Abstract: With the addition of directional information in the environment, a variety of service(s) can be provided on top of user identification or interaction with specific object(s) of interest. For instance, when a user points at a particular item at a particular location or place, this creates an opportunity, e.g., an advertising opportunity, for anyone having an interest in that particular item to communicate with the user regarding that item or related items at a point in time when the user's focus is on the particular item. User context for the interaction can also be taken into account to supplement the provision of one or more interactive direction based services.

Abstract: A novel application and user interface for facilitating group interactions over a network integrates messaging, file sharing, media playing, journaling, profiles, and gaming into a cohesive environment. The groups facilitated by the invention are persistent and mobile in that a user does not have to recollect and reconfigure the group each time he or she wants to interact with the group online and, while online, the group may be taken from one activity to another without having to disband and reconnect at the second activity. The application is modular so as to be extensible to include other activities and functionalities. In an embodiment, the group interaction application utilizes a peer-to-peer network environment to facilitate network communications between group members.

Abstract: Example embodiments of the present disclosure provide techniques for improving the rendering and management of client desktops and the subsequent transmission to the remote client. The techniques may minimize the movement of frame data within the server, the amount of data to be compressed, the amount of data transmitted over the network, and the amount of data to be decompressed. Various embodiments are disclosed for merging rendering functions and encoding functions onto the same chip so that frame data does not need to be transferred, calculation of a tile-based checksum for determining which tiles have changed from frame to frame, the dropping of tiles waiting to be transmitted if network bandwidth or decode speed is limiting the transmission and an equivalent tile in a subsequent frame is available to replace it, and the transfer of the frame buffer into the chip from an external GPU using one of three modes.

Abstract: A user interface (UI) includes floating action buttons. Respective hot zones are established for associated respective UI elements. When a focus is targeting (e.g., located at) a given hot zone, one or more floating action buttons that are associated therewith are presented as part of the UI. Activation of a particular action button of the one or more floating action buttons causes an action corresponding to the particular action button to be implemented. In an example implementation, the actions available through the one or more floating action buttons may be context-sensitive such that the actions thereof are tailored to the type of item corresponding to the UI element (e.g., an icon, a graphical element, a text portion, a screen area, etc.).

Abstract: A system and method for efficiently executing a plurality of live parallel Internet content usage experiments using a large pool of randomly selected participating users (separated into control and test groups) while minimally disturbing offered content is provided. In an illustrative implementation, a content provider communicates the parameters for a content usage experiment to a content server. A complimentary test subject verification script operates on the content server that determines which client computing devices are to be included in the experiment group. In operation, a participating client computing device requests content from the content provider's server. The content provider's server executes the test subject verification script to determine if the client computing device is to be considered as a test subject. The content usage of the experiment content and non-experiment content is tracked and compared to each other to determine if the experiment content impacted content usage.

Abstract: Portions of content are transformed into portions of rendered content. While the portions of the content are being transformed into portions of the rendered content, each discrete portion of the rendered content can be provided to the application program after that portion is completed.

Abstract: Systems and methods for generating zoomable user interface dynamically or at scale are disclosed. In at least some implementations, at least portions of zoomable user interface information returned to a client may be generated in response to a request. In the same or other implementations, one or more of a variety of optimizations may be used to more efficiently generate zoomable user interface information.

Abstract: The present invention extends to methods, systems, and computer program products for updating Bloom filters. Embodiments of the invention facilitate more efficient use Bloom filters across multiple computers connected across a WAN (potentially having limited bandwidth and latency characteristics), such as, for example, computers located on different continents. The acceptability of false positives is leveraged by allowing the operation of removing items from a set to be batched and delayed. On the other hand, insert operations may be more latency sensitive as a delayed insert results in the semantic equivalent to a false negative. As such, additions to a set are processed in closer to real time to update Bloom filters. In some embodiments, Bloom filters are used to check set membership for electronic mail addresses.

Abstract: Systems, methods and computer readable media are disclosed for reducing the tearing of display data received across a communications network. A server determines at least two logically related drawing orders in an order heap and warps those orders with a begin marker and an end marker. It sends those wrapped orders across the communications network to a client. The client receives those orders and renders them to a shadow buffer. When the client processes the end marker, it moves the drawing orders in the shadow buffer to a client display surface.

Abstract: Providing a market design for a peer-to-peer resource exchange system. Prices for a plurality of resources such as storage space, upload bandwidth, and download bandwidth are calculated and balanced based on previous resource prices, a supply of the resources, and a demand for the resources. Further, prices for operations such as storage and retrieval are determined such that a total of the payments to resource suppliers equals a total of the payments received from the resource consumers. In some embodiments, incoming data operation requests are allocated to the peers such that equilibrium among the peers is achieved.

Abstract: Functionality is described for identifying a discussion topic based on user interest information. The user interest information may originate from one or more sources, such as the user's search-related behavior. The functionality then provides an opportunity for the user to engage in a communication exchange associated with the identified discussion topic.

