Digital Commons Network^™

Verifying Client Media Playback Using Unique Embedded Metadata, Benjamin Seligman, Christopher Dinn, Damien Levin

Defensive Publications Series

The described subject matter is directed to injecting metadata into a media stream at (or just after) a cache edge of a content delivery network (“CDN”). A unique instance value (e.g., included within a tag or uniform resource locator (“URL”)), is embedded by an edge device into metadata for the media stream. Examples of media stream metadata include, but are not limited to, D3 timed metadata inserted in an MPEG-2 transport stream or an emsg box in the ISO-BMFF video container for MPEG-DASH. When a streaming media player receives the metadata, it generates a network request or callback request including …

Decoding Text With Errors Due To Auto-Correction, Thomas Deselaers, Victor Carbune

Defensive Publications Series

Auto-correction techniques implemented in software keyboards attempt to mitigate user errors in text entry by analyzing user input and automatically generating corrections. This approach can result in inaccurate corrections (auto-corruptions), e.g., when users enter words that are out of vocabulary, uncommon words, abbreviations, etc. When such phrases are sent, e.g., as messages, recipient users may not understand the sender’s intent or make sense of the received text.

This disclosure describes techniques to decode received text that has errors produced by auto-correction. The techniques include reconstructing possible touch point sequences that led to the phrase, determining alternative phrases that correspond to …

Disposable Apps, Leon Nicholls

Defensive Publications Series

This disclosure describes techniques that enable end users that do not possess technical knowhow, e.g., knowledge of software development, to create apps. The apps can be standalone, e.g., run directly on an operating system, or be integrated into other apps or software. For example, the apps can be integrated into a conversational assistant, a browser, etc. The user-generated apps are designated for a specific event and/or a specific time period. When the user-generated app is no longer needed, the app and its data are automatically destroyed.

Competitor Identification Based On Organic Impressions, Yunting Sun, Aiyou Chen, Abinaya Selvam

Defensive Publications Series

This document describes a technique for identifying competitors of a brand based on organic impression data. The system identifies relevant search queries that lead to the brand website based on a selection of search queries from historical data. The system assigns a weight to each search query associated with the brand website. The system calculates an organic impression count based on the search query. The system calculates a score for each candidate competitor as it relates to the brand website. The system ranks/sorts each candidate brand based on its calculated score to determine the top competitors for the brand website. …

Incremental Evaluation Of Complex Conditions, Madhu Kallazhi Vasu, Nagaraju Pothineni, Bin Liu

Defensive Publications Series

Evaluating a complex condition such as users who have visited a certain type of website in the last week requires a great deal of processing power. The present disclosure describes an incremental evaluation technique that makes use of shortcuts and intermediate results in order to reduce the amount of time and processing needed to produce a final result. The main component of a visitor condition as described is a unified segment which can contain any number of simple or sequence type segment filters. Each segment filter can be evaluated using shortcuts and intermediate results. The evaluation of the entire unified …

Displaying Web Pages Within A Software Keyboard, Dong Kim, John Arendt

Defensive Publications Series

Techniques described in this disclosure display entire web pages with a display area of a software keyboard. In response to user selection of a search result, an optimized version of a web page is retrieved and displayed in the display area. Use of optimized versions of web pages ensures that the software keyboard does not experience crashes or performance problems, e.g., due to inefficient web pages, web pages that include incompatible content, etc. Display of entire web pages in the keyboard display area saves the user the effort to switch to a browser application to view the web page to …

Dynamic Determination Of Rcs Video Share Capability, Jean-Philippe Cormier

Defensive Publications Series

Mobile video calling requires determination of whether the available network is capable of supporting video calls. In Rich Communication Suite (RCS), such determination is static and is made at the time of call initiation. Such an approach limits usefulness of video share call functionality, e.g., when network conditions change during a call.

