Patents Represented by Attorney Ference & Associates LLC
  • Patent number: 7522366
    Abstract: Systems and methods for managing adjacent track interference in a hard drive. Adjacent track interference potential is ascertained in at least one track, and data corruption is averted via scrubbing data in at least one track with ascertained adjacent track interference potential.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: November 30, 2006
    Date of Patent: April 21, 2009
    Assignee: Lenovo (Singapore) Pte. Ltd.
    Inventors: Michael S. Mettler, Daryl Cromer, Matthew B. Griffith, Jeffrey R. Hobbet, Scott D. Ruppert
  • Patent number: 7523173
    Abstract: A web page acquisition system, provider, method, computer readable memory and program of instructions for web page acquisition that reduces the waiting time that is experienced by a user who accesses a network site when the network is busy and also reduces the load that is imposed on the server of a provider.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: March 29, 2001
    Date of Patent: April 21, 2009
    Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
    Inventors: Naishin Seki, Yuhichi Nakamura
  • Patent number: 7523034
    Abstract: Methods and arrangements for enhancing speech recognition in noisy environments, via providing at least one initial Compound Gaussian Mixture model, applying an adaptation algorithm to at least one item associated with speech enrollment data and to the at least one initial Compound Gaussian Mixture model to yield an intermediate output, and mathematically combining the at least one initial Compound Gaussian Mixture model with the intermediate output to yield an adapted Compound Gaussian Mixture model.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: December 13, 2002
    Date of Patent: April 21, 2009
    Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
    Inventors: Sabine V. Deligne, Satyanarayana Dharanipragada
  • Patent number: 7516306
    Abstract: The present invention broadly contemplates braids and fibers, high-level programming constructs which facilitate the creation of programs that are partially ordered, to address the continuing trend of ever-increasing processor speeds and attendant increases in memory latencies. These partial orders can be used to respond adaptively to memory latencies. It is shown how these constructs can be effectively supported with simple and inexpensive instruction set and micro-architectural extensions.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: October 5, 2004
    Date of Patent: April 7, 2009
    Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
    Inventors: David F. Bacon, Xiaowei Shen
  • Patent number: 7516071
    Abstract: In automatic pattern recognition, in the context of patterns being observed either in the same or a new environment, e.g. a new acoustic channel, as compared to the one seen during the previous enrollment, an improvement wherein degradation of the system recognition accuracy caused by environment/channel mismatches is averted.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: June 30, 2003
    Date of Patent: April 7, 2009
    Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
    Inventors: Upendra V. Chaudhari, Stephane H. Maes, Jiri Navratil
  • Patent number: 7516276
    Abstract: Methods and arrangements for accessing a storage structure. Included are an arrangement for providing a storage access instruction, an arrangement for inputting an address into a storage structure data cache responsive to a storage access instruction, an arrangement for extending a storage access instruction with a predicted register number field, the predicted register number field containing a predicted register number corresponding to a speculative location of a load/store operand associated with a storage access instruction, an arrangement for speculatively accessing a storage structure with a storage access instruction extended by the extending arrangement, and an arrangement for reverting to the arrangement for inputting an address if the load/store operand is not in the speculative location.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: October 30, 2007
    Date of Patent: April 7, 2009
    Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
    Inventors: Kartik Agaram, Marc A. Auslander, Kemal Ebcioglu
  • Patent number: 7512615
    Abstract: A method and system for clustering of XML documents is disclosed. The method operates under specified memory-use constraints. The system implements the method and scans an XML document, assigns edge-weights according to the application workload, and maps clusters of XML nodes to disk pages, all in a single parser-controlled pass over the XML data. Application workload information is used to generate XML clustering solutions that lead to substantial reduction in page faults for the workload under consideration. Several approaches for representing workload information are disclosed. For example, the workload may list the XPath operators invoked during the application along with their invocation frequencies. The application workload can be further refined by incorporating additional features such as query importance or query compilation costs. XML access patterns could be also modeled using stochastic approaches.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: November 7, 2003
    Date of Patent: March 31, 2009
    Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
    Inventors: Rajesh Bordawekar, Sriram K. Padmanabhan, Oded Shmueli
  • Patent number: 7512395
    Abstract: This disclosure addresses providing gigabit-rate data transmission over wireless radio links, using carrier frequencies in the millimeter-wave range (>30 GHz). More specifically, a circuit for detection of amplitude-shift keyed (ASK) or other amplitude modulations (AM) which can be easily incorporated into an integrated circuit receiver system is described, making the receiver capable of supporting both complex IQ modulation schemes and simpler, non-coherent on-off or multiple-level keying signals. Several novel radio architectures are also described which, with the addition of a frequency discriminator network, have the capability of handling frequency shift keyed (FSK) or other frequency modulations (FM), as well as AM and complex IQ modulation schemes.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: January 31, 2006
