Patents by Inventor Tie Yan

Tie Yan has filed for patents to protect the following inventions. This listing includes patent applications that are pending as well as patents that have already been granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).

  • Publication number: 20130091013
    Abstract: Techniques for providing targeted social advertisements in a social network are described. A targeted social advertisement application detects a commercial intent of a user and retrieves input from friends in the social network. In an implementation, a user interface includes a pane to display a comment with the commercial intent submitted by the user in the social network, the commercial intent being detected for a potential product. The user interface also includes a voting pane to display a plurality of candidate products targeted towards the commercial intent of the user for the potential product. One or more command buttons are on the voting pane to prompt voting as recommendations for the plurality of candidate products from friends of the user.
    Type: Application
    Filed: October 7, 2011
    Publication date: April 11, 2013
    Applicant: Microsoft Corporation
    Inventors: Taifeng Wang, Tie-Yan Liu
  • Publication number: 20130085867
    Abstract: A computing device is described herein that is configured to select a subset of keywords from a plurality of keywords based at least on measures of competition associated with the keywords and to suggest the selected subset for bidding. The plurality of keywords is relevant to at least one advertising target. The computing device calculates a measure of competition for a respective keyword based on a number of bidders for the respective keyword and on a number of available advertisement slots in search results provided responsive to queries for the respective keyword.
    Type: Application
    Filed: September 30, 2011
    Publication date: April 4, 2013
    Applicant: MICROSOFT CORPORATION
    Inventors: Bin Gao, Tie-Yan Liu
  • Patent number: 8378169
    Abstract: Four zebrafish gene promoters, which are skin specific, muscle specific, skeletal muscle specific and ubiquitously expressed respectively, were isolated and ligated to the 5? end of the EGFP gene. When the resulting chimeric gene constructs were introduced into zebrafish, the transgenic zebrafish emit green fluorescence under a blue light or ultraviolet light according to the specificity of the promoters used. Thus, new varieties of ornamental fish of different fluorescence patterns, e.g., skin fluorescence, muscle fluorescence, skeletal muscle-specific and/or ubiquitous fluorescence, are developed.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: December 22, 2011
    Date of Patent: February 19, 2013
    Assignee: National University of Singapore
    Inventors: Zhiyuan Gong, Jiangyan He, Bensheng Ju, Toong Jin Lam, Yanfei Xu, Tie Yan
  • Patent number: 8368698
    Abstract: Method for creating a graph representing web browsing behavior, including receiving web browsing behavior data from one or more web browsers; adding a node on the graph for each web page listed in the web browsing behavior data; adding a first link connecting two or more nodes on the graph, wherein the first link representing a hyperlink for accessing a webpage; calculating an amount of time in which each web page is being accessed; determining a number of units of time in the calculated amount of time; adding one or more virtual nodes to the graph based on the number of units of time; and adding a second link connecting two or more virtual nodes on the graph, wherein the second link representing a virtual hyperlink for accessing a webpage.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: September 24, 2008
    Date of Patent: February 5, 2013
    Assignee: Microsoft Corporation
    Inventors: Bin Gao, Tie-Yan Liu, Hang Li, Yuting Liu
  • Publication number: 20120271821
    Abstract: The relevance of an object, such as a document resulting from a query, may be determined automatically. A graphical model-based technique is applied to determine the relevance of the object. The graphical model may represent relationships between actual and observed labels for the object, based on features of the object. The graphical model may take into account an assumption of noisy training data by modeling the noise.
    Type: Application
    Filed: April 20, 2011
    Publication date: October 25, 2012
    Applicant: Microsoft Corporation
    Inventors: Tao Qin, Tie-Yan Liu, Xiubo Geng
  • Publication number: 20120259850
    Abstract: Efficient search query clustering using tripartite graphs may enable a search engine developer to model information needs of users while expending less computing resources. The efficient clustering of search queries may involve multiple computing devices receiving a subgraph of a multi-partite graph that encompasses search queries, as well as receiving a global center vector table that includes cluster center entries for query clusters. At each computing device, the received global center vector table may be filtered to eliminate one or more cluster center entries that are irrelevant to the search queries. Subsequently, the search queries may be clustered into the query clusters by at least using the filtered global center vector table at each of the computing devices. In some instances, one or more comparisons between search queries and the cluster center entries in the global center vector table during the clustering may be eliminated.
    Type: Application
    Filed: April 8, 2011
    Publication date: October 11, 2012
    Applicant: MICROSOFT CORPORATION
    Inventors: Tie-Yan Liu, Taifeng Wang
  • Publication number: 20120259831
    Abstract: Techniques for determining user information needs and selecting data based on user information needs are described herein. The present disclosure describes extracting topics of interests to users from multiple sources including search log data and social network website, and assigns a budget to each topic to stipulate the quota of data to be selected for each topic. The present disclosure also describes calculating similarities between gathered data and the topics, and selecting top related data with each topic subject to limit of the budget. A search engine may use the techniques described here to select data for its index.
