International Business Machines Corporation

Shang-Hua Teng

Qi Lu

Matthias Eichstaedt

Reiner Kraft

Daniel Alexander Ford

Michael Lawrence Emens

Tobin Jon Lehman

Gaurav Tewari

Peter Chi-Sing Yim

Qi (nmn) Lu

A method in a computer network for identifying users with similar interests is described. The method includes accepting a first query statement from a first user and storing a first item of information related to the first query. The method further includes accepting a second query from a second user and storing a second item of information related to the second query. The method further includes computing a measure of similarity of the first query and the second query by using the first item of information and the second item of information. A system and computer readable medium for carrying out the above method is also described.

Internet based method for facilitating networking among persons with similar interests and for facilitating collaborative searching for information

A According to the invention, a music search system includes a music player, music analyzer, a search engine and a sophisticated user interface that enables users to visually build complex query profiles from the structural information of one or more musical pieces. The complex query profiles are useful for performing searches for musical pieces matching the structural information in the query profile. The system allows the user to supply an existing piece of music, or some components thereof, as query arguments, and lets the music search engine find music that is similar to the given sample by certain similarity measurement.

Graphical user interface to query music by examples

A system for automatically generating user interest profiles and delivering information to users learns a user's interests by monitoring the user's outbound communication streams, i.e., the information that the user produces either by typing (e.g., while a user is composing an e-mail message or editing a word processor document) or by speaking (e.g., while a user is engaged in a phone conversation or listening to a lecture). The system uses the monitored text to build (and possibly update) a user interest profile. The profile is constructed from current text generated by the user, so that the retrieved information reflects present user interests. In addition, the profile may also retain past user interests, so that the profile reflects a combination of past and present user interests. The system then automatically queries diverse databases for information relevant to the interest profile. The databases may include internet web pages, files stored on the user's local network, and other local or remote data repositories. The queries may use a combination of internet search engines, the specific selection of which may depend upon the nature and/or content of the queries. The information retrieved in response to the queries is then presented to the user. The retrieved information may contain, for example, answers to questions that the user might ask and/or data related to the user's current and continuing interests. Because a user's current speech or typed text is highly correlated with the user's current interests, the retrieved information will be relevant to the user's actual interests. The communication stream monitoring, interest profile building, data base querying, and presentation of retrieved information are all performed automatically, in real time, and in the background of current user activities.

Outbound information analysis for generating user interest profiles and improving user productivity

Private user data is securely entered from a public location in a way that the private user data cannot be ascertained by observers. A voice agent generates vocal instructions for a user, instructing the user to enter response data. The vocal instructions are communicated to the user with a telephonic link, in a manner that is secure from observers of entry of the response data. The instructions implement an encryption function, which causes the private user data to be encrypted within the response data. The response data is entered by the user vocally into a telephone, or by pressing buttons on a telephone keypad, or by pressing keys on a computer keyboard. The response data entered by the user is received by a security agent, which ascertains the private user data from the response data, and which also determines the validity of the data.

Method and system for voice guided secure entry of private data in a public setting

A system generates user interest profiles by monitoring and analyzing a user's access to a variety of hierarchical levels within a set of structured documents, e.g., documents available at a web site. Each information document has parts associated with it and the documents are classified into categories using a known taxonomy. The user interest profiles are automatically generated based on the type of content viewed by the user. The type of content is determined by the text within the parts of the documents viewed and the classifications of the documents viewed. In addition, the profiles also are generated based on other factors including the frequency and currency of visits to documents having a given classification, and/or the hierarchical depth of the levels or parts of the documents viewed. User profiles include an interest category code and an interest score to indicate a level of interest in a particular category. The profiles are updated automatically to accurately reflect the current interests of an individual, as well as past interests. A time-dependent decay factor is applied to the past interests. The system presents to the user documents or references to documents that match the current profile.

Automatic user interest profile generation from structured document access information

A method and system for generating audio summaries of musical pieces receives computer readable data representing the musical piece and generates therefrom an audio summary including the main melody of the musical piece. A component builder generates a plurality of composite and primitive components representing the structural elements of the musical piece and creates a hierarchical representation of the components. The most primitive components, representing notes within the composition, are examined to determine repetitive patterns within the composite components. A melody detector examines the hierarchical representation of the components and uses algorithms to detect which of the repetitive patterns is the main melody of the composition. Once the main melody is detected, the segment of the musical data containing the main melody is provided in one or more formats. Musical knowledge rules representing specific genres of musical styles may be used to assist the component builder and melody detector in determining which primitive component patterns are the most likely candidates for the main melody.

Method and apparatus for music summarization and creation of audio summaries

An efficient method and apparatus for regulating access to information objects stored in a database in which there are a large number of users and access groups. The invention uses a representation of a hierarchical access group structure in terms of intervals over a set of integers and a decomposition scheme that reduces any group structure to ones that have interval representation. This representation allows the problem for checking access rights to be reduced to an interval containment problem. An interval tree, a popular data structure in computational geometry, may be implemented to efficiently execute the access-right checking method.

Efficient large-scale access control for internet/intranet information systems

A distributed collection of web-crawlers to gather information over a large portion of the cyberspace. These crawlers share the overall crawling through a cyberspace partition scheme. They also collaborate with each other through load balancing to maximally utilize the computing resources of each of the crawlers. The invention takes advantage of the hierarchical nature of the cyberspace namespace and uses the syntactic components of the URL structure as the main vehicle for dividing and assigning crawling workload to individual crawler. The partition scheme is completely distributed in which each crawler makes the partitioning decision based on its own crawling status and a globally replicated partition tree data structure.

Collaborative team crawling:Large scale information gathering over the internet

A method and apparatus for efficiently matching a large collection of user profiles against a large volume of data in a webcasting system. The invention generally includes in one embodiment four steps to parallelize the profiles. First, an initial profile set is partitioned into several subsets also referred to as sub-partitions using various heuristic methods. Second, each sub-partition is mapped onto one or more independent processing units. Each processing unit is not required to have equal processing performance. However, for best performance results, subset data should be mapped in one embodiment where the subset with a highest cost is mapped to a fastest processor, and the next highest cost subset mapped to the next fastest processor. Where appropriate, the invention evaluates the relative subset processing speed of each processor and adjusts future subset mapping based upon these evaluations. For each information item I that needs to be matched with a profile predicate, a third and a fourth step are executed. The third step broadcasts I to all processing units, and a fourth step performs a sequential profile match on I.

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Champaign, IL, United States of America

Shang-Hua Teng