Abstract: Architecture that introduces storage of an extra (skeleton) property of a document as well as default document properties on a server. In a specific messaging implementation, a MIME skeleton property is stamped on an arriving MIME messages. An incoming MIME message is shredded and all content that is currently saved to MAPI properties continues to be saved. The remaining message content that is not saved to the MAPI properties is stored in the skeleton property. The skeleton property includes all body part headers and any body part content that was not saved as a property on the item by the server. On retrieval of this message by a MIME client, the MIME message is regenerated in full fidelity by using the default set of properties in combination with the skeleton (or extra) property and the stored body content.

Abstract: A system and method is described for generating a test bed that is useful in developing, testing and/or supporting the use of software, such as software used for managing IT processes and/or monitoring equipment in an enterprise network. The system and method operates by processing a manifest to generate an instance space model of a computer network, wherein the manifest refers to a type space model of a computer network and includes an encoding that conveys parameters that are used to inflate the type space model of the computer network into the instance space model of the computer network. The type space model may comprise an object-relational directed graph that describes a plurality of potential directed graph instances and the instance space model may comprise one of the plurality of potential directed graph instances.

Abstract: Techniques for enhanced automatic speech recognition are described. An enhanced ASR system may be operative to generate an error correction function. The error correction function may represent a mapping between a supervised set of parameters and an unsupervised training set of parameters generated using a same set of acoustic training data, and apply the error correction function to an unsupervised testing set of parameters to form a corrected set of parameters used to perform speaker adaptation. Other embodiments are described and claimed.

Abstract: Functionality for storing and modifying multi-resolution texture atlases is provided so that applications can expose methods to enable users to access and browse a collection that includes multiple multi-resolution images. The images are stored as thumbnails in a texture atlas having different levels of detail in which the levels are arranged in an image pyramid that includes multiple tiles that are each stored as separate files. The thumbnails are spatially storable as textures in the texture atlas using a fractal layout (which in one illustrative example is a Morton layout) that enables images to be efficiently packed in the tiles. The fractal layout ensures that no more than one tile stores less than a fully packed texture at each level of detail. The same packing order scales across each level of detail in the texture atlas so that layout information is stored for the individual images in the collection only once.

Abstract: Techniques for improving a troubleshooting experience by providing a common troubleshooting framework. Such a framework may enable use of common elements between troubleshooters and lead to similarities between troubleshooting packages, which may improve the user experience. Further, a framework may reduce the amount of knowledge and time necessary to create troubleshooting packages, and thus encourage increased development of these troubleshooting packages. In some implementations of the framework, a troubleshooting package may be implemented in a declarative manner that outlines/describes the problems it solves and the potential solutions to those problems. The declarative troubleshooting packages may then be provided to the troubleshooting framework and may provide direction to the framework, in that the framework may execute functions as directed by the troubleshooter.

Abstract: Modern network communications often require a client application requesting data to authenticate itself to an application providing the data. Such authentication requests can be redundant, especially in the case of stateless network protocols. When a full authentication is performed, a conversation identifier and one or more encryption keys can be agreed upon. Subsequent authentication requests can be answered with a fast reconnect token comprising the conversation identifier and a cryptographically signed version of it using the one or more encryption keys. Should additional security be desirable, a sequence number can be established and incremented in a pre-determined or a random manner to enable detection of replayed fast reconnect tokens. If the recipient can verify the fast reconnect token, the provider can be considered to have been authenticated based on the prior authentication. If an aspect of the fast re-authentication should fail, recourse can be had to the original full authentication process.

Abstract: A data repository monitoring system that utilizes queries to generate notifications in response to the identification of new and changed content. The system includes a monitoring component that monitors a plurality of disparate repositories in order to identify the receipt of new or modified content. The monitoring component includes a query component(s) that identifies metadata of imported content. The query can be generated and communicated to the monitoring component via a graphical user interface. A notification component is also provided to generate a prompt upon the receipt of incoming content as identified by the query component. The invention employs a centralized store (e.g., change queue) that maintains metadata corresponding to imported (e.g., new) metadata.

Abstract: A system for reporting information about how selected components of an operating system are used by applications on a computing device. A manifest of components is provided from a management server to a computing device. The manifest specifies components of the operating system for which usage information is to be collected. The computing device surveys applications for calls to the components specified in the manifest. Surveys may be performed by static scanning and/or dynamic monitoring. In static scanning, application files are scanned for keyword strings specified in the manifest. Keyword string matches are recorded to a log file. In dynamic monitoring, calls from executing applications to components specified by the manifest are identified and logged. A report is generated from the log and sent to the management server. The management server then aggregates and analyzes reports from multiple computing devices to enable developers to assess how the components are being used.

Abstract: A system for multi-modal mapping of images is described. Embodiments are described where the image mapping system is used for visualizing high dynamic range images such as medical images, satellite images, high dynamic range photographs and the like and also for compressing such images. In examples, high bit-depth images are tone-mapped for display on equipment of lower bit-depth without loss of detail. In embodiments, the image mapping system computes statistics describing an input image and fits a multi-modal model to those statistics efficiently. In embodiments, the multi-modal model is a Gaussian mixture model and a plurality of sigmoid functions corresponding to the multi-modal model are obtained. In an embodiment the sigmoid functions are added to form a tone-mapping function which is used to transform a high bit-depth image such as 16 or 12 bits per pixel to a low bit-depth image such as 8 bits per pixel.