    Date of Patent: March 31, 2009
    Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
    Inventors: Troy J. Beukema, Scott K. Reynolds
  • Patent number: 7496510
    Abstract: Disclosed are a method and apparatus for processing a continuous audio stream containing human speech in order to locate a particular speech-based transaction in the audio stream, applying both known speaker recognition and speech recognition techniques. Only the utterances of a particular predetermined speaker are transcribed thus providing an index and a summary of the underlying dialogue(s). In a first scenario, an incoming audio stream, e.g. a speech call from outside, is scanned in order to detect audio segments of the predetermined speaker. These audio segments are then indexed and only the indexed segments are transcribed into spoken or written language. In a second scenario, two or more speakers located in one room are using a multi-user speech recognition system (SRS). For each user there exists a different speaker model and optionally a different dictionary or vocabulary of words already known or trained by the speech or voice recognition system.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: November 30, 2001
    Date of Patent: February 24, 2009
    Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
    Inventors: Joachim Frank, Werner Kriechbaum, Gerhard Stenzel
  • Patent number: 7496912
    Abstract: Methods and arrangements for automatically determining allowable sequences of changes, e.g., sequences where the order in which changes are carried out will transition a computing system from a workable state into another workable state, are disclosed.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: February 27, 2004
    Date of Patent: February 24, 2009
    Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
    Inventors: Alexander Keller, Joseph L. Hellerstein, Vijaya Krishnan, Joel L. Wolf, Kun-Lung Wu
  • Patent number: 7496509
    Abstract: In large-scale deployments of speaker recognition systems the potential for legacy problems increases as the evolving technology may require configuration changes in the system thus invalidating already existing user voice accounts. Unless the entire database of original speech waveform were stored, users need to reenroll to keep their accounts functional, which, however, may be expensive and commercially not acceptable. Model migration is defined as a conversion of obsolete models to new-configuration models without additional data and waveform requirements. The present disclosure investigates ways to achieve such a migration with minimum loss of system accuracy.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: May 28, 2004
    Date of Patent: February 24, 2009
    Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
    Inventors: Jiri Navratil, Ganesh N. Ramaswamy, Ran D. Zilca
  • Patent number: 7496592
    Abstract: Towards mining closed frequent itemsets over a sliding window using limited memory space, a synopsis data structure to monitor transactions in the sliding window so that one can output the current closed frequent itemsets at any time. Due to time and memory constraints, the synopsis data structure cannot monitor all possible itemsets, but monitoring only frequent itemsets makes it difficult to detect new itemsets when they become frequent. Herein, there is introduced a compact data structure, the closed enumeration tree (CET), to maintain a dynamically selected set of itemsets over a sliding-window. The selected itemsets include a boundary between closed frequent itemsets and the rest of the itemsets Because the boundary is relatively stable, the cost of mining closed frequent itemsets over a sliding window is dramatically reduced to that of mining transactions that can possibly cause boundary movements in the CET.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: January 31, 2005
    Date of Patent: February 24, 2009
    Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
    Inventors: Yun Chi, Haixun Wang, Philip S. Yu
  • Patent number: 7493602
    Abstract: A unified program analysis framework that facilitates the analysis of complex multi-language software systems, analysis reuse, and analysis comparison, by employing techniques such as program translation and automatic results mapping, is presented. The feasibility and effectiveness of such a framework are demonstrated using a sample application of the framework. The comparison yields new insights into the effectiveness of the techniques employed in both analysis tools. These encouraging results yield the observation that such a unified program analysis framework will prove to be valuable both as a testbed for examining different language analysis techniques, and as a unified toolset for broad program analysis.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: May 2, 2005
    Date of Patent: February 17, 2009
    Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
    Inventors: Trent R. Jaeger, Lawrence Koved, Liangzhao Zeng, Xiaolan Zhang
  • Patent number: 7493346
    Abstract: Load shedding schemes for mining data streams. A scoring function is used to rank the importance of stream elements, and those elements with high importance are investigated. In the context of not knowing the exact feature values of a data stream, the use of a Markov model is proposed herein for predicting the feature distribution of a data stream. Based on the predicted feature distribution, one can make classification decisions to maximize the expected benefits. In addition, there is proposed herein the employment of a quality of decision (QoD) metric to measure the level of uncertainty in decisions and to guide load shedding. A load shedding scheme such as presented herein assigns available resources to multiple data streams to maximize the quality of classification decisions. Furthermore, such a load shedding scheme is able to learn and adapt to changing data characteristics in the data streams.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: February 16, 2005
