Patent application number | Description | Published |
20090073033 | LEARNING A USER'S ACTIVITY PREFERENCES FROM GPS TRACES AND KNOWN NEARBY VENUES - A method for inferring activities to a user is provided. The system receives at least one location trace and corresponding contextual information. The system then derives a set of venues based on a venue database, wherein a respective hypothetical visit is associated with the contextual information corresponding to the location trace. The system derives a set of activity types associated with a context based on the venues, the corresponding context indicated by the location trace, and a venue-to-activity mapping. In addition, the system receives a user query context and identifies a number of activity types of which the associated contextual information is similar to the user query context. The system further weights a respective identified activity type based on its associated context's similarity to the user query context, normalizes weights associated with each identified activity type, and produces an activity-type probability distribution, thereby facilitating inferring activities associated with the user. | 03-19-2009 |
20090076997 | RECOMMENDER SYSTEM WITH AD-HOC, DYNAMIC MODEL COMPOSITION - One embodiment of the present invention provides recommender system for generating a recommendation of an item by combining a set of utility models adaptively to facilitate a decision-making process. The system includes a utility model database containing the set of utility models and a query module for receiving at least one query about the item from a querying entity. The system also includes a rule engine to specify a subset of utility models to be applied to the item and to specify a weight function of the specified utility models. Further included in the system is a set generator coupled to the utility model database, the query module, and the rule engine. The set generator computes a set of ratings by applying each of the utility model in the subset to the item and generates an overall rating for the item based on the weight function. The system further a communication module to return the overall rating. | 03-19-2009 |
20090077000 | METHOD AND SYSTEM TO PREDICT AND RECOMMEND FUTURE GOAL-ORIENTED ACTIVITY - One embodiment of the present invention provides a method for recommending activities to a user. During operation, the system determines an activity-type distribution based on the user's personal profile and/or population prior information, thereby facilitating prediction of future activities for the user. The system further searches for and receives one or more activities based on the activity-type distribution. The system then scores each received activity and recommends a number of activities to be performed by the user in the future and a number of corresponding venues, based on the activity-type distribution and the weight distribution. | 03-19-2009 |
20090077057 | MIXED-MODEL RECOMMENDER FOR LEISURE ACTIVITIES - One embodiment of the present invention provides a method for recommending leisure activities to a user. During operation, the system receives at least one query for leisure activities. The system then determines a collaborative filtering score of a candidate activity based on a collaborative filtering model, a soft query score for the candidate activity based on a soft query model, a content preference score for the candidate activity based on a content preference model and the user's past behavior, and a distance score for the candidate activity based on a distance model. Next, the system generates a composite score for the candidate activity by calculating a weighted average of the collaborative filtering score, the soft query score, the content preference score, and the distance score. The system further returns a recommendation list containing the activities with the highest composite scores. | 03-19-2009 |
20090193099 | METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR AUTOMATICALLY INCORPORATING HYPOTHETICAL CONTEXT INFORMATION INTO RECOMMENDATION QUERIES - A system facilitates automatically determining the hypothetical context information or the distribution of hypothetical contexts. During operation, the system receives a request from a user for one or more recommendations. The system also receives a current context substantially associated with the request. The system then determines a hypothetical context for the request, wherein the hypothetical context may be determined by considering several sources of information, including but not limited to the current context, past contexts, and relationships between the current context and past contexts. Next, the system determines one or more recommendations for the user based on the hypothetical context. Finally, the system returns the one or more recommendations to the user. | 07-30-2009 |
20110137927 | METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR AUTOMATICALLY INCORPORATING HYPOTHETICAL CONTEXT INFORMATION INTO RECOMMENDATION QUERIES - A system facilitates automatically determining the hypothetical context information or the distribution of hypothetical contexts. During operation, the system receives a request from a user for one or more recommendations. The system also receives a current context substantially associated with the request. The system then determines a hypothetical context for the request, wherein the hypothetical context may be determined by considering several sources of information, including but not limited to the current context, past contexts, and relationships between the current context and past contexts. Next, the system determines one or more recommendations for the user based on the hypothetical context. Finally, the system returns the one or more recommendations to the user. | 06-09-2011 |
20130123949 | USING MODEL COMMUNICATION AS A PROTOCOL IN A MANAGED ELECTRICAL SYSTEM - One embodiment of the present invention provides managing component driver for an energy-management system that manages energy within a predominantly closed power system. The component driver includes a receiving mechanism configured to receive current status information for a component associated with the component driver, a model-construction mechanism configured to construct a performance model for the component, and a transmitting mechanism configured to transmit the performance model to an optimization and control module. | 05-16-2013 |
