Digital Commons Network^™

Maximum Power Point Tracking Using A Dc-Dc Converter Coupled To Photovoltaic Cells And A Battery, Anonymous

Defensive Publications Series

Solar arrays provide power to loads and should ideally be operated at their maximum power point (MPP) to optimize the power output from the solar arrays under various environmental and operating conditions. Maximum power point tracking (MPPT) techniques control operating conditions so that the solar arrays are at or near the MPP. However, MPPT configurations use a DC-DC converter that contributes to power loss. The DC-DC converter in the disclosed configuration is relocated to a position in front of a battery, so that the power loss contributed by the DC-DC converter is reduced. A switch is also coupled across the …

Peer Node Eviction In Wireless Mesh Networks, Javier Cardona

Defensive Publications Series

Wireless mesh networks that include large numbers of peer nodes pose problems for routing frameworks. Multicast messages used for peer discovery can get dropped and synchronization of data between peer nodes does not scale to large numbers of peer nodes. A peer eviction technique for selective eviction of peer nodes is described. The technique can be used to limit the number of nodes for a wireless mesh network. Peer nodes are selected for eviction based on node-specific metrics. The technique ensures stability of the network by restricting the eviction rate and by adjustments to signal thresholds used to evaluate nodes …

Person Identification And Displaying Ar Banners, Anonymous

Defensive Publications Series

A technique for identifying a person and displaying a banner using Augmented Reality (AR) is described. The person is identified by comparing data gathered from orientation sensors such as gyroscope, accelerometer, etc., present in a smartphone of the person with estimated sensor data of the person (e.g. approximate readings of orientation sensors of the smartphone are estimated basis person’s motion/movement, which is detected by analyzing images of the person). Finally, AR is used to display an AR banner or an AR bubble (a 3D object) on top of the identified person. The AR banner or the AR bubble may be …

A Wearable Emotion Detection And Video/Image Recording System, Anonymous

Defensive Publications Series

A system for sensing an important event/occasion and automatic capturing of video/image is disclosed. The system detects important event/occasion by analyzing physiological signals and derives corresponding emotional state of a user. The system includes a wearable computing device having an emotion recognition system, a sensor array and a capturing device. Alternatively, the sensor array may be attached to the arm of the user when it is not integrated with the wearable computing device. The capturing device starts recording a video/image of surroundings if an event/occasion is detected. The user presets settings of the capturing device, which includes shutter speed, aperture, …

Airspeed Measurement Device For Slow Aircraft

Defensive Publications Series

A device, system, and method for measuring the airspeed of a slow moving aircraft are disclosed. The device comprises a pitot tube at the end of a rotating arm. When installed on an aircraft, the pitot tube is exposed to a relative wind that is the result of the sum of the speed due to rotation and the forward speed of the aircraft. The pressure is turned into an electrical signal by a pressure sensor. This pressure sensor’s output is processed by an electronic unit which extracts the aircraft’s airspeed, ignoring the speed due to rotation. The difference between the …

Verifying Authenticity Of Digital Images Using Digital Signatures, Neil Dhillon, Tanmay Wadhwa

Defensive Publications Series

This disclosure describes techniques to verify the authenticity of digital images using digital signatures. A secure element on a client device generates a public-private key pair and the public key is uploaded to a server. When a new image is captured by the client device, the device hashes the image and signs the hashed result using the private key to form a digital signature. Both the original image and digital signature are uploaded to the server. The server hashes the original image and compares it to the digital signature that has been decrypted using the appropriate stored public key. A …

Performance Delay Measurement And Fault Detection Of Sr / Srv6 Te Policies In Software Defined Networks, Clarence Filsfils, Rakesh Gandhi, Tarek Saad, Patrick Khordoc, Sagar Soni

Defensive Publications Series

Mechanisms are provided for Performance Measurement (PM) Delay Measurement (DM) as well as Fault Detection (FD) for Traffic Engineering (TE) Segment Routing (SR) policies (applicable to both SR-MPLS and SRv6 data-planes) in Software Defined Networks (SDN). For an SR policy, end-to-end atomic paths are "dynamically" computed using adjacency SIDs (or prefix SIDs in some cases) of all its ECMP paths by the path computation process running locally or on a controller. Key of the atomic path based on IP address of each hop is used for Telemetry, histogram and Client notification. The PM probe messages (or FD messages) are injected …

Visual Match Of Emails Or Landing Pages To Detect Phishing, Kuntal Sengupta, Vijay Eranti

Defensive Publications Series

In a phishing attack, a perpetrator attempts to obtain the online credentials of a user by impersonating a trusted entity such as a bank, email service provider, etc. Sophisticated phishers attempt to deceive spam filters by structuring the visual look-and-feel of their fake emails to be nearly but not precisely identical to emails sent by a trusted entity, such that the spam filter allows the fake email to reach a user’s inbox.

