Abstract: Disclosed is a method of detecting a short circuit in the jaws of an end effector of a surgical instrument. The method includes applying a sub-therapeutic electrical signal to an electrode located in the jaws of the end effector. The sub-therapeutic electrical signal comprises a sequence of exploratory waveforms comprising pulsed current and voltage waveforms. The method includes detecting a shorted electrode when a measured electrical parameter in the jaws of the end effector is less than a predetermined value and modifying electrical current applied to the shorted electrode by the RF generator.

Abstract: An audio editing system includes a controller for processing audio data; an interface establishing communication between the processor and a digital audio workstation (DAW), the DAW having an audio production program executing thereon and at least one audio project stored therein; a scanner controlled by the controller to analyze the project to obtain a list of all tracks corresponding to the project; and an automated bouncing module receiving a job list which includes multiple jobs, each job indicating a selection of the tracks and a cycle range to bounce into at least one set of stem files, at least one mix file, or at least one set of stem files and at least one mix file. The automated bouncing module transmits bounce commands to the audio production program to automatically bounce the respective selection of the tracks for each job consecutively in a single run.

Abstract: A composite rebar having ridges formed therein by grinding is buffed and/or coated to reduce the surface roughness caused by fibers extending from the rebar.

Abstract: Apparatus and methods can be implemented to perform software testing or to perform emulated hardware testing using a cloud architecture that can utilize centralized testing technology and can enable scaling up to test for multiple tenants and scaling up to arbitrary numbers of programs tested for each tenant. A user can configure an initial test virtual machine on a cloud platform for a cloud service over a physical network such as the Internet. Components of the cloud architecture can create a set of clones of the initial test virtual machine and inject tools into each clone for testing. Testing of one or more clones of the set can be conducted in an environment isolated from the physical network and isolated from a backend of the cloud service. Additional apparatus, systems, and methods are disclosed.

Abstract: The claimed subject matter includes techniques for processing gestures. An example method includes receiving a gesture from an application. The gesture includes one or more primitives from a language that is domain-specific to gestures. The method also further includes receiving skeletal data from a motion detection system. The method also includes comparing the skeletal data with the gesture from the application in a runtime module. The method also further includes sending a gesture event to the application.

Abstract: An automatic context-sensitive sanitization technique detects errors due to the mismatch of a sanitizer sequence with a browser parsing context. A pre-deployment analyzer automatically detects violating paths that contain a sanitizer sequence that is inconsistent with a browsing context associated with outputting an untrusted input. The pre-deployment analyzer determines a correct sanitizer sequence which is stored in a sanitization cache. During the runtime execution of the web application, a path detector tracks execution of the web application in relation to the violating paths. The correct sanitizer sequence can be applied when the runtime execution follows a violating path.

Abstract: Functionality is described herein for receiving events which characterize features in an environment, and for identifying at least one policy based on the events. The functionality consults a certificate, associated with the policy, to determine whether the policy is valid. If valid, the functionality uses the policy to govern the behavior of at least one application, such as by controlling the application's consumption of events. A trusted passport authority may be employed to generate the certificates. Each certificate may: (1) identify that it originated from the trusted passport authority; (2) contain context information which describes a context in which the policy is intended to be applied within an environment; and/or (3) contain machine-readable content that, when executed, carries out at least one aspect of the policy.

Abstract: An “AR Privacy API” provides an API that allows applications and web browsers to use various content rendering abstractions to protect user privacy in a wide range of web-based immersive augmented reality (AR) scenarios. The AR Privacy API extends the traditional concept of “web pages” to immersive “web rooms” wherein any desired combination of existing or new 2D and 3D content is rendered within a user's room or other space. Advantageously, the AR Privacy API and associated rendering abstractions are useable by a wide variety of applications and web content for enhancing the user's room or other space with web-based immersive AR content. Further, the AR Privacy API is implemented using any existing or new web page coding platform, including, but not limited to HTML, XML, CSS, JavaScript, etc., thereby enabling existing web content and coding techniques to be smoothly integrated into a wide range of web room AR scenarios.

Abstract: A shared renderer maintains shared state information to which two or more augmented reality application contribute. The shared renderer then provides a single output presentation based on the shared state information. Among other aspects, the shared renderer includes a permission mechanism by which applications can share information regarding object properties. The shared renderer may also include: a physics engine for simulating movement of at least one object that is represented by the shared state information; an annotation engine for managing a presentation of annotations produced by plural applications; and/or an occlusion engine for managing the behavior of the output presentation when two or more objects, produced by two or more applications, overlap within the output presentation.

Abstract: Functionality is described herein for managing the behavior of one or more applications, such as augmented reality applications and/or other environment-sensing applications. The functionality defines permission information in a world-driven manner, which means that the functionality uses a trusted mechanism to identify cues in the sensed environment, and then maps those cues to permission information. The functionality then uses the permission information to govern the operation of one or more applications.

