Canon Kabushiki Kaisha

Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Microsoft Corporation

Todd D Newman

John S Haikin

Timothy Louis Kohler

Michael Brian Palmer

Pamela Bhattacharya

Justin Brooks Cranshaw

Mayerber Loureiro De Carvalho Neto

Benjamin Gene Cheung

Charles Yin-che Lee

William L Portnoy

Sharon A Henley

Steven Wayne Ickman

Steve Ickman

James H Lewallen

David Shigeru Taniguchi

Stephen B Coy

Sameer Halai

Flynn Joffray

Eric J Horvitz

Heung-Yeung Shum

Xuedong D Huang

Lili Cheng

Siu-Kei Tin

Cezary Antoni Marcjan

Rajeev V Karunakaran

Colleen G Estrada

Eugenio Martinez-Uriegas

Will Portnoy

Rong Wang

Emad Mohamed Hamdy Elwany

Annie P Louis

Elizabeth Pirrotta

A software agent, that is used to assist in providing a service, receives communications from a set of users that are attempting to use the software agent. The communications include communications that are interacting with the software agent, and communications that are not interacting with the software agent. The software agent performs natural language processing on all communications to identify such things as user sentiment, user concerns or other items in the content of the messages, and also to identify actions taken by the users in order to obtain a measure of user satisfaction with the software agent. One or more action signals are then generated based upon the identified user satisfaction with the software agent.

Signal analysis in a conversational scheduling assistant computing system

A media party network service manages a set of media parties and a set of users of the media party service. Managing the media parties can involve instantiating new media parties according to input from the users, allowing the users to join the media parties, and tracking which users are participating in which media parties. Managing a given one of the media parties may include maintaining a queue of media items, allowing users in the media party to provide input to add media items to the queue and to provide input to skip media items in the queue. The media party service streams the given one of the media parties to client devices of the users currently in the given media party such that all of the client devices are currently displaying substantially a same part of a media item in the corresponding queue.

Collaborative media sharing

A set of nodes are organized into a graph to represent a workflow to enable the dynamic and directed management of that workflow in a decentralized system. Each node maintains a value necessary for execution of the workflow, and includes code to populate that value. A workflow agent manages the population of the values according to an identified dependency structure for the nodes relative to the workflow. As changes are made to the workflow, the workflow agent ensures that values and dependencies of the nodes stay up-to-date. Each node retains historic values, which enables the workflow agent to query several states of the workflow throughout time as changes are made thereto. The dynamic management of the nodes improves the responsiveness of the system to changes, thereby improving computational efficiency.

Dynamic directed graph workflows

Various embodiments enable an application to obtain information associated with a link to content without navigating to the link. The application can be configured to identify a link, receive input to attain information associated with the link, and send a request to a service for the information. In one or more embodiments, a service can be configured to receive a request for information associated with a link, ascertain one or more sources from which to gather the information, determine appropriate mechanisms by which to obtain the information, and acquire the information. Alternately or additionally, the service can further assemble the information into a consumable format, and return the consumable format to a requesting application or device.

Link expansion service

A social network system (or other type of hosting system) is described herein which allows different types of applications to interact with the common resources of the system via respective application-specific channels. Through an application-specific channel, a user may obtain a filtered set of content items (e.g., posts) and notifications that pertain to a particular application with which the user is currently interacting. But the user may also obtain items and notifications that do not necessarily have an affiliation with the particular application. The social network system may maintain a single identity for each user across all application channels hosted by the system.

Multi-faceted social network system for use with plural applications

Various embodiments provide summarization techniques that can be applied to blogs or microblogs to present information that is determined to be useful, in a shortened form. In one or more embodiments, a procedure is utilized to automatically acquire a set of concepts from various sources, such as free text. These acquired concepts are then used to guide a clustering process. Clusters are ranked and then summarized by incorporating sentiment and the frequency of words.

Microblog summarization

A unified search service may collect information related to an enterprise from at least one of publicly available data and private enterprise data. In some implementations, crowd sourcing may be used to determine a source list of one or more sources of information. Authored content can be generated, such as by combining one or more items of information from the public data with one or more items of information from the private enterprise data. Further, in some implementations, a public index may be generated from the public data, and one or more affiliation indexes may be generated from the private enterprise data. For example, a first affiliation index may contain confidential enterprise information, while a second affiliation index may contain non-confidential enterprise information. A user's affiliation to the enterprise may be taken into consideration when determining which indexes to use when responding to a search request from the user.

Enterprise search over private and public data

A state affinitized system comprises worker computing devices uniquely affinitized with one or more states such that only those worker computing devices maintain local copies of the states with which they are affinitized. Requests and data relevant to a state are directed to the worker computing device affinitized with that state, such as by front-end computing devices. A centralized persistent storage can maintain a copy of each state and can modify the states in response to newly received information in the same manner as the worker computing devices. Such maintenance can be performed by coalescer computing devices, which can also derive second order data from the states in the centralized persistent storage, which can be further added to the state and also communicated to the worker computing device affinitized with that state. Crawler computing devices can obtain additional information for incorporation into states from network-based information repositories and services.

Scalable affinitized state management

The present invention provides for determining a gamut boundary description for a color device, the color device being characterized at least by a destination transform which converts colors from a device-independent color space to a device-dependent color space and which reports out-of-gamut colors. A set of sample values is determined in the device-independent color space. For each of the sample values within the set of sample values, the destination transform is applied to the sample value, and in a case where the sample value is in gamut, the sample value is included within a set of gamut boundary values. The gamut boundary description is determined by forming a set of polygonal surfaces based on the set of gamut boundary values. Accordingly, a gamut boundary description is determined without necessarily having to sample additional color values as the number of colorant channels for the color device increases.

Computation of gamut boundary by sampling device-independent color space

A method and apparatus for color conversion useful for color devices having a large number of input channels, for example CMYK color printers having additional inks used to enhance the color printer's gamut. The color conversion is performed using a strata collection of look-up tables that stratify an n-dimensional color space into sets of lower dimensional subspaces. For lower dimension subspaces, the associated look-up tables may be closed, while for a higher dimension subspace, an associated look-up table may be open, leaving gaps in the subspace not enclosed by a look-up table. A color management module using the strata collection for color conversion may determine if a color conversion is for a color value that falls within a gap. If so, the color management module may use a relatively complex interpolation process. If not, the color management module may use a relatively simple interpolation process.

Color conversion with many input channels

The present invention transforms a source device colorant value to a destination device colorant value, by determining whether all non-black colorant values of the source device colorant value are zero, transforming the source device colorant value to a colorimetric value using a source device model, transforming the colorimetric value to a gamut-mapped colorimetric value using a user-selectable gamut-mapping model, and selecting a destination device colorant value based on the determination. In a case where all of the non-black colorant values of the source device colorant value are zero, the destination device colorant value is selected so that its black colorant value reproduces a lightness of the gamut-mapped colorimetric value, and all of its non-black colorant values are zero. Otherwise, the destination device colorant value is selected so that a combination of its non-black and black colorant values reproduces the gamut-mapped colorimetric value. Accordingly, black content is preserved while accommodating a user-selectable gamut-mapping model.

Color transformation with black preservation

Growing community of inventors

Palo Alto, CA, United States of America

Todd D Newman