Abstract: Disclosed are various embodiments for facilitating a search of published works, non-published works, and/or other works using both visual and text search elements. Upon receipt of an image, the search engine application determines whether the item depicted in the image includes searchable content. Once the search engine application determines that the item depicted in the image contains searchable content, the search engine application facilitates receipt of the search string that may be used to search the searchable content of the item. The search engine application may generate one or more search results in response to the search.

Abstract: Disclosed are various embodiments for facilitating a search of published works, non-published works, and/or other works using both visual and text search elements. Upon receipt of an image, the search engine application determines whether the item depicted in the image includes searchable content. Once the search engine application determines that the item depicted in the image contains searchable content, the search engine application facilitates receipt of the search string that may be used to search the searchable content of the item. The search engine application may generate one or more search results in response to the search.

Abstract: Systems, methods, and apparatus are provided for determining relevance of documents to queries. An optimized relevance function is configured to determine a relevance value of documents of a first type that are linked to documents of a second type. The relevance function is optimized to satisfy certain criteria. According to one criterion, a relevance value produced by the optimized relevance function, when invoked for documents of the first type, should have a locally maximal degree of fit to the results of the existing relevance function for the sample training documents of the second type. An assessed degree of fit of a document can be increased or decreased to arrive at an optimized relevance function that ranks the documents of the first type in a desired position relative to documents of the second type in search results. The degree of fit can be assessed by a user-provided objective function.

Abstract: In a method for determining whether a person is potentially unavailable for communication, sensors are provided at a location to obtain information regarding a state of availability for communication of a first person at the location. The information regarding potential unavailability of the first person for communication is presented to a second person. A system for determining whether a person is potentially unavailable for communication includes a data acquisition module that has sensor receiving ports and is configured to transmit signal data from the sensors over a network. An inferencing engine is configured to receive the signal data from the sensors over the network and to use the signal data to reach an inference regarding a person's presence and an inference regarding the person's potential unavailability for communication. A presence service presents the inferences to other persons over the network before such other persons attempt to communicate with the person.