Abstract: Functionality is described herein by which plural environment-sensing applications capture information from an environment in a fine-grained and least-privileged manner. By doing so, the functionality reduces the risk that private information that appears within the environment will be released to unauthorized parties. Among other aspects, the functionality provides an error correction mechanism for reducing the incidence of false positives in the detection of objects, an offloading technique for delegating computationally intensive recognition tasks to a remote computing framework, and a visualization module by which a user may inspect the access rights to be granted (or already granted) to each application.

Abstract: The claimed subject matter includes techniques for processing gestures. An example method includes receiving a gesture from an application. The gesture includes one or more primitives from a language that is domain-specific to gestures. The method also further includes receiving skeletal data from a motion detection system. The method also includes comparing the skeletal data with the gesture from the application in a runtime module. The method also further includes sending a gesture event to the application.

Abstract: Described is a technology by which the identity of a person (e.g., a customer in a commercial transaction) is determinable without active identification effort, via biometric data is obtained without action by the person. Machine processing of the biometric data over a set of possible persons, determined from secondary proximity sensing, is used to determine or assist in determining the identity of the person.

Abstract: A crowdsourcing environment is described herein which uses a single-stage or multi-stage approach to evaluate the quality of work performed by a worker, with respect to an identified task. In the multi-stage case, an evaluation system, in the first stage, determines whether the worker corresponds to a spam agent. In a second stage, for a non-spam worker, the evaluation system determines the propensity of the worker to perform desirable (e.g., accurate) work in the future. The evaluation system operates based on a set of features, including worker-focused features (which describe work performed by the particular worker), task-focused features (which describe tasks performed in the crowdsourcing environment), and system-focused features (which describe aspects of the configuration of the crowdsourcing environment). According to one illustrative aspect, the evaluation system performs its analysis using at least one model, produced using any type of supervised machine learning technique.

Abstract: Described is a technology by which the identity of a person (e.g., a customer in a commercial transaction) is determinable without active identification effort, via biometric data is obtained without action by the person. Machine processing of the biometric data over a set of possible persons, determined from secondary proximity sensing, is used to determine or assist in determining the identity of the person.

Abstract: A method, system, and computer-readable storage medium for application monitoring through continuous record and replay are described herein. The method includes continuously recording execution traces including external non-deterministic input data for an application at a user device and analyzing the recorded execution traces to identify relevant execution traces for determining a behavior of the application. The method also includes reporting the relevant execution traces to a server, wherein the server is configured to replay the relevant execution traces to determine whether the behavior of the application is as expected.

Abstract: A processing system is described which generates stimulus information (SI) having one or more stimulus components (SCs) selected from an inventory of such components. The processing system then presents the SI to a group of human recipients, inviting those recipients to provide linguistic descriptions of the SI. The linguistic information that is received thereby has an implicit link to the SCs. Further, each linguistic component is associated with at least one feature of a target environment, such as a target computer system. Hence, the linguistic information also maps to the features of the target environment. These relationships allow applications to use the linguistic information to interact with the target environment in different ways. In one case, the processing system uses a challenge-response authentication task presentation to convey the stimulus information to the recipients.

Abstract: An “AR Privacy API” provides an API that allows applications and web browsers to use various content rendering abstractions to protect user privacy in a wide range of web-based immersive augmented reality (AR) scenarios. The AR Privacy API extends the traditional concept of “web pages” to immersive “web rooms” wherein any desired combination of existing or new 2D and 3D content is rendered within a user's room or other space. Advantageously, the AR Privacy API and associated rendering abstractions are useable by a wide variety of applications and web content for enhancing the user's room or other space with web-based immersive AR content. Further, the AR Privacy API is implemented using any existing or new web page coding platform, including, but not limited to HTML, XML, CSS, JavaScript, etc., thereby enabling existing web content and coding techniques to be smoothly integrated into a wide range of web room AR scenarios.

Abstract: An automatic context-sensitive sanitization technique detects errors due to the mismatch of a sanitizer sequence with a browser parsing context. A pre-deployment analyzer automatically detects violating paths that contain a sanitizer sequence that is inconsistent with a browsing context associated with outputting an untrusted input. The pre-deployment analyzer determines a correct sanitizer sequence which is stored in a sanitization cache. During the runtime execution of the web application, a path detector tracks execution of the web application in relation to the violating paths.

Abstract: Functionality is described herein by which plural environment-sensing applications capture information from an environment in a fine-grained and least-privileged manner. By doing so, the functionality reduces the risk that private information that appears within the environment will be released to unauthorized parties. Among other aspects, the functionality provides an error correction mechanism for reducing the incidence of false positives in the detection of objects, an offloading technique for delegating computationally intensive recognition tasks to a remote computing framework, and a visualization module by which a user may inspect the access rights to be granted (or already granted) to each application.