Digital Commons Network^™

Shower Head Programmable With An App, Anonymous

Defensive Publications Series

Disclosed is a shower head with embedded electronic valve capable of controlling different output options based on input from a touch control on the shower or from a remote device. Connection from the remote device to the shower head can be made via blue-tooth, Wi-Fi, or other wireless connectivity protocol.

Shower Diversion Assembly, Anonymous

Defensive Publications Series

Disclosed is a shower assembly comprising a shower head, rail, and diverting assembly. The diverting mechanism is capable of diverting the flow of water from a shower outlet to a hand shower outlet.

Detachable Faucet, Anonymous, Chris Schmauder

Defensive Publications Series

Disclosed is a faucet or plumbing fixture utilizing a quick connection system that allows the faucet or plumbing fixture to quickly connect and disconnect without the use of additional tools. The quick connection system may include seals, check valves, O-rings, or other connection that allows for a fixture to connect to a base, create a seal, and allow for the flow of fluid to occur.

Link Convergence Improvement In Radio-Aware Routing, Shruthi Venkatesh, Eric Nguyen, Ibrahim Mortada

Defensive Publications Series

Techniques are described herein to reduce link flapping scenarios in existing Radio-Aware Routing (RAR) technology, on both the server side and the client side. Existing techniques provide no mechanism to prioritize vendor-based or reliable/preferred clients. In particular, Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) protocol and/or Enhanced Interior Gateway Routing Protocol (EIGRP) often initiate a call based on link quality and other metrics at that moment in time, which may lead to constant link/session flapping. This is due to the limited set of link characteristics relied upon by existing techniques for computing session establishment to a Dynamic Link Exchange Routing (DLEP) client. …

Providing Supplemental Content Related To A Keyword In A Conversation, Anonymous

Defensive Publications Series

Keywords are stored and supplemental content is associated with the stored keywords. Users conduct a conversation by exchanging messages with each other via an online messaging application. Keywords in a message are compared to the stored keywords to determine if related supplemental content is available. If available, the appearance of the keywords is modified to indicate the availability of the related supplemental content. If the keyword is selected by any user engaged in the conversation, the related supplemental content is displayed in a user interface of the online messaging application along with the messages in the conversation.

Plumbing Line Freeze Protection, Anonymous

Defensive Publications Series

Disclosed is an electronically controlled plumbing fixture comprising an electronic valve, temperature sensor, and processor. The system is capable of measuring and predicting the temperature of a fluid in a plumbing line and opening the electronic valve and allowing the fluid to flow within the plumbing line when the system determines that the fluid may freeze and cause an issue in the plumbing line.

Global Leak Notifications And Announcements, Anonymous

Defensive Publications Series

Disclosed is a system of leak detectors and plumbing fixtures connected together in a network. The network is capable of detecting a leak from a leak detection device and reporting it to all fixtures connected within the network allowing a user to take action immediately.

Plumbing Fixture Safety Modes, Anonymous

Defensive Publications Series

Disclosed is a plumbing fixture capable of changing states depending on an input from a user. The fixture is capable of setting a first state of use and a second state of use being different from the first state and when a user requests the state to change, the fixture limits the maximum temperature output of a fluid. Additional, a purging system is described where when the system is used above a threshold, the system purges with cold water when deactivation is requested to ensure extremely hot water is not present in the fixture body.

Using A Certificate Public Key To Protect Dkim Public Key Spoofing, Brett Krueger

Defensive Publications Series

Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI) is a standard that allows domain owners to coordinate with Mail User Agents (MUAs) to display brand-specific indicators or logos next to properly authenticated messages. A Verified Mark Certificate allows an email service to authenticate a logo, but currently BIMI is susceptible to DNS spoofing attacks. In this work, BIMI messages are protected from DNS spoofing by aligning the message’s DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) public key with the public key associated with the VMC. The email service may validate the alignment between the keys as part of the authentication of the message. When the …

A Method To Efficiently Generate Noise For Differential Privacy, Brett Krueger

Defensive Publications Series

Noise for differential privacy is often generated to obfuscate raw statistical results to hide identifies of specific individuals in data. Traditional methods are often inaccurate and/or computationally inefficient. In this work, a software library or program uses a differential privacy noise generator to generate high quality random numbers from the geometric distribution to both accurately and efficiently generate noise for differential privacy.

Integrated Collection And Presentation Of Audience Engagement For Shared Photos, Victor Carbune, Sandro Feuz

Defensive Publications Series

Users commonly share photos from their photo gallery application with others via social media applications, messaging platforms, email, etc. Many such applications and services allow viewers to interact with the shared photos by providing tags, comments, emojis, etc. Monitoring engagement with a shared photo requires the user to interact separately with the notifications from each app and toggle between various apps and services where the photo was shared.

