Patents Represented by Attorney Ference & Associates LLC
  • Patent number: 7478036
    Abstract: A method of and system for automatically extracting new words are provided. The method and system are highly efficient for automatically extracting new words from a mass amount of cleaned corpus.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: August 30, 2001
    Date of Patent: January 13, 2009
    Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
    Inventors: Liqin Shen, Qin Shi, Haixin Chai
  • Patent number: 7475135
    Abstract: A system accesses a log of events on more than one computing system and scans these logs in an effort to determine the likely cause of various items of interest, events, or problems. These items of interest often include improper or frustrating behavior of a computer system, but may also include delightful or beneficial behaviors for which a user, group of users, company, service, or help desk seeks a cause. Once the likely source of the item of interest is found, a test may be performed to confirm the source of the problem and warning or corrective action taken.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: March 31, 2005
    Date of Patent: January 6, 2009
    Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
    Inventors: David F. Bantz, Thomas E. Chefalas, Steven J. Mastrianni, Clifford A. Pickover
  • Patent number: 7475070
    Abstract: Sequence-based XML indexing aims at avoiding expensive join operations in query processing. It transforms structured XML data into sequences so that a structured query can be answered holistically through subsequence matching. Herein, there is addressed the problem of query equivalence with respect to this transformation, and thereis introduced a performance-oriented principle for sequencing tree structures. With query equivalence, XML queries can be performed through subsequence matching without join operations, post-processing, or other special handling for problems such as false alarms. There is identified a class of sequencing methods for this purpose, and there is presented a novel subsequence matching algorithm that observe query equivalence. Also introduced is a performance-oriented principle to guide the sequencing of tree structures.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: January 14, 2005
    Date of Patent: January 6, 2009
    Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
    Inventors: Wei Fan, Haixun Wang, Philip S. Yu
  • Patent number: 7474631
    Abstract: The present invention broadly contemplates addressing QoS concerns in overlay design to account for the last mile problem. In accordance with the present invention, a simple queuing network model for bandwidth usage in the last-mile bottlenecks is used to capture the effects of the asymmetry, the contention for bandwidth on the outgoing link, and to provide characterization of network throughput and latency. Using this characterization computationally inexpensive heuristics are preferably used for organizing end-systems into a multicast overlay which meets specified latency and packet loss bounds, given a specific packet arrival process.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: January 13, 2005
    Date of Patent: January 6, 2009
    Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
    Inventors: Parijat Dube, Zhen Liu, Sambit Sahu
  • Patent number: 7474335
    Abstract: Apparatus, and associated methods, for stabilizing an image. The apparatus includes an aiming device to be aimed at a moving image, a transforming device which transforms the image into a non-moving image; and a displaying device which displays the non-moving image. The apparatus and methods are of particular benefit, for example, to individuals with Parkinson's disease and/or individuals attempting to work on a laptop computer or read a book while travelling via airplane, boat, train or road vehicle.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: January 31, 2001
    Date of Patent: January 6, 2009
    Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
    Inventors: Sara H. Basson, Dimitri Kanevsky
  • Patent number: 7472062
    Abstract: Methods and arrangements for facilitating data clustering. From a set of input data, a predetermined number of non-overlapping subsets are created. The input data is split recursively to create the subsets.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: January 4, 2002
    Date of Patent: December 30, 2008
    Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
    Inventors: Upendra V. Chaudhari, Jiri Navratil, Ganesh N. Ramaswamy
  • Patent number: 7472377
    Abstract: The provision of methods and apparatus to determine package identity for an application build. The idea is based on providing a mapping of package with affiliated attributes such as paths used for include or linking, along with reverse mappings. This mapping could be provided through any number of conventional environments such as program development environments or operating system registries: Tools would access this information through a programmatic interface, and use that information to identify packages affiliated with some information. For example, a symbol in a program would be defined in some file. That file would be in a path, which maps to the package identity. Thus, the symbol definition can be conceptually affiliated with a package.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: January 18, 2005
    Date of Patent: December 30, 2008
    Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
    Inventors: Ashok Anand, Philippe G. Charles, Amitkumar M. Paradkar, Donald P. Pazel, Beth R. Tibbitts, Pradeep Varma
  • Patent number: 7469375
