Abstract: A system that uses a health-related dictionary component to establish responses to requests from devices and applications is provided. The innovation discloses uses of a health-related dictionary to enable retrieval of standardized lists and taxonomies in the healthcare space as well as localization of health-related data. Examples of these taxonomies include codes from medical coding vocabularies such as CPT (Current Procedural Terminology), layouts, templates, as well as references to units of measurements such as feet, inches, meters, liters, etc.

Abstract: An authorization framework is provided that protects data records in a platform, such as a service-based platform, by requiring multiple level entities to be authorized with respect to the data records. For example, the data records can have an associated owner user that can grant access to other users with respect to the data. Additionally, however, the user can also grant access to certain applications that access the platform such that the data records can be initially closed for a user requiring the user to explicitly grant desired access to applications and/or users. In this regard, applications can be forbidden from accessing the data, even on behalf of the user, unless expressly authorized to do so by the user. Thus, the user can make informed decisions regarding who is to have access to its data.

Abstract: A protocol is provided for communicating data between two applications. The protocol can support communication of an extensible markup language (XML) document over hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) by associating the XML document with a data envelope and sending the data envelope to a disparate application. The data envelope can comprise a header, which can specify supported compression methods, encryption keys, and/or data specific to the disparate application and/or the sending application. The protocol adds a layer of security to the communication and can prevent malicious requests and other attacks. This protocol can also be used in conjunction with a health integration network.

Abstract: An information management system is described herein which maintains collected information that pertains to users, received from one or more data sources. The information management system also maintains a store of consent information. The consent information describes, for each user, at least one permission rule (established by the user) which enables at least one data consumer to receive at least part of the collected information for that user. Upon the occurrence of a triggering event, an information distribution module operates by distributing identified part(s) of the collected information to appropriate data consumer(s), as governed by the consent information. In this manner of operation, the consent information functions as global metadata which, from a centralized platform, governs the dissemination of the collected information to any data consumer in an application-agnostic manner.

Abstract: Data may be stored in a location or manner that takes various considerations into account. Examples of such considerations are the availability, speed and cost of storage resources, and commercial and regulatory expectations concerning the reliability, security, and/or availability of the stored data. When a piece of data is to be stored, a storage choice component may take the above-considerations into account in order to determine where the data is to be stored, how many copies of the data are to be made, whether the data is to be encrypted, and/or other issues. Additionally, a migration engine may re-evaluate data that has already been stored in order to determine whether the data may be migrated to other storage resources, and/or whether changes may be made with regard to issues such as the encryption level and/or the number of stored copies of the data.

Abstract: Architecture that employs probabilistic and/or decision-theoretic model(s) of application usage to predict application use and in view of bounded or limited-availability memory. The model(s) is applied with cost-benefit analysis to guide memory management in an operating system, in particular, for both decisions about prefetching and memory retention versus deletion or “paging out” of memory of lower priority items, to free up space for higher value items. Contextual information is employed in addition to computer action monitoring for predicting next applications to be launched. Prefetching is optimized so as to minimize user perceived latencies.

Abstract: An “Iterative Query Reformulator” provides various techniques for using a computational engine to reformulate initial queries through one or more iterations. This query reformulation process ensures that results returned from search engines or recommendation systems using a reformulated query have improved relevance relative to results that would have been returned using only the initial query. More specifically, the Iterative Query Reformulator provides an end to end solution that uses computations from one or more knowledge databases or knowledge sources to find “partial answers” to subqueries derived or extracted from an initial query. These partial answers are then used to reformulate the initial query, with the reformulated query being used by the search engines or recommendations systems to provide results that are highly relevant to the initial query.

Abstract: Described is extracting structured information from web pages for use in directly answering queries with data items from the structured data. Users' post-search browsing behaviors (search trails) are treated as implicit labels as to the relevance between web content and user queries, and are used to determine wrappers for extracting structured information. In one implementation, a system identifies websites from web search logs, builds wrappers from users' search trails, filters out bad wrappers (from inconsistent user clicks), and combines structured information from different web sites, e.g., for each query.

Abstract: Architecture that automatically detects historical search contexts as well as behaviors related to a search query. Machine learning and hand-authored rules are employed to automatically identify search contexts. Historical information likely to be useful in the current context is surfaced. When a user enters a search query or executes another search behavior, past behaviors are exposed which are contextually related to the current behavior. The architecture also provides automatic discovery of historical contexts, features related to the contexts, and training or authoring of a system for classifying behavior into contexts, using some combination of the machine learning and/or hand-authored rules. A runtime system classifies the current user behavior into a context and surfaces contextual information to the user.

Abstract: A system and method is provided to facilitate communication and collaboration by considering the timing of a user's activities on one or more clients via accessing, from a centralized server, information about the user's client-server interactions. The systems and methods can harness existing protocols and data exchange used in legacy client-server applications for email, making available to one or more client-side message routing applications, information about a user's interactions with email across multiple clients. Applications include considering the time since the last client-server interaction to guide decisions about if, when, and how to route messages so as to limit the mobile relay of information a user has already seen, providing information to colleagues about a user's current or past “inbox presence,” and forecasting the time until a user will have access to a device or communication channel.