This disclosure describes techniques to determine at regular intervals whether an available network at a user location or cell site supports video calling. A network performance database is queried periodically to determine whether the network at a user’s location supports video calling. If video calling is supported, the …

Leveraging High Quality Information To Generate New Ad Content, Sanchit Gupta, Ashwin Kumar

Defensive Publications Series

A system and method are disclosed that leverages high quality information present in ads of a particular advertiser to provide content for ads that may appear during a search. The system includes a server which stores ads under a particular category to determine and extract relevant high quality information from a group of ads provided by an advertiser. When a user presents a commercial query, the system collects high quality information from stored ads for formatting into a new ad. The ad is then displayed to the user. This system thus automatically generates high quality data for ad content.

Ssd Admission Control For Content Delivery Networks, Dragos Ionescu, Richard Schooler, Kenneth Barr

Defensive Publications Series

Content delivery networks (CDNs) are utilized to deliver content with low latency. Solid State Drive (SSD) devices are a cost-effective option for intermediate tier caches in servers used in CDNs. However, excessive writes of content to SSD devices can degrade useful life of such devices. This disclosure describes admission control techniques to manage content in an SSD cache. In particular, a popularity metric for content items is determined based on an inter-arrival time. The popularity metric takes into account past admission history and is dynamically to account for variations in content popularity over different time periods. These techniques balance the …

Non-Deterministic Video Frame Sampling To Thwart Frame Insertion Attacks, Juhyun Lee

Defensive Publications Series

Accurate machine understanding of videos is important, e.g., to maintain the integrity and policy compliance of videos at a video hosting website. For example, a video-hosting website with a policy of hosting only family-friendly videos deploys video understanding systems to automatically exclude non-compliant videos. Techniques of image analysis are applied to individual video frames to understand the video. Due to the computational cost of processing individual frames, videos are sampled, e.g., at a rate of one frame per second, and only the sampled frames are subjected to image analysis.

Sampling-based video understanding is susceptible to attack. For example, such systems …

Increase The Power Loss Of The Electric Machine To Heat The Hv-Battery, Daniel Hoppe

Defensive Publications Series

INCREASE THE POWER LOSS OF THE ELECTRIC MACHINE TO HEAT THE HV-BATTERY

Automated Capturing And Reporting Of Real World Data From Autonomous/Automated Vehicles, Matt Ruhstaller, Phillip Ames

Defensive Publications Series

A system and method are disclosed that automatically captures and reports real world data from autonomous/automated vehicles. The system includes sensors such as camera, GPS, microphone, accelerometer etc. that provide real-world tracking features in an automobile. The system may report the data to a reporting station to act on the reported data for a wide variety of applications. Cameras may detect billboards on a given route, which may provide information on ad impressions in the real world to ad buyers. The system might detect a pothole and relay its location, dimensions etc. to local authority who may take action to …

Volumetric Slider On User Interface, John N.A. Brown

Defensive Publications Series

A device and a method are disclosed for providing an improved volumetric slider on a touch user interface (UI). The device includes a UI, such as a touch screen, displaying a volumetric slider or controller. The controller is designed as a blob for adjusting the volume by a natural pinch or un-pinch motion using fingertips. The un-pinch motion stretches the blob to create two smaller blobs and a visually-compelling thread, which indicates a distance between the two smaller blobs. The thread allows the user to judge the adjustment they have made to the volume. Further, the thread can be brought …

An Eye Tracking System For Smart Devices, Justin Lewis, Thomas Price

Defensive Publications Series

A system and method is disclosed to track user’s eye gaze on a lockscreen and infer whether a user has read each message on the screen. An incoming message is initially marked as unread. The system presents the message to the user on a lockscreen. Eye tracking software uses the camera's video stream to detect that the user's gaze is directed at the message on screen. When the user's gaze is detected on the message for a sufficient duration, the system may tentatively mark that message as read. The system may notify and request confirmation from the user before marking …

Allocating Rf Spectrum Partitions In A Cbrs Network, Yi Hsuan

Defensive Publications Series

Methods for allocating portions of an available radio frequency spectrum to wireless access points and systems for carrying out such methods are disclosed herein. An example method can include receiving location and transmission information for a plurality of wireless access points associated with respective networks. A coexistence graph for the plurality of wireless access points is generated based on the received information. The coexistence graph is divided into coexistence areas. For each coexistence area, a coloring algorithm is executed to determine a number of colors needed to color the nodes in the coexistence area such that no two connected nodes …