This disclosure describes mechanisms to automatically determine audience interaction that occurs in response to the shared photos across multiple apps and services, implemented with user permission. When the user views the original …

Enhanced Microphone Security With Color Sensor, Hp Inc

Defensive Publications Series

A recent study has proven voice commands can be transmitted using a laser targeted a

voice assistant device’s microphone.

This disclosure provides a solution to detect any laser presence targeted at notebook’s

microphone and the ability to disable the microphone to prevent unwanted voice

commands.

Pneumatic Power Running Boards, Na

Defensive Publications Series

A pneumatic powered retractable running board for a motor vehicle, mounted underneath the frame of the vehicle offering easier mobility to/from the vehicle and better aerodynamics during driving operations.

Welded Case Boss, Douglas David Dierksmeier, Jack Dwane Petty Sr., William Matt Bryant

Defensive Publications Series

No abstract provided.

Enabling Calls To Public Contacts Via Smart Devices, Allen Ni

Defensive Publications Series

Devices with support for virtual assistants, such as smart displays, smart speakers, etc. include features that enable users to place audio or video calls to their contacts. The calling features are restricted to the user that is logged in to the device, since contacts are private to the user. This disclosure describes techniques to enable other users to place calls. A user, such as a device owner, can configure their address book to mark a subset of their contacts as public contacts. Public contacts are accessible to other users, who can then place calls to such contacts.

Video Identification Based On Video Snippet Fingerprinting, Roman Vorushin, Filip Pavetić

Defensive Publications Series

This disclosure describes techniques that enable a user to identify a video or a movie by capturing a video snippet of a screen on which the video or movie is being displayed with a camera, e.g., a smartphone or other camera. The captured video snippet is cropped to the content of the screen. An embedding (fingerprint) is generated for the video and is matched to stored embeddings of video content to identify the video or the movie. Information regarding the identified movie, e.g., options to purchase or stream the movie, read reviews, etc. are provided to the user.

Implanted Qr Code Enabled Incentivized System For Container Reuse, Garrett F. Berg

Defensive Publications Series

Single use disposable containers are widely used for a variety of products. Reuse of the containers offers environmental benefits. This disclosure describes techniques to facilitate efficient reuse of commodity packaging via an incentivized system for tracking of purchases. During product manufacture, unique metallic QR codes are embedded into product containers marked with a sticker indicative of the amount due to the consumer for the returned container. The QR codes are registered in a central database and enable tracking of the containers. Upon completion of product use, consumers can place the container into repositories placed at suitable locations. A full-sphere X-ray …

Shared On-Device And Server-Based Machine Learning Evaluation, Jorim Jaggi, Yannick Stucki, Adrian Roos, Sandro Feuz

Defensive Publications Series

On-device machine learning models can provide inferences quickly; however, such models often have a large size and need to be downloaded to the device. In many domains, such as optical character recognition or translation, the nature of the problem necessitates that several on-device models be made available.

This disclosure describes techniques to split inference computation between the device and a remote server by leveraging the observation that many ML models have domain independent layers that are shared between multiple models and domain specific layers that are specific to individual models. Per techniques described herein, an available smallest intermediate representation from …

Using Variation In Audio To Convey Change In Data, N/A

Defensive Publications Series

In devices such as smart speakers or other headless devices that lack a display screen, or when an audio user interface is used, it is not possible for the user to view data graphically. It is therefore difficult for such user interfaces to convey statistical data or trends. This disclosure describes techniques to map data to audio signals. A change in data is reflected as a change in some property, e.g., pitch, amplitude, etc., of the audio signal. Per the techniques, a user hears trends in data, e.g., data is auditorily visualized, referred to herein as audiolized.

Scene Metering And Exposure Control For Enhancing High Dynamic Range Imaging, Jinglun Gao, Szepo Robert Hung, Ruben Velarde, Gang Sun

Defensive Publications Series

This publication describes systems and techniques directed to enhancing High Dynamic Range (HDR) imaging by identifying and understanding the lighting environment of a scene for image capture. Natural light (e.g., outdoor sky, sunlight) is identified and differentiated from artificial light (e.g., light-emitting diode (LED), fluorescent, halogen, incandescent lighting) for advanced metering and optimal exposure control. Exposure is adjusted relative to the differentiated lighting for final image capture. Regions of the scene are differentiated by mapping different weights to the dynamic range detected. This comprehensive understanding of the scene captures the most important region of interest (e.g., from the viewer’s perspective) …

Interactive Recommendation Engine For Conversational Recommendations, Anonymous

Defensive Publications Series

The task of a traditional recommendation engine generally ends when it returns a list of possible answers to a user’s query, even if the user finds the answers unhelpful. Such a paradigm is incompatible with modern virtual assistants, where a user might request to filter, control, and modify results in an interactive conversational flow that is based on user context. This disclosure describes a conversational recommendation engine that provides an explanation of the recommendations provided to the user, proactively offers the user options to find better recommendations, asks personalized follow-up questions to ease the interaction, and enables the user to …

