Xerox Corporation

Palo Alto Research Center Inc.

Inxight Software, Inc.

Google Inc.

Stuart Kent Card

Jock Douglas Mackinlay

Lichan Hong

George G Robertson

Richard Carl Gossweiler, Iii

Ed H Chi

Allison Gyle Woodruff

Peter L T Pirolli

James Edward Pitkow

Ramana B Rao

Mark Jeffrey Stefik

John Turner Maxwell, Iii

D Austin Henderson, Jr

David A Nation

Rich Gossweller

Jock Douglas MacKinlay

Jock D MacKinlay

Paula S Newman

Jeffrey Heer

William M York

Roy Want

Daniel Gureasko Bobrow

Mark D Weiser

Richard J Goldstein

Walter A Johnson

Michael G Lamming

Jindong Chen

Tichomir G Tenev

Daniel Martin Russell

Martin F Cooper

Michalene M Casey

Barbara Stefik

Richard Carl Gossweiler Iii

Robert W Reeder

Frank H Bowers

Jeffery M Heer

Tobias Hans Höllerer

Peter L Pirolli

Richard C Gossweiler Iii

Techniques are described that provide a reading pane for reading one or more content portions of a work and a guide pane that displays a structured overview of additional information from the corpus that is focused by an analysis of information from the currently-visible content portion of the work. The contents of the currently-visible content portion displayed within the reading page are used to derive dynamic representations of the user's immediate interests. At the user's request, a structured persistent context-aware guide is computed and displayed. The persistent context-aware guide provides a framework for accessing other parts of the corpus having the most-related information. The elements in the persistent context-aware guide are other content portions or other organizations such as sections, chapters, or articles in the corpus. The persistent context-aware guide may also incorporate additional closely-related information elements from outside the corpus including advertisements. Advertisements for information on the topics of immediate interest to the user can be incorporated within the structured, context-aware guide so that the reader can purchase them and review that information in the context of the current session. The guide pane and the reading pane support navigation controls so that the user can go to new or previous sub-portions of the content portion, new or previous content portions and/or new or previous persistent context-aware guides.

Systems and methods for persistent context-aware guides

Techniques are provided to improve communication through selective display of attention shifting display elements. A focus of attention is determined, display events located and attention shifting display elements displayed. The attention shifting display elements suggest display events as candidate foci of attention based on the display event, the display event location and the distance from the focus of attention. Attention shifting display elements are composed of attention directing portions, and optional attention attracting and informing portions. The attention directing portions help direct attention across distances and help attract attention to a point. The informing portions indicate availability of information associated with the display event occurring outside the focus of attention. The attention directing, attention attracting and informing portions of an attention shifting display element are associated with dynamic or periphery of attention based display attributes, static or focus of attention based display attributes or a combination of the two.

Systems and methods for effective attention shifting

A system and method for providing a topic-directed search is provided, which advantageously harnesses user-provided topical indexes and an ability to characterize indexes according to how articles fall under their topical organizations. A corpus of articles and an index that includes topics from the articles is maintained. For each topic, a coarse-grained topic model is built, which includes the characteristic words included in the articles relating to the topic and scores assigned to the characteristic words. A search query is executed against the index. The topics that match the search terms are chosen by their scores. The topics that match the coarse-grained topic models and the articles corresponding to the search query are presented. In contrast to conventional search engines, search results are organized according to topic and search results can be offered across multiple indexes, where part of returned results are selected from most-relevant indexes with their most-relevant topics.

System and method for providing a topic-directed search

A system and method for redistributing interest in a hierarchical data structure representation is provided. A data representation of a hierarchical data structure includes depth levels having one or more blocks of sibling nodes associated with node interest characteristics. Two or more of the sibling nodes are combined as aggregates into elided subsets. One of the elided subsets is selected and expanded to reveal the aggregated sibling nodes. A breadth of the depth level in which the block is located is determined. A further determination that the breadth exceeds a constrained breadth extent for the data representation is made. The breadth is decreased by ordering the sibling nodes in the depth level by their node interest characteristic and by combining at least a portion of the sibling nodes into the elided subset based on the respective node interest characteristics such that the breadth does not exceed the constrained breadth extent.

System and method for redistributing interest in a hierarchical data structure representation

Page turning of a three-dimensional electronic book is modeled as a dynamic animation. The page to be turned may be rotated by rotating it about a base line, and deformed by curling points of the front face of the turning page around the outer side of an imaginary geometric shape.

Systems and methods for turning pages in a three-dimensional electronic document

Techniques provide for the dynamic display of a page-oriented information asset using an audio output mode. Pluralities of elements in the page-oriented information asset are determined based on chapters, sections, paragraphs, sentences, words and the like. The elements are rendered to an audio output mode. Optionally selectable representations of the elements are also determined and output using a 3-dimension-like rendering to a visual output mode. The 3-dimension-like rendering of the visual representations of the elements shows how the current element relates to the other elements and its location within the page-oriented information asset. The 3-dimension-like rendering provides visual orientation or context within the page-oriented information asset. The visual representations of the elements are optionally selectable as spatial context indicators providing direct navigation control to support reading, browsing and information retrieval tasks within the page-oriented information asset. Speech input is also optionally recognized as a direct navigation control.

