Abstract: A system, apparatus, and method to assist in the discovery of music or other content by members of a social network. The present invention permits network members to network together and share information about their music collections and listening habits with a processing platform and with each other. The processing platform processes music library content and playback related data to produce similarity and compatibility measures between artists (that is, an artist-to-artist measure) and between network members (that is, a network member-to-network member measure). By combining the content and playback related data with filtering mechanisms, recommendation techniques (which may be based on the calculated measures), and set membership concepts, the present invention provides network members of the network with tools to discover artists and/or songs that are likely to be of interest to them.

Abstract: A system, apparatus, and method to assist in the discovery of music or other content by members of a social network. The present invention permits network members to network together and share information about their music collections and listening habits with a processing platform and with each other. The processing platform processes music library content and playback related data to produce similarity and compatibility measures between artists (that is, an artist-to-artist measure) and between network members (that is, a network member-to-network member measure). By combining the content and playback related data with filtering mechanisms, recommendation techniques (which may be based on the calculated measures), and set membership concepts, the present invention provides network members of the network with tools to discover artists and/or songs that are likely to be of interest to them.

Abstract: A system, apparatus, and method to assist in the discovery of music or other content by members of a social network. The present invention permits network members to network together and share information about their music collections and listening habits with a processing platform and with each other. The processing platform processes music library content and playback related data to produce similarity and compatibility measures between artists (that is, an artist-to-artist measure) and between network members (that is, a network member-to-network member measure). By combining the content and playback related data with filtering mechanisms, recommendation techniques (which may be based on the calculated measures), and set membership concepts, the present invention provides network members of the network with tools to discover artists and/or songs that are likely to be of interest to them.

Abstract: Described is a method of handling automated conversations by categorizing a plurality of events which occur during automated conversations based on an impact of the events on a level of user satisfaction with the automated conversations, assigning to each category of events a quality score corresponding to the impact on user satisfaction of the events in each category and initiating a conversation handling action for one of the conversations based on the categories of events detected during the one of the conversations.

Abstract: The present application is directed to the use of photon migration analysis to provide a method of analyzing the diffuse reflectance, fluorescence, Raman or other types of spectra obtained from tissue. This procedure provides a means for processing spectral data such that the distortion in fluorescence spectra, for example, caused by the interplay of a variety of factors such as scattering, absorption, geometry and boundary conditions, can be precisely removed simply by measuring the diffuse reflectance spectrum as well as a second selected spectrum, such as fluorescence, and adjust the spectrum with the reflectance spectrum as described herein. By this procedure, the sample-to-sample variability is minimized. The intrinsic spectrum extracted by this procedure can be easily deconvoluted and provide quantitative information about the physicochemical composition of tissue. Analytical procedures for clinical diagnosis have been developed based on this method.