Improved Object Detection In An Image By Correcting Regions With Distortion, Ruiduo Yang, Yichang Shih, Chia-Kai Liang, Sam Hasinoff

Defensive Publications Series

This publication describes techniques and processes for correcting distortion in an image in order to improve object detection by an object detector on an imaging device. In order to avoid missing target objects (e.g., faces) in an image during object detection due to distortion, the object detector performs object detection on the image using a low-threshold value. A low-threshold value is associated with a lesser chance of missing target objects. The detection results are compared against regions of the image that are known to have distortion due to factors, such as a wide field of view (WFOV) lens of the …

Contextual Haptics For Wearable Devices, Jianxun Wang, Debanjan Mukherjee, Chun Yat Frank Li, Andrew Viny, Haechang Lee

Defensive Publications Series

Haptic feedback is an important feature for wearable devices such as watches, fitness bands, etc. Current techniques to provide hardware feedback either cannot generate specially customized haptic feedback, or are limited to predefined haptic effects, and are limited by the battery and peak power draw available on a wearable device.

This document describes context-aware haptics that take into account the user state while using the wearable device. With permission from the user, the user state or activity, e.g., sitting, walking, running, etc. is detected by analyzing sensor readings from inertial measurement unit (IMU) sensor(s) that are included in the wearable …

Ambient Hotword Detector To Facilitate Discovery And Use Of Relevant App Functions, Victor Carbune, Matthew Sharifi

Defensive Publications Series

Audio input and output is used in a wide variety of mobile applications that provide a visual user interface that enables users to provide input. Visual UI often includes a number of elements that may be difficult to discover or not immediately available to the user at a time when the user needs them.

This disclosure describes the use of a lightweight hotword detector to make relevant app UI elements easily distinguishable and discoverable at opportune times during voice calls and other interaction in which user-provided audio is available. User-facing visual UI elements within each app are tagged and associated …

Delegating Tasks To A Virtual Assistant Based On Anticipated Battery Life, Matthew Sharifi, Victor Carbune

Defensive Publications Series

When using a mobile device such as a smartphone, tablet, smartwatch, etc., users often encounter frustrating situations when the device runs out of battery charge. This disclosure describes techniques, implemented with user permission, to employ a virtual assistant to perform user-permitted tasks in case the device runs out of battery charge. The status of the remaining charge of the battery of a user’s device is determined. If the device is likely to run out of battery charge prior to one or more upcoming tasks, the user is provided a user interface to selectively permit a virtual assistant application to perform …

Optimizing Wlan Access Point Scans For Voims, Chinmay Dhodapkar, Amruth Ramachandran

Defensive Publications Series

WLAN-to-WLAN handover decisions and WLAN-to-WWAN handover decisions for a portable user device conducting a VoIMS call typically are based on a scan list that lists identified WLAN APs and their detected signal quality characteristics. The conventional approach of periodically updating the scan list can result in an out-of-date listing of available WLAN APs and their signal quality characteristics, which can result in sub-optimal handover decisions and thus a sub-optimal voice call experience. The handover decision process is improved by using other triggers to initiate an updated WLAN AP scan, including using activation of a dialer GUI or other indication that …

Vehicle-To-Infrastructure Contextual Emergency Event Classification, Scoring, And Response, Purvesh Sane, Hazim Dahir

Defensive Publications Series

Techniques are described herein for precisely determining conditions of accident patients, including assessing severity, determining a best trauma center, and deciding the best route to take to the trauma center. Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) contextual emergency event classification, scoring, and response may be achieved by obtaining speech or video input provided by an Emergency Medical Services (EMS) operator and running the input through a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) (for speech input) and/or a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) (for video input) to convert the input into keywords. The keywords can be run through a Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) to identify certain medical-specific keywords to …

Differentiated Retransmission In Wireless Mesh Networks, Pascal Thubert, Huimin She, Wenjia Wu, Feiliang Wang

Defensive Publications Series

Techniques are described herein for enabling diverse retries at a lower layer based on possibilities provided by routing operations. An anycast model is used to indicate a set of next hops and forwarding interfaces that enable indicating raw constraints such as bounded latency to perform a transmission.

Securing Connected And Autonomous Electric Vehicle (Caev) Fleets By Enforcing Authorized Charging, Yaron Sella

Defensive Publications Series

Provided herein are techniques for using charging events of connected, autonomous and electric vehicles (CAEVs) as an enforcement point in which an owner/operator of a vehicle gives authorization to the vehicle to proceed with the charging, and hence continue operating normally. Such techniques can be utilized for fleets of CAEVs.

Seat Adjustment With Rotary Pusher, Verena Blunder

Defensive Publications Series

No abstract provided.