Systems and methods for navigating page-oriented information assets

User's interests can be explicitly determined via keywords that the user specifies, and/or are implicitly constructed from user browsing and reading activity. User interests may be expressed as an interest profile. Conceptual keywords related to user interests are selected by combining spreading activation and word co-occurrence, by latent semantic analysis, or other methods. One embodiment automatically highlights sentences and other information that contain conceptual keywords related to user interests. Highlights can be activated when the user directly performs a keyword search or index search, or the invention can generate information reflecting user interests, apply it to the text, and generate and display highlights. One embodiment includes an algorithm for computing a conceptual keyword vector through an iterative spreading activation process also employing word co-occurrence. A conceptual index of the text may be created and then combined with conceptual highlighting.

Method for automatically performing conceptual highlighting in electronic text

A system and method for turning pages of a three-dimensional electronic book. A closed three-dimensional electronic book is modeled as at least one three-dimensional object having length, width and thickness dimensions. An opened three-dimensional book electronic is modeled as at least two three-dimensional objects having length, width and thickness dimensions, representing the left side of the opened book and the right side of the opened book. The page(s) to be turned is modeled as at least a three-dimensional object having length, width and thickness dimensions. The cross-section parallelogram having a width dimension and a thickness dimension based on the width and thickness dimensions of the closed three-dimensional electronic book, and a user-selected number of page(s) to be turned. Page turning of a three-dimensional electronic book is modeled as a dynamic animation showing the concurrent movement of three three-dimensional objects representing the left side pages block, the right side pages block, and the pages(s) to be turned.

Systems and method for turning pages in a three-dimensional electronic document

A system is described for displaying images of a virtual three-dimensional book having one or more virtual pages. The system comprises a display system capable of executing a display program wherein images of the virtual three-dimensional book are produced on the display system. A degree of interest (DOI) function is provided for allocating available space on the display system. A page selection function may provide a user-selectable scale along a long axis of the virtual book for selecting virtual pages. Virtual chapter tabs may also be provided for navigating within the virtual book. The display system may also include a page flipping function with several different page flipping speeds and several different page flipping animations for moving between virtual pages in the virtual book. Moreover, a scroll bar function provided to facilitate page navigation wherein space on the scroll bar is allocated using a DOI function. Finally, a computer program product comprising a computer usable medium having computer readable code embodied therein for producing images of a virtual three-dimensional book is also disclosed.

Navigation methods, systems, and computer program products for virtual three-dimensional books

Apparatus, methods, and computer program products are disclosed that perform computationally efficient layout of hierarchical data structures.

Method, apparatus, and program product for visualizing tree structured information

To annotate a three-dimensional electronic object, e.g., document, a user specifies, on a two-dimensional screen, a portion of a page of a three-dimensional document as a specified page area to be annotated by making a stroke. The annotation may be displayed to the user by a hybrid technique where the annotation is displayed by a 3D polyline segment placed behind the near clipping plane of a virtual camera frustrum. At the same time, previous annotations are displayed by another technique, such as, for example, the texture coloring technique. During the intermittent time between the stroke and another stroke the 3D polyline segment is removed from behind the near clipping plane and the page texture is updated with the annotation data. The display techniques support highlighting annotations, free-form annotations, and text annotations.

Systems and methods for annotating pages of a 3D electronic document

Method and system to enable a user to view large collections of hierarchically linked information on a computer based display. A tree structure visualization is created which presents a representation of the complete collection of information on the display. The visualization fits completely within a fixed area of the computer based display, negating the need to scroll information into the display area. The visualization is based on identified focus nodes and through calculation of a Degree of Interest (DOI) for each of the nodes based in the structure. Layout and presentation of the visualization structure is based on the DOI values in combination with considerations of available display space. A user may dynamically manipulate views of the structure by selecting one or more focus nodes, thus causing a recalculation of the degree of interest.

System and method for browsing hierarchically based node-link structures based on an estimated degree of interest

A system is described for displaying images of a virtual three-dimensional book having one or more virtual pages. The system comprises a display system capable of executing a display program wherein images of the virtual three-dimensional book are produced on the display system. The display system may include a magnification function producing a virtual magnifier moveable over the virtual pages. The display system may also include a the 'stretchy page' display method wherein one section of the page is directly magnified, while other adjacent sections may be directly magnified in a horizontal or vertical direction, but not both directions. Moreover, a virtual page may also be tilted about a central axis of the virtual page to accommodate viewing of a desired section on the display system. Finally, a computer program product comprising a computer usable medium having computer readable code embodied therein for producing images of a virtual three-dimensional book is also disclosed.

Magnification methods, systems, and computer program products for virtual three-dimensional books

A system is described for displaying images of a virtual three-dimensional book having a plurality of virtual pages. The system comprises a display system capable of executing a display program wherein images of the virtual three-dimensional book are produced on the display system. Information relating to the virtual three-dimensional book may be displayed on an edge of the virtual three-dimensional book. This information may comprise a table image, meta-data about references in the book, information about the organizational structure of the book, or graphical data. Additionally, several columns or rows of information may be displayed on the virtual book edge, each column or row being selectively expandable and contractible. Moreover, a virtual three-dimensional book may be displayed in a way that bears a metaphorical relationship to the contents of the virtual three-dimensional book. Also disclosed is a computer program product comprising a computer usable medium having computer readable code embodied therein for producing images of a virtual three-dimensional book.

Methods, systems, and computer program products for display of information relating to a virtual three-dimensional book

Growing community of inventors

Los Altos Hills, CA, United States of America

Stuart Kent Card