A secure data interchange system enables information about bilateral and multilateral interactions between multiple persistent parties to be exchanged and leveraged within an environment that uses a combination of techniques to control access to information, release of information, and matching of information back to parties. Access to data records can be controlled using an associated price rule. A data owner can specify a price for different types and amounts of information access.

Secure data interchange

An intelligent automated assistant system engages with the user in an integrated, conversational manner using natural language dialog, and invokes external services when appropriate to obtain information or perform various actions. The system can be implemented using any of a number of different platforms, such as the web, email, smartphone, and the like, or any combination thereof. In one embodiment, the system is based on sets of interrelated domains and tasks, and employs additional functionally powered by external services with which the system can interact.

Intelligent Automated Assistant

The present invention teaches a variety of methods and systems for providing computer/human interfaces. According to one method, the user interfaces with an electronic device such as a computer system by engaging a sensor with desired regions of an encoded physical medium. The encoded physical medium is preferably chosen to provide intuitive meaning to the user, and is thus an improved metaphor for interfacing with the computer system. Suitable examples of the encoded physical medium include a data-linked book, magazine, globe, or article of clothing. Some or all of the selected regions have had certain information encoded therein, information suitable for interfacing and controlling the computer system. When the user engages the sensor with a region having certain encoded information, the certain encoded information is interpreted and an appropriate action taken. For example, the sensor or the computer system may provide suitable feedback to the user. The encoded physical medium may have text and/or graphic illustrations that draw the user in or provide meaningful clues or instructions perhaps related to the encoded information. The sensor may have at least one identification number (ID) providing information such as user identity, sensor type, access type, or language type. The sensor can transmit the certain decoded information together with the at least one ID to the computer system.

Methods and systems for providing human/computer interfaces

important problems involve clustering large datasets. Although naive implementations of clustering are computa- tionally expensive, there are established ecient techniques for clustering when the dataset has either (1) a limited num- ber of clusters, (2) a low feature dimensionality, or (3) a small number of data points. However, there has been much less work on methods of eciently clustering datasets that are large in all three ways at once|for example, having millions of data points that exist in many thousands of di- mensions representing many thousands of clusters. We present a new technique for clustering these large, high- dimensional datasets. The key idea involves using a cheap, approximate distance measure to eciently divide the data into overlapping subsets we call canopies .T hen cluster- ing is performed by measuring exact distances only between points that occur in a common canopy. Using canopies, large clustering problems that were formerly impossible become practical. Under reasonable assumptions about the cheap distance metric, this reduction in computational cost comes without any loss in clustering accuracy. Canopies can be applied to many domains and used with a variety of cluster- ing approaches, including Greedy Agglomerative Clustering, K-means and Expectation-Maximization. We present ex- perimental results on grouping bibliographic citations from the reference sections of research papers. Here the canopy approach reduces computation time over a traditional clus- tering approach by more than an order of magnitude and decreases error in comparison to a previously used algorithm by 25%.

http://dc-pubs.dbs.uni-leipzig.de/files/McCallum2000Efficientclusteringofhighdimensionaldatasetswith.pdf

Efficient clustering of high-dimensional data sets with application to reference matching

Systems and methods are provided for receiving speech and non-speech communications of natural language questions and/or commands, transcribing the speech and non-speech communications to textual messages, and executing the questions and/or commands. The invention applies context, prior information, domain knowledge, and user specific profile data to achieve a natural environment for one or more users presenting questions or commands across multiple domains. The systems and methods creates, stores and uses extensive personal profile information for each user, thereby improving the reliability of determining the context of the speech and non-speech communications and presenting the expected results for a particular question or command.

Systems and methods for responding to natural language speech utterance

An information retrieval system and method are provided in which an operator inputs one or more query words which are used to determine a search key for searching through a corpus of documents, and which returns any matches between the search key and the corpus of documents as a phrase containing the word data matching the query word(s), a non-stop (content) word next adjacent to the matching word data, and all intervening stop-words between the matching word data and the next adjacent non-stop word. The operator, after reviewing one or more of the returned phrases can then use one or more of the next adjacent non-stop-words as new query words to reformulate the search key and perform a subsequent search through the document corpus. This process can be conducted iteratively, until the appropriate documents of interest are located. The additional non-stop-words from each phrase are preferably aligned with each other (e.g., by columnation) to ease viewing of the "new" content words.

An iterative technique for phrase query formation and an information retrieval system employing same

Machine readable electronic domain definitions of part or all of the electronic domain descriptions of hardcopy documents and/or of part or all of the transforms that are performed to produce and reproduce such hardcopies documents are encoded in codes that are printed on such documents, thereby permitting the electronic domain descriptions of such documents and/or such transforms to be recovered more robustly and reliably when the information carried by such documents is transformed from the hardcopy domain to the electronic domain.

Hardcopy lossless data storage and communications for electronic document processing systems

The present invention is a method and apparatus for document clustering-based browsing of a corpus of documents, and more particularly to the use of overlapping clusters to improve recall. The present invention is directed to improving the performance of information access methods and apparatus through the use of non-disjoint (overlapped) clustering operations. The present invention is further described in terms of two possible methods for expanding document clusters so as to achieve the overlap, and a method for increasing precision through the use of the overlapped clusters.

Method and apparatus for information access employing overlapping clusters

A system, computer readable medium and method for searching for recently altered documents on the World Wide Web is provided. The method selects a server to be searched or crawled by a Web crawler based on a user selected ranking. Servers are ranked by a filter program which compares a user query with the content of a server and the frequency in which content is altered. A top percentage of ranked servers are crawled and the recently altered information, such as hyperlinks, are then provided to the user.

User query generate search results that rank set of servers where ranking is based on comparing content on each server with user query, frequency at which content on each server is altered using web crawler in a search engine

Regions of a document such as sentences and blocks of sentences are scored and classified based upon their scores. An abstract of the document can be formed from the classified sentences. Sentences are classified by the use of words classified as stop words and vanish words. Sentences are scored based on the number of stop words and the number of strings of connected stop words, called stop-word runs, contained in the sentence. Passionate sentences, which usually contain information which the writer has strong feelings about, such as joy, admiration, or sadness, are identified. This method can also select sentences that are contrapassionate, which the writer may either have to strengthen or have inserted to complete the record and provide continuity or information.

Jan O Pedersen

Papers

An iterative technique for phrase query formation and an information retrieval system employing same

Hardcopy lossless data storage and communications for electronic document processing systems

Method and apparatus for information access employing overlapping clusters

User query generate search results that rank set of servers where ranking is based on comparing content on each server with user query, frequency at which content on each server is altered using web crawler in a search engine

Method and apparatus for automatic document summarization