    Type: Application
    Filed: April 5, 2011
    Publication date: October 11, 2012
    Applicant: Microsoft Corporation
    Inventors: Taifeng Wang, Tie-Yan Liu, Xiaodong Fan
  • Publication number: 20120253930
    Abstract: This application describes a system and method for estimating user intent towards categories of content. The estimation of user intent may be based at least in part on a score for prior user actions and a decay function that is applied to that score to provide an estimate of current user intent. The estimate represents current user intent for time periods in which user actions towards a category of content are negligible or non-existent.
    Type: Application
    Filed: April 1, 2011
    Publication date: October 4, 2012
    Applicant: Microsoft Corporation
    Inventors: Bin Gao, Tie-Yan Liu, Jun Yan, Ning Liu, Dou Shen, Ying Li
  • Publication number: 20120253945
    Abstract: Some implementations provide techniques for estimating impression numbers. For example, a log of advertisement bidding data may be used to generate and train an impression estimation model. In some implementations, an impression estimation component may use a boost regression technique to determine a predicted impression value range based on a proposed bid received from an advertiser. For example, the predicted impression value range may be determined based on a predicted estimation error. Additionally, in some instances, the predicted impression value range may be evaluated using one or more evaluation metrics.
    Type: Application
    Filed: April 1, 2011
    Publication date: October 4, 2012
    Applicant: Microsoft Corporation
    Inventors: Bin Gao, Tie-Yan Liu, Tao Qin, Zeyong Xu, Jianhua Hu, Wei-Ying Ma
  • Publication number: 20120253899
    Abstract: Some implementations construct a quality score table based on historic data collected for a plurality of ad-keyword pairs. An ad-keyword pair may be selected for determining a quality score. One or more advertisement parameters may be determined for the selected ad-keyword pair. Based on the one or more advertisement parameters, the quality score for the selected ad-keyword pair may be determined from the quality score table. In some implementations, the quality score table is constructed by iteratively cutting a directed graph representing the advertisement parameters and the historic data. Further, in some implementations, the table may be smoothed using a smoothing operation.
    Type: Application
    Filed: April 1, 2011
    Publication date: October 4, 2012
    Applicant: Microsoft Corporation
    Inventors: Tao Qin, Tie-Yan Liu, Wei Xie, Chi Gao, Zeyong Xu, Wei-Ying Ma
  • Publication number: 20120253927
    Abstract: Some implementations generate a mapping function using one or more historic performance indicators for a set of ad-keyword pairs and one or more advertisement metrics extracted from the set of ad-keyword pairs. The mapping function may be applied to map one or more advertisement metrics of a particular ad-keyword pair to determine a quality score for the particular ad-keyword pair. For example, the quality score may be used when determining whether to select an advertisement for display or may be provided as feedback to an advertiser. Additionally, in some implementations, the mapping function may be applied to determine a quality score for a new ad-keyword pair that has not yet accumulated historic information.
    Type: Application
    Filed: April 1, 2011
    Publication date: October 4, 2012
    Applicant: Microsoft Corporation
    Inventors: Tao Qin, Tie-Yan Liu, Bin Gao, Jingyi Xu, Zeyong Xu, Wei-Ying Ma
  • Patent number: 8244737
    Abstract: Ranking documents based on a series of web graphs collected over time is provided. A ranking system provides multiple transition probability distributions representing different snapshots or times. Each transition probability distribution represents a probability of transitioning from one document to another document within a collection of documents using a link of the document. The ranking system determines a stationary probability distribution for each snapshot based on the transition probability distributions for that snapshot and the stationary probability distribution of the previous snapshot. The stationary probability distributions represent a ranking of the documents over time.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: June 18, 2007
    Date of Patent: August 14, 2012
    Assignee: Microsoft Corporation
    Inventors: Tie-Yan Liu, Hang Li, Bin Gao, Lei Yang, Lei Qi
  • Patent number: 8229968
    Abstract: Embodiments for caching and accessing Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) data to and from a computing device of a DAG distributed execution engine during the processing of an iterative algorithm. In accordance with one embodiment, a method includes processing a first subgraph of the plurality of subgraphs from the distributed storage system in the computing device. The first subgraph being processed with associated input values in the computing device to generate first output values in an iteration. The method further includes storing a second subgraph in a cache of the device. The second subgraph being a duplicate of the first subgraph. Moreover, the method also includes processing the second subgraph with the first output values to generate second output values if the device is to process the first subgraph in each of one or more subsequent iterations.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: March 26, 2008
    Date of Patent: July 24, 2012
    Assignee: Microsoft Corporation
    Inventors: Taifeng Wang, Tie-Yan Liu, Minghao Liu, Zhi Chen
  • Patent number: 8224825
