Amazon.com

About: Amazon.com is a company organization based out in Seattle, Washington, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Computer science & Service (business). The organization has 13363 authors who have published 17317 publications receiving 266589 citations.

Method and system for electronic commerce using multiple roles

Abstract: A computer system for conducting electronic commerce. The system provides multiple electronic shopping carts for each user. Each electronic shopping cart has an indication of items currently within the electronic shopping cart and billing and shipment information. The system generates a display that identifies each of the electronic shopping carts and sends the generated display to a user computer system. The system then receives a selection of one of the identified electronic shopping carts from the user computer system and receives a selection of an item from the user computer system. In response to receiving the selection of the item, the system adds the item to the selected electronic shopping cart. The system then receives an indication to checkout the items in the selected electronic shopping cart from the user computer system. In response to receiving the indication to checkout, the system ships the items in the selected electronic shopping cart in accordance with the shipment information of the selected electronic shopping cart and bills for the items in the selected electronic shopping cart in accordance with the billing information for the selected electronic shopping cart. The system thus allows a user to select each of the electronic shopping carts for adding items to each electronic shopping cart.

Method and apparatus for data partitioning and replication in a searchable data service

Abstract: Method and apparatus for repartitioning and replication of a searchable index in a searchable data service. The searchable data service may provide a searchable index to a backend data store. The searchable index may be repartitioned, and a partition may be moved to another storage node, to allow the searchable index to grow beyond the limits of a single storage device. Repartitioning may also be performed to provide load-balancing of write requests. Partitions may be replicated across two or more storage nodes to provide redundancy, data durability, data availability and load balancing of read requests among the storage nodes and/or across data centers. In one embodiment, a lazy replication mechanism may be used in the replication of partitions. In one embodiment, replication may be performed using an anti-entropy protocol to replicate a partition, and a gossip protocol to update the replicated partition.

Dynamically migrating computer networks

Abstract: Techniques are described for providing capabilities to dynamically migrate computing nodes between two or more computer networks while the computer networks are in use, such as to dynamically and incrementally migrate an entire originating first computer network to a destination second computer network at a remote location. For example, the first computer network may include one or more physically connected computer networks, while the second computer network may be a virtual computer network at a remote geographical location (e.g., under control of a network-accessible service available to remote users). The provided capabilities may further include facilitating the ongoing operations of the originating first computer network while a subset of the first computer network computing nodes have been migrated to the remote destination second computer network, such as by forwarding communications between the first and second computer networks in a manner that is transparent to the various computing nodes.

Forest loss and fragmentation in the Amazon: implications for wildlife conservation.

Abstract: Amazonian forests are experiencing rapid, unprecedented changes that are having major impacts on wildlife, regional hydrology and the global climate. Rates of deforestation and logging have accelerated in recent years and patterns of forest loss are changing, with extensive new highways providing conduits for settlers and loggers into the heart of the Amazon basin. These myriad changes are causing widespread fragmentation of forests. Fragmented landscapes in the Amazon experience diverse changes in forest dynamics, structure, composition and microclimate, and are highly vulnerable to droughts and fires—alterations that negatively affect a wide variety of animal species. In human-dominated lands intensive hunting may interact synergistically with fragmentation to further threaten wildlife populations.

Geometric Rectification of Camera-Captured Document Images

Abstract: Compared to typical scanners, handheld cameras offer convenient, flexible, portable, and noncontact image capture, which enables many new applications and breathes new life into existing ones. However, camera-captured documents may suffer from distortions caused by a nonplanar document shape and perspective projection, which lead to the failure of current optical character recognition (OCR) technologies. We present a geometric rectification framework for restoring the frontal-flat view of a document from a single camera-captured image. Our approach estimates the 3D document shape from texture flow information obtained directly from the image without requiring additional 3D/metric data or prior camera calibration. Our framework provides a unified solution for both planar and curved documents and can be applied in many, especially mobile, camera-based document analysis applications. Experiments show that our method produces results that are significantly more OCR compatible than the original images.