20130123993 | HIERARCHICAL MODEL COMMUNICATION AND CONTROL IN A MANAGED ELECTRICAL SYSTEM - One embodiment of the present invention provides an energy-management system for managing energy within a predominantly closed power system. The system includes an upper-level energy-management module, at least one lower-level energy-management module coupled to the upper-level energy-management module, and at least one component coupled to the lower-level energy-management module. The component is configured to provide a performance model associated with the component to the lower-level energy-management module. The lower-level energy-management module is configured to provide an aggregated model to the upper-level energy-management module. | 05-16-2013 |
20130123994 | USING PLANNING TO CONTROL DEMAND RESPONSE AND SUPPLY CHOICES IN A MANAGED ELECTRICAL SYSTEM - One embodiment of the present invention provides an energy-management system for managing energy within a predominantly closed power system. The system includes an identifying mechanism configured to identify a number of components coupled to the energy-management system, a receiving mechanism configured to receive current status information of the components, an evaluating mechanism configured to evaluate future energy need, a planning mechanism configured to plan future energy activities based on the energy need and the current status information, and a controlling mechanism configured to control operations of the components based on the planned energy activities. | 05-16-2013 |
20130124002 | STAGGERING AND FEATHERING OF DEMAND RESPONSE AND ENERGY SUPPLY CHANGE IN A MANAGED ELECTRICAL SYSTEM - One embodiment of the present invention provides an energy-management system for managing energy within a predominantly closed power system. During operation, the system obtains one or more control actions that control energy transitions of a plurality of components, receives transitional characteristics associated with the components, and schedules the energy transitions by generating a set of offsets. A respective offset results in a delay of at least one energy transition. | 05-16-2013 |
20130218825 | AUTOMATICALLY TRIGGERING PREDICTIONS IN RECOMMENDATION SYSTEMS BASED ON AN ACTIVITY-PROBABILITY THRESHOLD - A recommender system determines a probability threshold for an activity-prediction model, and uses the probability threshold to predict whether a user is performing a target activity. To determine the probability threshold, the system computes a set of activity probabilities based on contextual information for a set of historical activities, and based on an activity-prediction model for a target activity. The system then compares a set of probability thresholds with the set of activity probabilities to determine a prediction success rate for each probability threshold. The system computes a utility score for each probability threshold based on the prediction success rates and a utility function, and selects a probability threshold whose utility score is optimal amongst the utility scores of the set of thresholds and greater than or equal to a baseline utility score. The system then assigns the probability threshold to the activity-prediction model. | 08-22-2013 |
20130226856 | PERFORMANCE-EFFICIENT SYSTEM FOR PREDICTING USER ACTIVITIES BASED ON TIME-RELATED FEATURES - A recommender system uses an activity decision tree to model the changes in a user's behavior according to a plurality of time-related features. The system determines historical activities for the user, and generates a decision tree for the user's historical activities. Each leaf node of the decision tree is associated with an activity-prediction model that computes a probability for a corresponding activity. The system selects a path of the decision tree from a root node to a leaf node of the decision tree based on a target time. The selected path traverses two or more non-leaf nodes that are each associated with a temporal decision model that compares the target time against a temporal classifier. The system then determines a probability for a user activity based on an activity-prediction model of the selected path. | 08-29-2013 |
20130308003 | FLASH CHARACTERIZATION FOR CAMERA | 11-21-2013 |
20130308004 | DETECTION OF NEAR-FIELD CAMERA OBSTRUCTION | 11-21-2013 |
20130335579 | DETECTION OF CAMERA MISALIGNMENT - A camera system ( | 12-19-2013 |
20140079280 | AUTOMATIC DETECTION OF PERSISTENT CHANGES IN NATURALLY VARYING SCENES - A method for detecting a persistent change in a dynamically varying scene includes: obtaining a set of reference images of the scene; transforming the reference images into an abstract feature space; classifying pixels of the reference images in the abstract feature space; generating a stable reduced-reference image based on the classifications of corresponding pixels; obtaining a set of test images of the scene; transforming the test images into the abstract feature space; classifying pixels of the test images in the abstract feature space; generating a stable test image based on the classifications of corresponding pixels; and comparing the stable reduced-reference and test images to one another to detect a difference therein, the difference corresponding to a persistent change in the dynamically varying scene occurring between when the reference images and the test images were obtained. | 03-20-2014 |