Pause Viewing Button For A Multiple-Person Household To Facilitate Resuming Later, Rochelle Edwards

Defensive Publications Series

A method for resuming playback of a media item after user co-participation in playback of the media item is described. A processing device provides playback of a media item to a first user and a second user. The processing device determines that the first user is not participating in the playback at a first point in time corresponding to a first temporal location in the media item and that the second user is not participating in the playback at a second point in time corresponding to a second temporal location in the media item. The processing device receives a request …

Low-Bandwidth, Client-Based, Rendering For Gaming Videos, Ian Fischer, Shumeet Baluja

Defensive Publications Series

A system for low-bandwidth, client-based, rendering for gaming videos is described. The system may include a gaming device, server device, and user devices. The gaming device may include a processing device and graphics processing unit (GPU). The processing device receives user input and generates rendering commands from the user input. A first rendering unit of the GPU generates gaming video from the rendering commands. The server device receives the gaming video and the rendering commands from the gaming device. The server device determines the first user device is not compatible with the rendering commands, compresses the gaming video, and transmits …

Virtual Reality Video Compression, Andrew Ian Russell, Matthew Milton Pharr, Evan Rapoport

Defensive Publications Series

Uncompressed light field files tend to be big, and may take gigabytes of space for storing a small portion of a scene. However, there can be redundancy in the data. Therefore, compressing the data can result in significant reduction of data size for transmission and/or storage. Further, interpolating uncaptured light-fields can be based on two blurry images generated from a frame of streaming video.

Neural Network Based Regression Test Selection, Komateswar Dhanadevan, Jayasankar Nallasamy, Sundaravadivel Murugavel

Defensive Publications Series

Need for regression testing has been ever growing demand for software development organizations so does the cost of executing regression test suites. The intent of this idea is to propose a unique method in regression test for selecting a subset of test cases as oppose to select all test cases for a given software change using Neural Network. In general, a software consist of multiple features and it interacts with each other in the order of different magnitude. Each feature interaction is assessed based on five relative dimensional complexity. These complexities for each feature interaction is determined and subjected to …

Elastic Multi-Resolution Model-Serving To Compute Inferences, Christopher Olston, Noah Fiedel, Ed H. Chi, Alexander Beutel

Defensive Publications Series

Machine-learning models are consuming an increasing fraction of the world's computing resources. The cost of computing inferences with some machine-learning models is extremely high. Provisioning computing resources for peak performance, e.g., high availability and quality of service, entails the creation of headroom for traffic spikes (increases in demand) and preparing for the possibility of outages (decreases in capacity). Executing computer applications that utilize machine-learning models, also known as machine-learned models, can require significant capital and operational expenses.

This disclosure describes techniques to optimize use of computing resources for a machine-learning model. Multi-resolution models and/or models with recurrence are utilized. These …

Context-Sensitive Audio Notifications, Sandro Feuz, Victor Carbune, Thomas Deselaers, Google Inc.

Defensive Publications Series

A method is disclosed for triggering context-sensitive audio notifications. Systems and devices according to the method also predict a least disruptive moment to trigger a notification within a given period of time. The method comprises two parts. In the first part, a machine learning (“ML”) subsystem determines a current context of a user (based on, e.g., surrounding audio environment, current location, user calendar, etc.) and assesses the potential disruptiveness of an audible notification in the current context. The ML subsystem predicts a time-series of scores denoting the disruptiveness of the audible notification if emitted at particular times in the future. …

A/B Experiment Framework For Native Ads In Ad Servers, Bo Lin, Chetna Mcdonald, Roman Apostol, Sonny Thai, Woo Lee, Mikhail Shalai, Zutao Zhu, Olawale Abiri

Defensive Publications Series

Techniques are described for experiment frameworks around server-side rendering of native advertising content for presentation within an application environment. As described, a server receives a request, from a client device, for content that includes a content slot identifier. The server, using the content slot identifier, accesses a database to identify a presentation schema used to arrange content components and generates rendered content files according to a specific configuration for display within the environment of the resource. The server renders the content components based on the identified presentation schema and transmits the rendered content to the client device for display within …

Self Configuration Of Wireless Devices For Cloud Deployments, Frédéric Brunner, Jean-Michel Lauriol

Defensive Publications Series

In a context of Cloud deployments, we need to find a way for “out of the box” devices with no MMI (Man to Machine Interface) capabilities to easily discover the Cloud Service Provider and Application Server instance they are attached to.

