Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Ryszard K Kott

Lili Cheng

Cezary Antoni Marcjan

Sean U Kelly

David Patrick Vronay

William L Portnoy

Andrzej Turski

Richard Lloyd Hughes

Surajit J Chaudhuri

Mario C Goertzel

Nathaniel S Brown

Dietmar Gaertner

Alwin Vyhmeister

Christopher Gustav Ewbank

Terry Kennedy

A rich communication profile system with notifications. The system is a feedback mechanism that utilizes rich content, e.g., multimedia content, as one or more indicators that represent the status of a remote user. The system includes a state component that receives information relating to state of at least one entity. A notifications component dynamically renders at least one personalized graphical indicia representative of the entity's state. The entity can be a person, group of people, component, place, and object.

Rich profile communication with notifications

A database query user interface combines the user convenience of simple text searching with the expressive refinements of powerful query language. The database query user interface includes a query text string input from a user including one or more terms of a chunk expression language format. The database query user interface further includes a syntactical prompt for constructing a multi-element chunk expression language database query that is syntactically correct and complete and includes the text string input from the user. For example, the syntactical prompt is selected from the database based upon a weighted analysis of database information relating to database elements included in the text string input from the user. A database query formed according to the present user interface may then be persisted or stored as a database query object.

Database query user interface to assist in efficient and accurate query construction

A search of an index database or another search method is conducted to identify preliminary results listing one or more selected computer objects having selected identifying information stored in an index database. In addition, one or more selected computer objects of the preliminary search results are correlated with one or more other computer objects that have associations with the selected computer objects of the preliminary search results. Integrated search results are then returned and include the preliminary search results and one or more other computer objects that have associations with the selected computer objects of the preliminary search results. The associations may be determined by a association system and represent relationships between computer files based upon user or other interactions between the objects. The associations between the objects may include similarities between them and their importance.

System and method for searching computer files and returning identified files and associated files

The subject invention provides a unique system and method that facilitates a controlled communication environment which allows a user to participate in a plurality of privacy contexts with other people in a simultaneous manner in an online community. A user can assign or define varying levels of privacy to his/her information or content to control the visibility of such information by others. In particular, a first user can maintain one or more 'gardens' or stores of content which may be accessible to at least a subset of the online community. Access to the contents of any one garden can be based on the privacy level of the garden and the privacy level (e.g., access parameters) granted to the person. The privacy levels and arrangement of content can be hierarchal and/or non-overlapping. Thus, a user can seamlessly communicate with multiple users at the same time regardless of their context or privacy level while maintaining the privacy boundaries of each garden.

Walled gardens

The subject invention provides a unique system and method that facilitates self-regulation of a social network system based at least in part on user behavior, and in particular on good or desirable user behavior. The system and method involve monitoring user behavior such as user activity and user interactions with other users and the network itself. Several factors can be weighed to determine whether the user behavior is good. Network assets or rights can be allocated to good users in the form of gifts or trade exchange opportunities whereas less desirable or bad users may not receive such gifts or trade opportunities or assets and rights might be revoked from them. By watching user behavior and promoting good behavior in this manner, the social network can be managed and self-regulated to optimize the utilization and distribution of both limited and unlimited assets (e.g., network created and user created assets or resources).

Systems and methods to facilitate self regulation of social networks through trading and gift exchange

A system and method for generating a schema for a database is provided. The schema is based, at least in part, upon three main tables: object types, objects, and, associations. Through these three base tables, the system facilitates rapid prototyping of schema associated with database(s). The schema is extensible since associations between objects, objects and object types are not hard-coded and can be dynamically updated by modifying the appropriate entry(ies) in one or more of these three base tables. Thus, through these three tables, an extensible, flexible framework for generating and/or dynamically modifying the schema is provided. The system includes an input component that receives information associated with a requested database prototype. The system further includes a schema generation component that generates a schema based, at least in part, upon the information received by the input component.

Rapid prototyping, generating and dynamically modifying a schema representing a database

The subject invention provides a unique system and method that facilitates creating a summary page of content associated with disparate sources of data. For example, a user can select one or more regions of one or more disparate web pages for which he/she desires updated information over a length of time. The selected regions can be identified and then marked for monitoring via a web crawler. The web crawler can analyze the relevant web pages, and in particular, only the selected regions to determine if any of the corresponding content have changed. Changes to other non-selected content can be ignored. The desired changes can be extracted and included on the summary page to mitigate the number of times a user must revisit individual web pages to see what if any changes have occurred since the previous visit.

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A remote procedure call marshaling architecture provides remote procedure call interoperability between computers having arbitrary native data format pointer sizes not conforming to an on-wire multicanonical data representation of the remote procedure calls. The architecture includes an interface description language compiler having a code path generic to effecting marshaling of data structures containing non-conformant pointers. When compiled to run on a computing platform having a native, non-conformant pointer size, the code path is automatically configured to effect marshaling of data structure containing pointers of the computing platform's native pointer size.

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Redmond, WA, United States of America

Ryszard K Kott