Abstract: An authentication mechanism is provided for a web method platform that allows homogeneous access for different types of clients according to a bootstrapping procedure utilized to establish the session. Different clients can be assigned different levels of trust based in part on the bootstrapping procedure and/or information provided during the procedure. The bootstrapping procedure can produce a token that is used by the clients in subsequent requests to provide previous authentication or state information to the platform. The token can comprise a shared secret used to ensure integrity of communications in some cases, and the token can be opaque to the client. Tokens can expire and require a client to re-bootstrap to provide higher levels of authentication protection, and tokens can be shared among a plurality of application servers to facilitate effective handling of requests in a farmed environment.

Abstract: A sensing and context management architecture that can detect that a user is interacting with a given device and in an associated context, and in response thereto, manages device processes as the user moves from device to device, location to location, and/or context to context. The invention comprises a system that facilitates management of a user situation or context. A sensing component is provided that senses a context of a user by way of one or more sensors and/or a particular device with which the user is interacting in the context, for example, and a management component that manages the device and/or one or more services in the context according to rules or inferences user preferences, sensed observations, and user input data.

Abstract: A statistical methodology is employed for assisting people with the setting of parameters of software applications or services. With the method, information about demographics and/or about the complete or partial preferences of other people, are analyzed to infer recommendations for settings and functionality of a computer application or service. A system is reviewed with the ability to receive data regarding a plurality of users, and stores respective profiles for these users in a community store. The system can leverage off of these completed and/or partially completed profiles of parameters representing preferences about software operation in connection with building new profiles for users (new and/or existing). Data regarding a user that desires to build a new profile is employed in connection with the community profiles to facilitate the user building a personalized profile.

Abstract: In one example, data may be divided into blocks, and the blocks may be stored in various storage resources. Data to be stored may be provided to a data divider. The data divider may divide the data into blocks. Redundancy may be introduced into the blocks to allow the original data to be reconstructed at some point in the future, even if fewer than all of the original blocks are available. The blocks may be sent to a data shuffler, which may shuffle the blocks, and may provide a key that describes how to reconstruct the original data from the blocks. The key may be provided to the owner of the data. When the original data is to be retrieved, the key may be provided to a reassembler, which retrieves the blocks from the various storage resources and reconstructs the data using the key.

Abstract: Data may be stored in a location or manner that takes various considerations into account. Examples of such considerations are the availability, speed and cost of storage resources, and commercial and regulatory expectations concerning the reliability, security, and/or availability of the stored data. When a piece of data is to be stored, a storage choice component may take the above-considerations into account in order to determine where the data is to be stored, how many copies of the data are to be made, whether the data is to be encrypted, and/or other issues. Additionally, a migration engine may re-evaluate data that has already been stored in order to determine whether the data may be migrated to other storage resources, and/or whether changes may be made with regard to issues such as the encryption level and/or the number of stored copies of the data.

Abstract: A statistical methodology is employed for assisting people with the setting of parameters of software applications or services. With the method, information about demographics and/or about the complete or partial preferences of other people, are analyzed to infer recommendations for settings and functionality of a computer application or service. A system is reviewed with the ability to receive data regarding a plurality of users, and stores respective profiles for these users in a community store. The system can leverage off of these completed and/or partially completed profiles of parameters representing preferences about software operation in connection with building new profiles for users (new and/or existing). Data regarding a user that desires to build a new profile is employed in connection with the community profiles to facilitate the user building a personalized profile.

Abstract: The present invention relates to a system and method to facilitate providing computer users with efficient access to electronic notifications while minimizing disruption in the context of ongoing tasks. A notification system provides visual information heralds that provide summarizations of notifications to users. An information controller considers the importance or urgency of content and a user's current and/or recent activities in decisions about the rendering and positioning of the information herald on a display screen or screens in order to facilitate user processing of the summarized notifications with minimal disruption to ongoing tasks.

Abstract: The present invention relates to a system and methodology to facilitate collaboration and communications between entities such as between automated applications, parties to a communication and/or combinations thereof. The systems and methods of the present invention include a service that supports collaboration and communication by learning predictive models that provide forecasts of one or more aspects of a users' presence and availability. Presence forecasts include a user's current or future locations at different levels of location precision and usage of different devices or applications. Availability assessments include inferences about the cost of interrupting a user in different ways and a user's current or future access to one or more communication channels. The predictive models are constructed from data collected by considering user activity and proximity from multiple devices, in addition to analysis of the content of users' calendars, the time of day, and day of week, for example.

Abstract: Systems and methods are described for constructing predictive models, based on statistical machine learning, that can make forecasts about traffic flows and congestions, based on an abstraction of a traffic system into a set of random variables, including variables that represent the amount of time until there will be congestion at key troublespots and the time until congestions will resolve. Observational data includes traffic flows and dynamics, and other contextual data such as the time of day and day of week, holidays, school status, the timing and nature of major gatherings such as sporting events, weather reports, traffic incident reports, and construction and closure reports. The forecasting methods are used in alerting, the display graphical information about predictions about congestion on desktop on mobile devices, and in offline and real-time automated route recommendations and planning.

Abstract: An information delivery system comprises a receiver component that receives information about the movement, velocity, acceleration, and/or locations over time of a user. A computation component using a predictive model generates a probability distribution relating to one or more of when the user will next be stopped, how long the user will be stopped, how long a pattern of motion, such as walking, driving in stop and go traffic, and smooth highway motion will last, based at least in part upon signals about motion over time. The system can further comprise an alerting component that determines when to provide the user with information based at least in part upon the probability distribution over some aspect of motion or cessation of motion, and optionally the content, or tagged or inferred urgency or importance, of a message or communication.