    Abstract: Methods and arrangements for managing error messages from a set of programming tools within a program development environment, such as compilers, linkers, library builders, etc. The error messages are arranged as a directed acyclic graph, with the nodes as error messages, and edges as dependency relationships. In accordance with at least one presently preferred embodiment of the present invention, there are broadly contemplated the following: allowing one or more programming tool to report errors to an error manager component; deducing dependencies amongst error messages, based on error dependency definition provided to the error manager; and delivering messages and dependencies to client components. Although framed within the context of program development tools, this solution could be applied to many other tools outside this domain, under suitable and specified requirements.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: January 18, 2005
    Date of Patent: December 23, 2008
    Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
    Inventors: Ashok Anand, Amitkumar M. Paradkar, Donald P. Pazel, Beth R. Tibbitts, Pradeep Varma
  • Patent number: 7466656
    Abstract: Methods, apparatuses and program storage devices for constructing a network overlay via embedding an interconnection network in a network overlay graph are provided herein. The network delay distances between pairs of overlay nodes are measured on the shortest network paths. The mapping of the interconnection topology to the network overlay nodes preferably involves assigning 2m m-length binary indexes to the network overlay nodes. There is proposed herein a polynomial time algorithm for interconnection topology embedding using iterative cluster division and node binary index assignment. There is further proposed herein a method for construction of network overlays through interconnection network topology embedding, with the objective of optimizing a quality of service metric (e.g. minimization of the average network overlay routing delay).
    Type: Grant
    Filed: October 26, 2004
    Date of Patent: December 16, 2008
    Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
    Inventors: Parijat Dube, Zhen Liu, Dimitrios Pendarakis, George V. Popescu
  • Patent number: 7464068
    Abstract: In connection with the mining of time-evolving data streams, a general framework that mines changes and reconstructs models from a data stream with unlabeled instances or a limited number of labeled instances. In particular, there are defined herein statistical profiling methods that extend a classification tree in order to guess the percentage of drifts in the data stream without any labelled data. Exact error can be estimated by actively sampling a small number of true labels. If the estimated error is significantly higher than empirical expectations, there preferably re-sampled a small number of true labels to reconstruct the decision tree from the leaf node level.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: June 30, 2004
    Date of Patent: December 9, 2008
    Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
    Inventors: Wei Fan, Haixun Wang, Philip S. Yu
  • Patent number: 7454573
    Abstract: A hardware based method for determining when to migrate cache lines to the cache bank closest to the requesting processor to avoid remote access penalty for future requests. In a preferred embodiment, decay counters are enhanced and used in determining the cost of retaining a line as opposed to replacing it while not losing the data. In one embodiment, a minimization of off-chip communication is sought; this may be particularly useful in a CMP environment.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: January 13, 2005
    Date of Patent: November 18, 2008
    Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
    Inventors: Alper Buyuktosunoglu, Zhigang Hu, Jude A. Rivers, John T. Robinson, Xiaowei Shen, Vijayalakshmi Srinivasan
  • Patent number: 7454608
    Abstract: A method and system for configuring available resources in real-time to automatically accommodate the needs of the system user in multi-modal distributed computing system is disclosed. Information about the location or environment of a wireless device is used, preferably in combination with user personal preferences and past history to modify the behavior of the wireless device, including the selection of the most appropriate mode of interaction with the device and the activation of applications thereon as appropriate.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: October 31, 2003
    Date of Patent: November 18, 2008
    Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
    Inventors: Ponani Gopalakrishnan, Stephane H. Maes, Ganesh N. Ramaswamy
  • Patent number: 7428515
    Abstract: Classification of objects using the best boolean expression that represents the most optimal combination of the underlying features is disclosed.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: September 30, 2003
    Date of Patent: September 23, 2008
    Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
    Inventors: Laxmi P. Parida, Ajay K. Royyuru
  • Patent number: 7425810
    Abstract: Arrangements and methods for implementing a “spin-down policy” for HDD motors that is “smart”, flexible and admirably achieves an objective of ensuring prolonged motor life as just discussed. To this end, one specific implementation involves (among other things) the addition of a dedicated cache that acts as a buffer element of sorts for writing or obtaining data during a period when a motor may be spun down, especially (but not necessarily exclusively) in instances when a notebook needs to be running for a large portion of the day. Other analogous implementations are of course possible that would achieve similar ends.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: June 30, 2006
    Date of Patent: September 16, 2008
    Assignee: Lenovo (Singapore) Pte., Ltd.
