Patents Represented by Attorney Microsoft Corporation
  • Patent number: 8352496
    Abstract: One or more techniques and/or systems are disclosed for matching entity names. A matching analysis is performed between a first entity name (e.g., business entity name) and a second entity name. The matching analysis comprises comparing a first entity category descriptor that has been amended into the first entity name with a second entity category descriptor that has been amended into the second entity name. If a match is identified in the category descriptors, the first and second entity names may comprise the same entity.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: October 26, 2010
    Date of Patent: January 8, 2013
    Assignee: Microsoft Corporation
    Inventor: Carolyn Johnston
  • Patent number: 8352445
    Abstract: Instructions within an instruction set (such as source code for a software application) may be documented within many separate tools, such as a development environment, a version control system, and a bug report database. However, it may be inefficient to search for such information in many locations and through many interfaces while investigating the version history of an instruction. Instead, the development environment may be configured to retrieve relevant information (such as bug reports, versioning, and version release notes) and to display the version history information for a selected instruction together within the development environment.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: May 23, 2008
    Date of Patent: January 8, 2013
    Assignee: Microsoft Corporation
    Inventors: Andrew B. Begel, Gina D. Venolia, Reid T. Holmes
  • Patent number: 8347206
    Abstract: Techniques are described for performing automatic generation of one or more tags associated with an image file. One or more ink annotations for a displayed image are received. Handwriting recognition processing of the one or more ink annotations is performed. A string is generated and the string includes one or more recognized words used to form the one or more tags associated with the image file. The handwriting recognition processing and generating the string are performed in response to receiving the ink annotations.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: March 15, 2007
    Date of Patent: January 1, 2013
    Assignee: Microsoft Corporation
    Inventors: Gavin M. Gear, Sam J. George, Richard L. Spencer
  • Patent number: 8340689
    Abstract: Mobile communication devices, such as mobile phones, may be capable of recommending to a user various providers of one or more solicited services, e.g., by identifying a user location and identifying providers near the user location that provide the services, and by initiating a call between the user and a selected provider. However, the equipment and service costs of such devices may be prohibitive, particularly for mid-range mobile communication devices that may appeal to cost-conscious users. The prohibitive costs may be diminished by redirecting part or all of the cost of providing the recommendation service from the providers, e.g., by charging the provider a service cost upon initiating a call from the user to the provider, or upon representing the provider in a provider database. In one such embodiment, all service costs may be borne by providers, providing to the user a free recommendation service via the mobile communication device.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: February 6, 2010
    Date of Patent: December 25, 2012
    Assignee: Microsoft Corporation
    Inventors: Eric Horvitz, Xuedong Huang, Kamal Jain, Milind Vasudeo Mahajan
  • Patent number: 8341108
    Abstract: A goal of computer development is to understand the user and the data with which the user is engaged. If a better understanding of the user and their data can be accomplished, then additional information and features may be provided based upon the user's intent and interests. Accordingly, as provided herein, Kinds may be created as digital representations of everyday things. Kind classifications may be created to characterize the Kinds. The Kind classifications may be updated based upon user interaction to further characterize Kinds with which the user has interacted. For example, when a user writes an email about using orange peels as an air freshener, an orange Kind classification may be updated to reflect that an orange may be used as an air freshener. Kind feature vectors and user feature vectors may be created to represent the probabilities that the Kind or user relates to particular characteristics.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: June 9, 2009
    Date of Patent: December 25, 2012
    Assignee: Microsoft Corporation
    Inventors: Donald Thompson, Alexander S. Stojanovic
  • Patent number: 8341154
    Abstract: Aspects of the subject matter described herein relate to extending types hosted in a database to other platforms. In aspects, a database may store objects according to a one type system while an application accessing the database may store objects according to another type system. To allow the application to understand the types, a mapping mechanism may be employed that maps from the types of type system of the database to types of a type system of the application. The mapping mechanism may utilize metadata associated with the data in mapping between types. In conjunction with mapping a source type to a target type, a target object may be instantiated and populated with properties of a source object of the source type.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: October 28, 2009
    Date of Patent: December 25, 2012
    Assignee: Microsoft Corporation
    Inventors: Balendran Mugundan, Peter Gvozdjak, Chadwin J. Mumford
  • Patent number: 8335763
    Abstract: When presenting a news feed (e.g., statuses of contacts in a social media network), it may be inefficient to display the data items in a single column according to a single filter, such as a designated group of contacts. Rather, from the data feed, a set of at least two data subfeeds may be generated based on different filters, and the at least two data subfeeds may be currently presented to the user (e.g., as two or more vertically aligned columns, each presenting a different set of data items based on a different filter.) The user may prefer the concurrent presentation due to the contextual separation of the data items according to different filters, and may more easily administrate the filters and groupings; e.g., dragging data items from one column to another column may alter the filters to achieve a more preferred sorting of data items in future presentations.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: December 4, 2009
    Date of Patent: December 18, 2012