This disclosure applies machine-learning based techniques to assess the visual similarity of genuine and phished emails (or landing pages) for a given brand. The techniques detect visual near-duplicates …

Using Machine Learning To Improve Image Storage And Recall, Mary Witkowski, Kristina Bohl, Raja Ratna Murthy Ayyagar

Defensive Publications Series

Photographs taken using mobile devices are uploaded to image storage and sharing services at a resolution, server location, and upload priority that is blind to the importance of the photo to the user. This is sub-optimal, as there are images of great importance to a user (e.g., wedding photos) that are better uploaded at high priority and resolution. Similarly, there are images (e.g., screenshots, photos of receipts, etc.) that are not very important and can be uploaded at lower priority and resolution.

With user permission, the techniques of this disclosure use machine learning to predict the importance of an image …

Spatially Optimized Wireless Multicast Networks With Guaranteed Bit-Rate, Paul Heninwolf, Daniel Fernandes Barros

Defensive Publications Series

Multicasting is a mode of transmission in which the same information is relayed to a subset of users. Delivering the same information to multiple users of the subset via a series of one-to-one (unicast) transmissions quickly exhausts bandwidth. Delivering information in a series of one-to-all (broadcast) transmissions such that each subset receives its information in a round-robin manner causes latency, or equivalently, a reduction in bandwidth.

The techniques of this disclosure estimate the angular locations of each multicast subset using channel state information received across an antenna array. The locations are clustered using machine learning models. The available transmit power …

Guided Capture For Improved Composition Of Group Photographs, Zoltan Egyed

Defensive Publications Series

When a group of individuals want to get a photograph of the entire group, it is common to request a bystander to do so. However, strangers are generally unaware of the preferences for photo composition specific to the group or to the camera owner. The result is often an unsatisfactory group photograph due to incorrect camera orientation, zoom, or other parameters. Per techniques of this disclosure, one of the persons of a group of the group takes an initial reference photograph of the remaining members of the group with the desired background. The person hands over the camera to a …

Remote Ranging Using Vibrations And Ultrasonic Transmission, N/A

Defensive Publications Series

This disclosure addresses the problem of ranging or imaging a remote environment, e.g., a remote conference room, using audio equipment present at the remote location. Ultrasonic waves are transmitted, e.g., via standard telecommunication channels, from the near end to the remote location, and their reflections off objects at the remote location are received at the near end. The reflections are used to reconstruct the remote environment and form an ultrasonic signature. The techniques of this disclosure can be used to secure a phone call, e.g., to verify the identity of the remote party; verify the remote location; differentiate humans from …

Measuring End-To-End Latency Of Fingerprint Authenticators, Jose Rodriguez, Firas Sammoura

Defensive Publications Series

The techniques of this disclosure enable accurate measurement of end-to-end latency of a fingerprint sensor, e.g., of a mobile device. A touch sensor in proximity to the fingerprint sensor is coupled to an oscilloscope. A photodiode in proximity to the screen of the device is coupled to another channel of the same oscilloscope. An accelerometer attached to the device to measure device vibrations, and is coupled to yet another channel of the same oscilloscope. The oscilloscope logs the signals generated by the touch sensor, the photodiode, and the accelerometer. An accept decision results in the brightening of the device screen …

Handcrafting Visual Features Of Emails Or Landing Pages To Detect Phishing, Kuntal Sengupta, Vijay Eranti

Defensive Publications Series

In a phishing attack, a perpetrator attempts to obtain the online credentials of a user by impersonating a trusted entity such as a bank, email service provider, etc. Sophisticated phishers attempt to deceive spam filters by structuring the visual look-and-feel of their fake emails to be nearly but not precisely identical to emails sent by a trusted entity, such that spam filters allow the fake email to reach a user’s inbox.