These devices “MMI less” are devices without input (e.g. keyboard ) or output (e.g. Display) allowing user to type any characters or read information on the screen, typically wireless DECT (Digital Enhanced Cordless Telecommunications) Base Station or WLAN (Wireless Local Area Networks) Access Points.

Delivery Box With Perforated Folding Edges, Roger Ryan Quinlan, Daniel Lee

Defensive Publications Series

A delivery box is provided that is perforated at one or more of the folding edges to allow the box to be easily ripped apart for placement in a recycling bin or for storage.

Mechanism For Fine-Grained Software Controlled Core Dumps, Matthew D. Fleming, Robert Lee, Boris Feigin

Defensive Publications Series

We present a mechanism to generate a minidump file that will only include the exact memory an application wants when the application receives a fatal signal – the application itself can write a file in valid ELF CORE file format.

Real Estate Project Delivery System, Roshan Mehdizadeh Corsiglia

Defensive Publications Series

Organizations that have real estate holdings often spend substantial amounts on development of real estate for office spaces, production facilities, data centers, etc. Such organizations typically rely on third-party software solutions and consultants to manually track real-estate project costs and schedules. The present techniques provide a cloud based project delivery system that integrates the organization’s real-estate management applications with cloud based applications and building information models. With such integration, the techniques enable monitoring of project costs and schedules using a flexible user interface. The techniques can extract insights by integrating project cost, schedule, and attribute data with building information models …

Virtual Assistant Service For Patients And Caregivers

Defensive Publications Series

A major healthcare cost is the lack of strict adherence to, or outright non-compliance with, medicines and medical schedule by patients. The techniques disclosed herein assist patients by automatically performing routine healthcare-related tasks, e.g., reminding patients to take medications at appropriate times; ordering prescription refills at pharmacies; scheduling and managing medical appointments; tracking and charting their vital statistics, e.g., blood glucose, blood pressure, heart rate, etc.; asking for and logging patient symptoms, etc. The virtual personal assistant uses a machine learning model to adapt itself to the particulars of the patient. The virtual personal assistant may interface with the patient …

Assistant Enabled Entertainment System, Google Inc.

Defensive Publications Series

A virtual, intelligent, or computational assistant (e.g., also referred to simply as an “assistant”) is described that relies on supplemental data (e.g., contextual information, user information, etc.) to determine media, including movies, television shows, music, etc., that a user may want to consume and provide recommendations or automatically perform actions based on to assist the user in consuming the media. With explicit permission from a user, the assistant may access a user’s location history, calendar, e-mail, messages, past assistant interactions, contacts, photos, search history, sensor data, social network accounts, and other contextual or user information develop recommendations. The supplemental data …

Proactive Assistance For A Predicted Destination, Google Inc.

Defensive Publications Series

A virtual, intelligent, or computational assistant (e.g., also referred to simply as an “assistant”) is described that relies on supplemental data (e.g., contextual information, user information, etc.) to predict a user’s destination and offer to assist the user with actions the user will likely want to take at the predicted destination. With explicit permission from a user, the assistant may access a user’s location history, calendar, e-mail, messages, past assistant interactions, contacts, photos, search history, sensor data, and other contextual or user information to predict a destination of a user as well as actions the user will likely want to …

Assistant Generated Answers Using Supplemental Data, Google Inc.

Defensive Publications Series

A virtual, intelligent, or computational assistant (e.g., also referred to simply as an “assistant”) is described that relies on supplemental data (e.g., contextual information, user information, etc.) to decipher, and determine answers to, user queries. With explicit permission from a user, the assistant may access a user’s location history, calendar, e-mail, messages, past assistant interactions, contacts, photos, search history, sensor data, and other contextual or user information to answer a user query. The supplemental data can be stored locally on a device that is executing the assistant or in a cloud computing environment that is accessible to the assistant from …