    Assignee: Microsoft Corporation
    Inventors: Raman Narayanan, Rajenda Vishnumurty, Ming Liu, Russell Songco, George Moromisato
  • Patent number: 8335762
    Abstract: Clients may subscribe to resources for the purpose of receiving notifications of changes in the resource (e.g., a file is added to a shared folder). Storing subscriptions within persistent storage provides data security in the event of a service failure, at the cost of high latency in accessing subscription data. An efficient method for tracking a resource is provided herein. A subscription service creates subscriptions and monitors resources for a client. Upon a subscribed resource change, a notification service stores a notification of the change into a queue associated with the client. Efficient resource tracking is achieved because notification and subscription data is stored in low latency soft memory. The notification service is configured to detect a failure in the notification service and/or subscription service. In the event a service fails, the client provides a recovery mechanism by resubscribing to resources the client is interested in.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: October 6, 2008
    Date of Patent: December 18, 2012
    Assignee: Microsoft Corporation
    Inventors: Abolade Gbadegesin, Viraj B. Mody, David C. Steere, William Michael Zintel, Bruce W. Copeland, Atul Adya, Thomas W. Kleinpeter
  • Patent number: 8336063
    Abstract: A method of producing an executable image from an object file without shared library support from the operating system, wherein the executable image requires a shared library file in order to resolve at least one of the symbols called for in the object file. A method of optimizing the loading of a previously linked file into working memory in a computer for executing in a single address space of the working memory, the file containing an instruction to make an indirect jump to a location in a shared library through an import section of the file. A method for optimizing the loading of a previously linked file into working memory in a computer for executing in a single address space of the working memory, the file containing plural sections with number-filled padding between the end of each section and a succeeding page boundary. A method of optimizing the loading of a previously linked file into working memory in a computer for executing in a memory sharable with other executables.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: May 23, 2005
    Date of Patent: December 18, 2012
    Assignee: Microsoft Corporation
    Inventors: Alessandro Forin, Johannes V. Helander
  • Patent number: 8332862
    Abstract: A job scheduler may schedule concurrent distributed jobs in a computer cluster by assigning tasks from the running jobs to compute nodes while balancing fairness with efficiency. Determining which tasks to assign to the compute nodes may be performed using a network flow graph. The weights on at least some of the edges of the graph encode data locality, and the capacities provide constraints that ensure fairness. A min-cost flow technique may be used to perform an assignment of the tasks represented by the network flow graph. Thus, online task scheduling with locality may be mapped onto a network flow graph, which in turn may be used to determine a scheduling assignment using min-cost flow techniques. The costs may encode data locality, fairness, and starvation-freedom.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: September 16, 2009
    Date of Patent: December 11, 2012
    Assignee: Microsoft Corporation
    Inventors: Michael Isard, Vijayan Prabhakaran, Jonathan James Currey, Ehud Wieder, Kunal Talwar
  • Patent number: 8332443
    Abstract: A distributed, high availability scalable task execution framework that does not use a master. Each server periodically checks if there are new jobs that are scheduled to execute immediately and picks a task for execution. Multiple batch server configurations can be created and executed during a specific time period where each server can behave differently to provide improved response time to online users. Each server can be configured to execute a different number of parallel tasks during a time period, execute fewer tasks or no batch task at all, and then change server behavior to execute many tasks in parallel at a different time when there are no online users. Automatic transaction assists in task restart in the case of infrastructure failures. If infrastructure failure happens before the task completes, the transaction will be rolled back by the database automatically.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: December 19, 2008
    Date of Patent: December 11, 2012
    Assignee: Microsoft Corporation
    Inventors: Gustavo A. Plancarte, Tao Wang, Vijay B. Kurup
  • Patent number: 8325909
    Abstract: Sound signals captured by a microphone are adjusted to provide improved sound quality. More particularly, an Acoustic Echo Reduction system which performs a first stage of echo reduction (e.g., acoustic echo cancellation) on a received signal is configured to perform a second stage of echo reduction (e.g., acoustic echo suppression) by segmenting the received signal into a plurality of frequency bins respectively comprised within a number of frames (e.g., 0.3 s to 0.5 s sound signal segments) for a given block. Data comprised within respective frequency bins is modeled according to a probability density function (e.g., Gaussian distribution). The probability of whether respective frequency bins comprise predominantly near-end signal or predominantly residual echo is calculated.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: June 25, 2008
    Date of Patent: December 4, 2012
    Assignee: Microsoft Corporation
    Inventors: Ivan J. Tashev, Alejandro Acero, Nilesh Madhu
  • Patent number: 8326048
    Abstract: Images may be sorted and categorized by defining a frustum for each image and overlaying the frustums in two, three, or four dimensions to create a density map and identify points of interest. Images that contain a point of interest may be grouped, sorted, and categorized to determine representative images of the point. By including many images from different sources, common points of interest may be defined. Points of interest may be defined in two or three Euclidian dimensions, or may include a dimension of time.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: October 4, 2007
    Date of Patent: December 4, 2012
    Assignee: Microsoft Corporation
    Inventors: Eyal Ofek, Boris Epshtein
  • Patent number: 8319784
