Abstract: A method is disclosed for reducing user-perceived latency due to the time required to establish a connection to a server in a network. In accordance with the present invention, an open connection is established to a set of servers, there being some probability the user will contact one of the servers in the near future. This is referred to as preconnecting or prefetching the connection. In the context of a Web client-server network, a list of likely servers can be deduced from links on a current Web page a user is looking at or from a more sophisticated analysis of the user's browsing habits. When the user requests a resource from one of the identified servers, the network connection has already been established, thereby reducing latency and improving service quality, especially for higher bandwidth clients for whom the delay is most noticeable.

Abstract: A method and apparatus provide improved cache coherency and more effective caching operations without placing an undue burden on network links. A proxy receives a request for a resource and then, depending on information in the proxy cache, generates a resource request for transmission to a resource server. The proxy appends a proxy filter to the request. The resource server maintains one or more volumes of resources based on some predetermined criterion that can be either static or dynamic in nature. Upon receipt of the request and the proxy filter the resource server generates a request response and a piggybacked list of additional resources selected from the volume with which the requested resource is associated.

Abstract: A method for detecting the transmission sub-rate of a data packet whose symbols are punctured prior to transmission as with an IS-95 transmission with a 13 kbps speech encoder. Sub-rates are detected by first regrouping the received symbols so as to exclude those symbols for which one or more of its repetitions were punctured. The regrouped symbols are then examined for consecutive identical soft decision symbols, i.e., the repetitive pattern used by the transmitter to mask the sub-rate, with statistical methods used to account for the effects of noise and power bit insertion. The repetitive pattern is then matched to the appropriate sub-rate.

Abstract: The invention is an improved retrieval system and method. Many pattern recognition tasks, including estimation, classification, and the finding of similar objects, make use of linear models. For example, many text retrieval systems represent queries as linear functions, and retrieve documents whose vector representation has a high dot product with the query. The fundamental operation in such tasks is the computation of the dot product between a query vector and a large database of instance vectors. Often instance vectors which have high dot products with the query are of interest. The invention relates to a random sampling based retrieval system that can identify, for any given query vector, those instance vectors which have large dot products, while avoiding explicit computation of all dot products.

Abstract: The invention relates to method and apparatus for computing transitive closure and reachability in directed graphs. These are fundamental graph problems with many applications such as database query optimization. A random rank is applied to each node (or record or element, as the case may be) and the least rank reachable from each such node is determined. This least rank value reachable from a node is highly correlatable to the size of the reachable set. An estimator can therefore be applied to convert the least reachable rank value to an estimate of the size of the reachable set. The accuracy of the estimate can be increased by repeating the random rank assignments together with the least reachable rank determinations and averaging the results.

Abstract: A particulate carrier, including a hydrophilic, non-liquid core, a first layer or ring of lipid nature bonded to the core by covalent bonds and a second layer or outer shell of amphiphilic compounds bonded to the first lipid by hydrophobic interactions.