20140122483 | SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR DETERMINING A DURATION FOR USER ACTIVITIES BASED ON SOCIAL-NETWORK EVENTS - An activity-modeling system computes an amount of time that a user is expected to spend when performing activities of a certain type. During operation, the system can obtain a plurality of location events associated with the user, such that a respective location event indicates a time at which a user logged his location while performed an activity related to the activity type. The system selects, from the plurality of location events, a set of location events associated with the activity type. The system determines an activity start-time and an activity end-time for the activity type from the set of location events, and computes an activity-duration time for the activity type based on the determined activity start-time and the activity end-time. | 05-01-2014 |
20140181214 | GENERATION-BASED UPDATE CACHING FOR ROBUST SCALABLE DISTRIBUTED GIBBS SAMPLING - A system includes a plurality of processors programmed to perform distributed, iterative computations on aggregate statistics of a data set. Each of the processors maintains global statistics describing the data set. The processors are programmed to iteratively perform a plurality of Gibbs sampling sweeps over a corresponding subset of the data set to update the corresponding global statistics. The processors are further programmed to maintain differential vectors representing the changes made to the global statistics by local computation. These can be broadcast to other processors to create a consistent global statistic across processors. The differential vectors can be saved for a number of past generations to provide updates for slow processors, processors that have been down for some time and newly added processors to the network. Additional methods are described for efficiently compressing multiple differential vector updates in to a smaller number of equally informative updates. | 06-26-2014 |
20140258186 | Generic Programming for Diagnostic Models - A system for compiling a machine operable diagnostic system includes a header unit, a component unit, an effects unit, a test unit, and an instantiation unit. The header unit identifies general properties of a system from a generic description in an electronic format which includes at least one category of a plurality of variations. The component unit identifies a plurality of components of a modeled system from the generic description, and adds and separates the plurality of variations to the plurality of components, and each identified component includes at least one type of failure and a probability of the at least one type of failure. The effects unit identifies from the generic description a plurality of observable effects, each observable effect corresponding to at least one type of failure for at least one component. The test unit identifies from the generic description a plurality of tests and test outcomes designed to elicit the observable effects. The instantiation unit constructs a procedural instantiation of the machine operable diagnostic system based on the general properties, the identified components, the identified observable effects, and the identified tests and test outcomes. | 09-11-2014 |
20140289733 | SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR EFFICIENT TASK SCHEDULING IN HETEROGENEOUS, DISTRIBUTED COMPUTE INFRASTRUCTURES VIA PERVASIVE DIAGNOSIS - A system and method schedules jobs in a cluster of compute nodes. A job with an unknown resource requirement profile is received. The job includes a plurality of tasks. Execution of some of the plurality of tasks is scheduled on compute nodes of the cluster with differing capability profiles. Timing information regarding execution time of the scheduled tasks is received. A resource requirement profile for the job is inferred based on the received timing information and the differing capability profiles. Execution of remaining tasks of the job is scheduled on the compute nodes of the cluster using the resource requirement profile. | 09-25-2014 |
20140325643 | DETECTING ANOMALIES IN WORK PRACTICE DATA BY COMBINING MULTIPLE DOMAINS OF INFORMATION - One embodiment of the present invention provides a system for multi-domain clustering. During operation, the system collects domain data for at least two domains associated with users, wherein a domain is a source of data describing observable activities of a user. Next, the system estimates a probability distribution for a domain associated with the user. The system also estimates a probability distribution for a second domain associated with the user. Then, the system analyzes the domain data with a multi-domain probability model that includes variables for two or more domains to determine a probability distribution of each domain associated with the probability model and to assign users to clusters associated with user roles. | 10-30-2014 |
20140337264 | SCALABLE SPATIOTEMPORAL CLUSTERING OF HETEROGENEOUS EVENTS - One embodiment of the present invention provides a system for clustering heterogeneous events. During operation, the system finds a partition of events into clusters such that each cluster includes a set of events. In addition, the system estimates probability distributions for various properties of events associated with each cluster. The system obtains heterogeneous event data, and analyzes the heterogeneous event data to determine the distribution of event properties associated with clusters and to assign events to clusters. | 11-13-2014 |
20140365404 | HIGH-LEVEL SPECIALIZATION LANGUAGE FOR SCALABLE SPATIOTEMPORAL PROBABILISTIC MODELS - One embodiment of the present invention provides a system for clustering heterogeneous events using user-provided constraints. During operation, the system estimates, based on a probabilistic model, a distribution of events across clusters such that each cluster includes a set of events. Next, the system estimates a probability distribution for an event property associated with each cluster. The system receives heterogeneous event data, and analyzes the heterogeneous event data to determine the probability distribution of event properties of clusters and to assign events to clusters. The system receives user input specifying the user-provided constraints for specializing the probabilistic model, and performs at least one of: re-computing the assignment of events to clusters, and re-determining the probability distribution of event properties of clusters based on the user input. | 12-11-2014 |