    Abstract: Systems, methods, and devices for sorting and processing various types of graph data are described herein. Partitioning graph data into master data and associated slave data allows for sorting of the graph data by sorting the master data. In another embodiment, promoting a data bucket having a first data bucket size to a data bucket having a second data bucket size greater than the first data bucket size upon reaching a memory limit allows for the reduction of temporary files output by the data bucket.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: May 31, 2010
    Date of Patent: July 17, 2012
    Assignee: Microsoft Corporation
    Inventors: Taifeng Wang, Tie-Yan Liu
  • Patent number: 8219549
    Abstract: An anti-spam technique for protecting search engine ranking is based on mining search engine optimization (SEO) forums. The anti-spam technique collects webpages such as SEO forum posts from a list of suspect spam websites, and extracts suspicious link exchange URLs and corresponding link formation from the collected webpages. A search engine ranking penalty is then applied to the suspicious link exchange URLs. The penalty is at least partially determined by the link information associated with the respective suspicious link exchange URL. To detect more suspicious link exchange URLs, the technique may propagate one or more levels from a seed set of suspicious link exchange URLs generated by mining SEO forums.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: February 6, 2008
    Date of Patent: July 10, 2012
    Assignee: Microsoft Corporation
    Inventors: Bin Gao, Tie-Yan Liu, Hang Li, Congkai Sun
  • Publication number: 20120167241
    Abstract: Four zebrafish gene promoters, which are skin specific, muscle specific, skeletal muscle specific and ubiquitously expressed respectively, were isolated and ligated to the 5? end of the EGFP gene. When the resulting chimeric gene constructs were introduced into zebrafish, the transgenic zebrafish emit green fluorescence under a blue light or ultraviolet light according to the specificity of the promoters used. Thus, new varieties of ornamental fish of different fluorescence patterns, e.g., skin fluorescence, muscle fluorescence, skeletal muscle-specific and/or ubiquitous fluorescence, are developed.
    Type: Application
    Filed: December 22, 2011
    Publication date: June 28, 2012
    Applicant: NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF SINGAPORE
    Inventors: Zhiyuan GONG, Jiangyan HE, Bensheng JU, Toon Jin LAM, Yanfei XU, Tie YAN
  • Publication number: 20120143844
    Abstract: Some implementations provide techniques for determining which URLs to select for crawling from a pool of URLs. For example, the selection of URLs for crawling may be made based on maintaining a high coverage of the known URLs and/or high discoverability of the World Wide Web. Some implementations provide a multi-level coverage strategy for crawling selection. Further, some implementations provide techniques for discovering unseen URLs.
    Type: Application
    Filed: December 2, 2010
    Publication date: June 7, 2012
    Applicant: Microsoft Corporation
    Inventors: Taifeng Wang, Tie-Yan Liu, Bin Gao
  • Publication number: 20120143792
    Abstract: Some implementations provide techniques for selecting web pages for inclusion in an index. For example, some implementations apply regularization to select a subset of the crawled web pages for indexing based on link relationships between the crawled web pages, features extracted from the crawled web pages, and user behavior information determined for at least some of the crawled web pages. Further, in some implementations, the user behavior information may be used to sort a training set of crawled web pages into a plurality of labeled groups. The labeled groups may be represented in a directed graph that indicates relative priorities for being selected for indexing.
    Type: Application
    Filed: December 2, 2010
    Publication date: June 7, 2012
    Applicant: Microsoft Corporation
    Inventors: Taifeng Wang, Bin Gao, Tie-Yan Liu
  • Patent number: 8195669
    Abstract: The present invention provides an improved method for ranking documents using a ranking model. One embodiment employs Continuous Conditional Random Fields (CRF) as a model, which is a conditional probability distribution representing a mapping relationship from retrieved documents to their ranking scores. The model can naturally utilize features of the content information of documents as well as the relation information between documents for global ranking. The present invention also provides a learning algorithm for creating Continuous CRF. Also provided, the invention introduces Pseudo Relevance Feedback and Topic Distillation.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: September 22, 2008
    Date of Patent: June 5, 2012
    Assignee: Microsoft Corporation
    Inventors: Tie-Yan Liu, Tao Qin, Hang Li
  • Patent number: 8153858
    Abstract: Four zebrafish gene promoters, which are skin specific, muscle specific, skeletal muscle specific and ubiquitously expressed respectively, were isolated and ligated to the 5? end of the EGFP gene. When the resulting chimeric gene constructs were introduced into zebrafish, the transgenic zebrafish emit green fluorescence under a blue light or ultraviolet light according to the specificity of the promoters used. Thus, new varieties of ornamental fish of different fluorescence patterns, e.g., skin fluorescence, muscle fluorescence, skeletal muscle-specific and/or ubiquitous fluorescence, are developed.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: May 15, 2007
    Date of Patent: April 10, 2012
    Assignee: National University of Singapore
    Inventors: Zhiyuan Gong, Jiangyan He, Bensheng Ju, Toong Jin Lam, Yanfei Xu, Tie Yan