Abstract: Disclosed herein are systems and methods for regulating network bandwidth by means of monitoring network traffic, predicting network loads, and scheduling traffic utilizing traffic reporting and bandwidth reservation mechanisms. These systems and methods may reduce network congestion and support more efficient processing by network applications. Traffic reporting may comprise broadcasting control messages to network nodes indicating appropriate times to send and receive messages. Network nodes may use traffic reports (e.g., control messages) to proactively regulate their use of the network. Bandwidth reservation may allow network nodes to do productive processing while waiting to send and receive data, and may decrease mean wait times. Reservations may be implemented in a synchronous or asynchronous manner. In an exemplary embodiment, the reservation mechanism may emulate a traditional stream socket API.

Abstract: Disclosed herein are systems and methods for supplementing content-based attributes with collaborative rating attributes for recommending or filtering items. Collaborative rating data may be consolidated into “composite critics” which serve as item quality rating attributes. These attributes may be used in conjunction with content-based attributes to generate user preference models. Composite critics may be formed using data clustering methods such that users with similar tastes may be grouped together. The user preference models may be induced using machine learning processes, such as decision trees, artificial neural networks, support vector machines, and/or statistical techniques. In some embodiments, composite critics may represent a small number of users or professional critics selected for having differing sensibilities and who rate most or all items according to those sensibilities.

Abstract: Disclosed herein are methods and systems for dynamically creating and inserting an application into an MPEG program transport stream. The application may be subsequently run on a customer premises equipment (CPE) device to effect switching between content streams for presentation to viewers based on other available data, such as targeting information.

Abstract: A system for and method of enhancing video advertising with interactive content in accordance with exemplary embodiments may include receiving non-interactive video advertisement data and advertisement order data associated with the non-interactive video advertisement data, generating interactive content data associated with the non-interactive video advertisement data, embedding, in the non-interactive video advertisement data, the interactive content data, and transmitting, to an ad server component of an ad system, the non-interactive video advertisement data and the embedded interactive content data for transmission to one or more end user devices.