    Date of Patent: February 17, 2009
    Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
    Inventors: Yun Chi, Haixun Wang, Philip S. Yu
  • Patent number: 7490062
    Abstract: A method, system and program for payment in a purchasing action performed by means of a cellular standard communication between a customer using said cellular standard communication device and a provider offering goods and/or services, wherein the communication between said customer and said provider is performed via a voice channel of said communication device and transmissions of an electronic bill from said provider to said customer, of a money transfer order from said customer to a payment provider and of a receipt of payment from said payment provider to said customer are performed via a service channel of the cellular standard network.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: January 2, 2001
    Date of Patent: February 10, 2009
    Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
    Inventors: Uwe Hansmann, Horst Henn, Lothar Merk, Thomas Stober
  • Patent number: 7487084
    Abstract: A testing arrangement provided for speech recognition systems in vehicles. Preferably included are a “mobile client” secured in the vehicle and driven around at a desired speed, an audio system and speaker which plays back a set of prerecorded utterances stored digitally in a computer arrangement such that the speech of a human being is simulated, transmission of the speech signal to a server, followed by speech recognition and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) computation. Here, the acceptability of the vehicular speech recognition system is preferably determined via comparison with pre-specified standards of recognition accuracy and SNR values.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: July 31, 2002
    Date of Patent: February 3, 2009
    Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
    Inventors: Andrew Aaron, Subrata K. Das, David M. Lubensky
  • Patent number: 7487537
    Abstract: Methods and apparatus for enabling a Pervasive Authentication Domain. A Pervasive Authentication Domain allows many registered Pervasive Devices to obtain authentication credentials from a single Personal Authentication Gateway and to use these credentials on behalf of users to enable additional capabilities for the devices. It provides an arrangement for a user to store credentials in one device (the Personal Authentication Gateway), and then make use of those credentials from many authorized Pervasive Devices without re-entering the credentials. It provides a convenient way for a user to share credentials among many devices, particularly when it is not convenient to enter credentials as in a smart wristwatch environment. It further provides an arrangement for disabling access to credentials to devices that appear to be far from the Personal Authentication Gateway as measured by metrics such as communications signal strengths.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: October 14, 2003
    Date of Patent: February 3, 2009
    Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
    Inventors: James R. Giles, Reiner Sailer
  • Patent number: 7484212
    Abstract: Methods and arrangements for operating distributed computing systems, and more particularly, to techniques for constructing and analyzing change plans are disclosed. Included are an arrangement for submitting a request for change to the system, an arrangement for specifying the order in which tasks execute in compliance with data and temporal dependency constraints; and an arrangement for creating a change plan.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: February 27, 2004
    Date of Patent: January 27, 2009
    Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
    Inventors: Joseph L. Hellerstein, Alexander Keller, Vijaya Krishnan, Joel L. Wolf, Kun-Lung Wu
  • Patent number: 7483988
    Abstract: A user is permitted to execute a predetermined program only within a limited time that corresponds to a period wherein the user maintains a valid contract for a connection with a specific network provider. When a user activates or executes a program that is provided by a network provider, or an entity having a tie-up with the network provider, the user must refer to a licensing key that can halt at least a part of the functions of the program when a predetermined licensing (halting) condition is matched. The licensing key can be updated by making a connection with the network provider.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: March 8, 2001
    Date of Patent: January 27, 2009
    Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
    Inventor: Makoto Ono
  • Patent number: 7480813
    Abstract: A portable notebook PC comprising a lid is able to avoid possible trouble during its transfer (as when a user carries the PC with him or her) and is able to reduce the time required to start up after the transfer. The portable notebook PC has a normal operating mode in which a user can utilize the notebook PC, a power saving mode in which an operation performed in the normal operating mode is saved to a predetermined memory so that power consumption can be reduced by using the minimum power required to retain data, and a transfer mode in which the system is temporarily disabled by stopping functions that may become defective during the transfer with a CPU remaining operative.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: May 23, 2005
    Date of Patent: January 20, 2009
    Assignee: Lenovo (Singapore) Pte., Ltd.
    Inventors: Junichi Asoh, Takashi Yomo