    Inventors: Jeffrey R. Hobbet, Daryl Cromer, Donald R. Frame, Masahiko Nagai, Tin-Lup Wong
  • Patent number: 7424425
    Abstract: In detection systems, such as speaker verification systems, for a given operating point range, with an associated detection “cost”, the detection cost is preferably reduced by essentially trading off the system error in the area of interest with areas essentially “outside” that interest. Among the advantages achieved thereby are higher optimization gain and better generalization. From a measurable Detection Error Tradeoff (DET) curve of the given detection system, a criterion is preferably derived, such that its minimization provably leads to detection cost reduction in the area of interest. The criterion allows for selective access to the slope and offset of the DET curve (a line in case of normally distributed detection scores, a curve approximated by mixture of Gaussians in case of other distributions). By modifying the slope of the DET curve, the behavior of the detection system is changed favorably with respect to the given area of interest.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: May 19, 2002
    Date of Patent: September 9, 2008
    Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
    Inventors: Jiri Navratil, Ganesh N. Ramaswamy
  • Patent number: 7424484
    Abstract: Path-based ranking of unvisited Web pages for WWW crawling is provided, via identifying all the paths beginning with a “seed” URL and leading to visited relevant web pages as “good-path set”, and for each unvisited web page, identifying the paths beginning from the “seed” URL leading to it as “partial-path set”; classifying all the visited web pages and labeling each web Page with the labels of a class or classes it belongs to; training a statistic model for generalizing the common patterns among all ones of “good-path set”; and evaluating the “partial-path set” with the statistic model and ranking the unvisited web pages with the evaluation results.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: February 5, 2003
    Date of Patent: September 9, 2008
    Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
    Inventors: Xiaochuan Ma, Yue Pan, Hui Su
  • Patent number: 7421278
    Abstract: A method of communicating inferred information to a wireless communication device user is provided. That method includes determining a location of the wireless device, inferring a likely interest of the user from the location of the wireless device, and transmitting data related to the interest to the wireless device. The method may also ascertain time at the location of the wireless communication device user and infer an interest of the user from the time and location of the user. In addition, the method may include inferences made from information related to preferences of the user.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: March 13, 2001
    Date of Patent: September 2, 2008
    Assignee: Intellions, Inc.
    Inventors: Kannan Srinivasan, Michael I. Shamos
  • Patent number: 7412377
    Abstract: Methods and arrangements for generating a voice model in speech processing. Upon accepting at least two input vectors with spectral features, vectors of ranks are created via ranking values of the spectral features of each input vector, ordered vectors are created via arranging the values of each input vector according to rank, and a vector of ordered average values is created via determining the average of corresponding values of the ordered vectors. Thence, a vector of ordered average ranks is created via determining the sum or average of the vectors of ranks, a vector of ordered ranks is created via ranking the values of the ordered average ranks and a spectral feature vector is created via employing the rank order represented by the vector of ordered ranks to reorder the vector of ordered average ranks.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: December 19, 2003
    Date of Patent: August 12, 2008
    Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
    Inventor: Michael D. Monkowski
  • Patent number: 7401020
    Abstract: A text-to-speech system that includes an arrangement for accepting text input, an arrangement for providing synthetic speech output, and an arrangement for imparting emotion-based features to synthetic speech output. The arrangement for imparting emotion-based features includes an arrangement for accepting instruction for imparting at least one emotion-based paradigm to synthetic speech output, as well as an arrangement for applying at least one emotion-based paradigm to synthetic speech output.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: November 29, 2002
    Date of Patent: July 15, 2008
    Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
    Inventor: Ellen M. Eide
  • Patent number: 7400258
    Abstract: A system which, in at least one embodiment, obtains a photographic image of an individual attempting to disengage an ignition interlock device or the like to assist in determining whether the individual is the same as one for whom the device is intended.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: October 17, 2005
    Date of Patent: July 15, 2008
    Assignee: Biometric Equipment & Safety Technology Labs, Inc.
    Inventor: Pierre M. Crespo