to emphasize a different combination of message properties.

Controlling an integrated messaging system using gestures

Methods and apparatus for linking captured images using short range communications or a personal area network are described. In an embodiment, an image capture device is described which detects devices in proximity to the device and stores data identifying the devices and the times when they were in proximity. In another embodiment, a computing-based device is described which uses the data stored by an image capture device to identify sequences of images which were captured by a group of devices in proximity to each other and to present these sequences to a viewer concurrently and in temporal alignment.

Linking captured images using short range communications

Proximity-based mobile message delivery is described. In an embodiment, a first user stores a message intended for a second user on a first mobile terminal, while the first mobile terminal is located remote from a second mobile terminal of the second user. Subsequent to this, the first mobile terminal detects that it is now in proximity with the second mobile terminal, and this triggers the first mobile terminal to transmit the message to the second mobile terminal. In embodiments, authentication of the second mobile terminal can be performed before transmitting the message. In another embodiment, a mobile terminal comprises a short-range wireless transceiver that can detect that a further mobile terminal is in proximity, and trigger the transmission of a pre-stored message to the further mobile terminal.

Proximity-based mobile message delivery

A data store including a file location attribute is described. In an embodiment, the location attribute for a data element, such as a file or database record, is stored with the bytes of data and records the geographic location of the data element. Writing to this attribute is limited to a single trusted entity, such as an operating system, to ensure that the location data can be trusted and when a data element is moved or replicated, the attribute is updated to reflect the new location of the data element. This location data is made available to users and applications by a metadata service which tracks the locations of data elements and responds to requests from users. Access control policies can been defined in terms of location and stored at the metadata service and the metadata service can then enforce these policies when responding to requests.

Data store including a file location attribute

Information retrieval using time is described. In an embodiment a web-crawler creates time objects which are composites of content of different media types obtained from potentially different sources and, for example, are about the same date or date range. For example, a time object may comprise an image and a piece of text about an event in 1977. In this case the time object may have the date 1977 stored with it as well as URLs of originating web pages. In an embodiment a user is able to query a search engine to retrieve time objects which are displayed in a manner related to the dates of the time objects. For example, the time objects may be displayed in chronological order against a time line. In examples time objects may be dynamically created as a web page is requested and displayed with that web page.

Information retrieval using time

Information exploration is described. For example, a user provides gathering terms to an information exploration system which uses those terms to generate many composite items formed from content of different media types obtained from a web search engine. For example, the composite items are displayed simultaneously on a user interface and provide a user with a partial map of information 'territory' accessible through the system. In some examples the user is able to select a composite item and use it to explore further in the same direction by generating more composite items using related gathering terms. In some examples the user is able to select a composite item and use it to explore further in a manner indirectly related to the selected composite item. In examples the composite items may be saved in scrap books, sent to other users or used to access content.

Information exploration

A resource allocation framework for wireless/wired networks is described. In an embodiment, methods of end host based traffic management are described which operate separately from the underlying access control protocol within the network (e.g. wireless MAC protocol or TCP). The rate limits for each flow are set based on per-flow weights, which may be user specified, and based on an estimate of the utilization of the shared resource and the rate limits are adjusted periodically so that the resource is not underutilized or saturated. Some embodiments compute a virtual capacity of the resource which is adjusted to optimize the value of the utilization and then the virtual capacity is shared between flows according to the per-flow weights. Methods for estimating the utilization of a wireless network and the capacity of a broadband access link are also described.

Growing community of inventors

Cambridge, United Kingdom

Richard Harper