This disclosure describes use of hand-crafted visual features of emails or landing pages, and classification based on earth-mover’s distance, to assess the visual similarity of genuine and phished emails. …

Mixed Reality Interaction With Physical Keyboard, Anonymous

Defensive Publications Series

Performing certain operations when viewing an application via virtual reality devices, such as VR glasses, can be cumbersome. This disclosure utilizes a mixed reality display to provide application-specific virtual overlays for a physical keyboard. User interface elements of the application currently active are identified and displayed as virtual overlays atop a physical keyboard. The overlay matches the UI elements displayed by the application icons and allows the user to activate a UI element by simply pressing a physical key. The virtual overlay provides a contextual keyboard and can be utilized for fast navigation, accessing system functions, setting up shortcuts, playing …

Automatic Removal Of Artifacts In 360° Videos, Anonymous

Defensive Publications Series

Many 360°videos captured using a camera rig and tripod setup have artifacts related to the tripod that the rig is attached to. This disclosure describes automatic removal of such artifacts by use of machine learning techniques. Portions of the video that include artifacts are detected and removed automatically using trained machine learning model(s). The ML models are trained to recognize production equipment based on videos captured in neutral environments or based on markers on the production equipment. The detected artifacts are automatically replaced based on the context and ensuring that the resultant video is stable.

Projection Agnostic Quality Metric For 360° Images, Anonymous

Defensive Publications Series

Comparison of image quality for 360° images and videos that utilize different projections are difficult. This disclosure provides a reliable quality metric for 360° images/ videos, irrespective of the projection used. The 360° image for which the quality metric is to be computed is converted into a spherical representation. The surface of the sphere is peeled to produce overlapping loops that are rectangular in structure. A quality metric is determined by utilizing the block-based technique of SSIM to compute scores for blocks of the image and choosing a percentile based on the scores of the blocks of an image.

User Identification Across Online Providers, Anonymous

Defensive Publications Series

This disclosure describes construction of a user identification model based on confirmed user data obtained from different providers. The user identification model is usable by individual providers to provide missing pieces of user-specific data. An identification server maintains user data that includes globally unique user identifiers. The user data can be utilized to match user actions across different online providers and to perform analyses based on matched actions.

Selective Content Delivery Based On Content Emotion, Anonymous

Defensive Publications Series

Content items and associated criteria for delivery are received by a server from content provider. The server provides online services such as social networking, media hosting and sharing websites, news, etc. The server extracts content features from the content items using text extraction, image processing and other techniques. The server determines a content emotion associated with the content by applying trained machine-learning models. The server selects content items based on the content emotion, detected user emotion of a requesting user, and the criteria associated with different content items. Selected content items are delivered to a requesting user in a ranked …

Attribute Prediction Based On Online Connections, Anonymous

Defensive Publications Series

Techniques to predict attributes for a user or user group are described. User profiles and connections to other users are analyzed to determine user groups such as a household. Clusters are formed based on matching attributes of similar user groups. Available databases are queried using the user group identifiers to obtain a group-wide attribute value, e.g., household income, for a subset of user groups of a cluster. The obtained values are used to predict missing attribute values that were not found in the database, after adjusting for variations between user groups, such as a number of users in the group. …

User Emotion Based Selective Delivery Of Content, Anonymous

Defensive Publications Series

User interaction with a server that provides online services such as social networking, media hosting and sharing websites, news, etc. is detected. The user interaction and other data such as user profile information is analyzed using machine-learning models trained to detect emotion. Available content items, such as user-provided content items and sponsored content items, are matched to the detected emotion based on various criteria to select and deliver particular content items to deliver to the requesting user. The described techniques for selection and delivery of content items based on detected emotion enable delivery of content items that have a high …

Smart Text Tool For Capturing And Sharing Visual Content

Defensive Publications Series

A system, method and computer readable media to facilitate capturing and sharing images through a device application is disclosed. The application includes smart and AR text tools for automatically placing the text in the image and choosing the color or the background of the text based on one or more rules. The rules may be based on analysis of the image such as facial recognition, contrast detection, color detection and content detection. The application additionally includes an augmented reality text filter for text placement on a capture screen. The AR text tool allows user to add expressive motion elements to …