    Abstract: Techniques and technologies are provided for binding resources to particular slots associated with shaders in a graphics pipeline. Resource dependencies between resources being utilized by respective shaders can be determined, and, based on these resource dependencies, common resource/slot associations can be computed. Respective common resource/slot associations identify a particular one of the resources to be associated with a particular one of the slots.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: September 2, 2011
    Date of Patent: November 27, 2012
    Assignee: Microsoft Corporation
    Inventors: Ramanujan Srinivasan, Relja Markovic, Samuel Glassenberg
  • Patent number: 8321927
    Abstract: Among other things, one or more systems and/or methods for a network aware firewall are disclosed. A method comprises accessing a first network connection from a client computer system and determining whether the first network connection is a first network type or a second network type. The method further comprises dynamically modifying security parameters associated with a firewall local to the client computer system in response to determining whether the network connection is the first network type or the second network type.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: January 21, 2011
    Date of Patent: November 27, 2012
    Assignee: Microsoft Corporation
    Inventors: Rajesh K. Dadhia, Fabien J. Royer, Pradeep Bahl
  • Patent number: 8316105
    Abstract: Architecture for installing and hosting of remote or server-based single-purpose applications (or server gadgets) on a local client. Where the client supports client gadgets that are available all the time, the server gadgets can now be installed and utilized on the client. Once installed in the client gadget framework, server gadgets can be docked or undocked. The server gadgets can be added to the client gadget framework with no modifications, and will continue to run as if running on the server. Components of the architecture include a browser plug-in (e.g., browser helper object (BHO)) that provides added functionality for the browser being employed, a client hosting application for hosting server gadgets on the client, and methods by which the client hosting application can interact with the server gadget and the server gadget can interact with the client hosting application. An installer is provided to install these components.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: March 22, 2007
    Date of Patent: November 20, 2012
    Assignee: Microsoft Corporation
    Inventors: Stephen M. Yolleck, Jay C. Jacobs, Peter C. Diemer
  • Patent number: 8315959
    Abstract: Described is a technology by which raw GPS data is processed into segments of a trip, with a predicted mode of transportation (e.g., walking, car, bus, bicycling) determined for each segment. The determined transportation modes may be used to tag the GPS data with transportation mode information, and/or dynamically used. Segments are first characterized as walk segments or non-walk segments based on velocity and/or acceleration. Features corresponding to each of those walk segments or non-walk segments are extracted, and analyzed with an inference model to determine probabilities for the possible modes of transportation for each segment. Post-processing may be used to modify the probabilities based on transitioning considerations with respect to the transportation mode of an adjacent segment. The most probable transportation mode for each segment is selected.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: August 1, 2011
    Date of Patent: November 20, 2012
    Assignee: Microsoft Corporation
    Inventors: Yu Zheng, Longhao Wang, Like Liu, Xing Xie
  • Patent number: 8316296
    Abstract: Real-time query expansion (RTQE) is a process of supplementing an original query with addition terms or expansion choices that are ranked according to some figure of merit and presented while users are still formulating their queries. As disclosed herein, phrases may be presented and one or more terms of a focused-on phrase may be pinned (as desirable to the user). Subsequent lists may be presented as a function of pinned terms and/or user input. In one embodiment, a placeholder may be substituted for one or more pinned terms if less than some predetermined threshold of phrases is able to be presented based upon the pinned terms and/or user input, and another list of phrases may be presented as a function of a query using fewer than all the pinned terms. The placeholder may allow out-of-index phrases to be formed, for example, based upon two or more phrases and/or terms input by the user.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: October 1, 2008
    Date of Patent: November 20, 2012
    Assignee: Microsoft Corporation
    Inventors: Tim Paek, Bongshin Lee, Bo Thiesson, Gary Voronel, Julian James Odell, Olilver Scholz
  • Patent number: 8316387
    Abstract: Web browsing environments are commonly used to facilitate user interaction with data over the Internet. A web browser is a tool used to view and interact with a webpage. A webpage may interface with a web service to provide remote functionality that the webpage does not locally provide. An effective method for specifying and consuming remote functionality that an application invokes outside of the web browser is disclosed herein. A webpage exposes remote functionality (e.g., web service) that a web browser and/or browser extensions may discover through browsing the webpage. A browser extension associated with an application determines whether the application is compatible with the remote functionality. Once a compatible application is determined, it may be executed so as to connect to and invoke the remote functionality outside of the web browser. The application may provide a more robust experience with the remote functionality compared to the web browsing environment.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: August 28, 2008
    Date of Patent: November 20, 2012
    Assignee: Microsoft Corporation
    Inventor: Andrzej Turski
  • Patent number: 8310956
    Abstract: A method is provided for a host node in a computer network to determine its coordinates in a d-dimensional network space, comprising discovering an address of a peer node in the network, measuring network latency between the host node and the peer node, determining whether network latency has been measured for at least d+1 peer nodes, where, if network latency has not been measured for at least d+1 peer nodes, estimating the network coordinates of the host node, and where, if network latency has been measured for at least d+1 peer nodes, calculating the network coordinates of the host node using d+1 measured latencies.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: September 16, 2010
    Date of Patent: November 13, 2012
    Assignee: Microsoft Corporation
    Inventors: John L. Miller, Manuel Costa, Noah Horton, Christian Huitema, Sandeep K. Singhal