Automated Augmented Reality Context Stickers

Defensive Publications Series

The disclosure relates to a method, system and computer readable media for automatically placing relevant augmented reality (AR) stickers in user’s field of view on opening a device application. The method places dynamic location, weather or time stickers on the ground plane or above the field of view, once the user opens the camera and also during the capture flow of moments. The user may either flick or dismiss them, or press-and-hold the stickers to move them to a desired position and then capture. The method brings the most used 2D post-capture sticker learnings to life automatically. The method gives …

Capture Modes, Filters And Frames For Visual Content

Defensive Publications Series

A system, method, and computer readable media are disclosed for performing swipe operations to edit visual content. The device application may include a smart feature to provide a plurality of subtle filters and/or frames for easy post-capture use with a swipe. The swipe filters and/or frames may be customized based on geographic location or nationality. Subtle filters with skin smoothing or improved lighting effects and boost filters may be used. Frames may be based on a location or city, or time - a day of week or time of day or relevant holiday frame may be used. The filters enhance …

Tool For Measuring End To End Latency, Michal Kielan, Jose M. Gonzalez, Michal Godek

Defensive Publications Series

A system, method, and computer readable media for measuring end to end (e2e) latency in a video calling system is disclosed. The latency measuring system includes a video calling system having at least two user devices that may be connected over a network, one or more external cameras, a device producing luminescence and a computing device. The camera is placed in front of each of the user devices and is configured to record the video call in both the devices. The luminescence device may be turned on for a short moment during the recording of the video call. The system …

Streaming Rate Based Playback Speed Control For Live Video

Defensive Publications Series

A system, method, and computer readable media for automatically varying the playback speed of live media content to match the measured streaming rate is disclosed. The system includes one or more live streaming devices, host devices or server, and client playback devices connected through a network. The method includes running an application configured to display an interface for accessing the built-in camera functionalities and for posting live feeds to an online system at the broadcaster side and viewing the live stream on the client side. The system includes a smart speed control module configured to automatically limit the rate of …

Simulating Web Page Loading Performance, Patrick Hulce

Defensive Publications Series

Determining the load time for a web page in any specific environment can be challenging and slow owing to the diversity of devices and network types. This disclosure provides techniques to estimate the loading time of a web page in a given environment via simulation of a dependency graph constructed by tracking the page loading process in any available environment. The simulated traversal activates a node only when all of its dependencies in the graph have completed. The time taken for node completion in the simulation is varied depending on the corresponding estimate for the target environment in which the …

On-Device Analytics: Data Collection, Representation, And Feedback Loop, Vishal Murgai, Nikul Bhatt, Srinivas Addanki

Defensive Publications Series

Described herein are techniques for a Machine Learning (ML) model to learn from a training set and predict the cause of a failure accurately. Although it is challenging for a human to identify the root cause of an issue when configuration and show command outputs are very large (e.g., for thousands of Internet Protocol (IP) routes), troubleshooting on a network device typically has to rely on a manual process with the help of some show commands.

Advertising Software/Security Usage Descriptions With Policy Response, Eliot Lear, Brian Weis, Chris Steck, Nancy Cam-Winget

Defensive Publications Series

Techniques are provided for an organization-maintained server which takes three inputs: (1) a set of Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) from Internet of Things (IoT) devices, each of which point to a manifest; (2) a set of manifests resolved from the URIs; and (3) a set of threat feeds. The server periodically compares the vulnerabilities in the threat feeds to the manifests. When a vulnerability is found, steps are taken to protect the rest of the network from the vulnerable devices until they can be remediated.

Obfuscation And Anonymization Techniques For Network Data Sets For Machine Learning, Ralf Rantzau, Sebastian Jeuk, Gonzalo Salgueiro

Defensive Publications Series

Techniques are described herein for securing data used for a machine learning algorithm. The frequency or top-k values calculated over time of the respective network traffic feature data sets are used instead of the actual data or a set thereof (this can also be extended to any other data sets). Here, the frequency represents the actual data and thereby obfuscates potential sensitive information that should not be used within an oftentimes shared cloud machine learning application.