US20060020662A1 - Enabling recommendations and community by massively-distributed nearest-neighbor searching - Google Patents

Enabling recommendations and community by massively-distributed nearest-neighbor searching Download PDF

Info

Publication number
US20060020662A1
US20060020662A1 US11/230,274 US23027405A US2006020662A1 US 20060020662 A1 US20060020662 A1 US 20060020662A1 US 23027405 A US23027405 A US 23027405A US 2006020662 A1 US2006020662 A1 US 2006020662A1
Authority
US
United States
Prior art keywords
user
java
apr
users
jsp
Prior art date
Legal status (The legal status is an assumption and is not a legal conclusion. Google has not performed a legal analysis and makes no representation as to the accuracy of the status listed.)
Abandoned
Application number
US11/230,274
Inventor
Gary Robinson
Current Assignee (The listed assignees may be inaccurate. Google has not performed a legal analysis and makes no representation or warranty as to the accuracy of the list.)
Emergent Music LLC
Original Assignee
Emergent Music LLC
Priority date (The priority date is an assumption and is not a legal conclusion. Google has not performed a legal analysis and makes no representation as to the accuracy of the date listed.)
Filing date
Publication date
Application filed by Emergent Music LLC filed Critical Emergent Music LLC
Priority to US11/230,274 priority Critical patent/US20060020662A1/en
Publication of US20060020662A1 publication Critical patent/US20060020662A1/en
Priority to US11/974,634 priority patent/US7783249B2/en
Priority to US12/806,856 priority patent/US8190082B2/en
Priority to US13/479,546 priority patent/US20130040556A1/en
Abandoned legal-status Critical Current

Links

Images

Classifications

    • GPHYSICS
    • G06COMPUTING; CALCULATING OR COUNTING
    • G06QINFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY [ICT] SPECIALLY ADAPTED FOR ADMINISTRATIVE, COMMERCIAL, FINANCIAL, MANAGERIAL OR SUPERVISORY PURPOSES; SYSTEMS OR METHODS SPECIALLY ADAPTED FOR ADMINISTRATIVE, COMMERCIAL, FINANCIAL, MANAGERIAL OR SUPERVISORY PURPOSES, NOT OTHERWISE PROVIDED FOR
    • G06Q30/00Commerce
    • G06Q30/02Marketing; Price estimation or determination; Fundraising
    • GPHYSICS
    • G06COMPUTING; CALCULATING OR COUNTING
    • G06FELECTRIC DIGITAL DATA PROCESSING
    • G06F15/00Digital computers in general; Data processing equipment in general
    • G06F15/16Combinations of two or more digital computers each having at least an arithmetic unit, a program unit and a register, e.g. for a simultaneous processing of several programs
    • GPHYSICS
    • G06COMPUTING; CALCULATING OR COUNTING
    • G06QINFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY [ICT] SPECIALLY ADAPTED FOR ADMINISTRATIVE, COMMERCIAL, FINANCIAL, MANAGERIAL OR SUPERVISORY PURPOSES; SYSTEMS OR METHODS SPECIALLY ADAPTED FOR ADMINISTRATIVE, COMMERCIAL, FINANCIAL, MANAGERIAL OR SUPERVISORY PURPOSES, NOT OTHERWISE PROVIDED FOR
    • G06Q10/00Administration; Management
    • GPHYSICS
    • G06COMPUTING; CALCULATING OR COUNTING
    • G06QINFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY [ICT] SPECIALLY ADAPTED FOR ADMINISTRATIVE, COMMERCIAL, FINANCIAL, MANAGERIAL OR SUPERVISORY PURPOSES; SYSTEMS OR METHODS SPECIALLY ADAPTED FOR ADMINISTRATIVE, COMMERCIAL, FINANCIAL, MANAGERIAL OR SUPERVISORY PURPOSES, NOT OTHERWISE PROVIDED FOR
    • G06Q10/00Administration; Management
    • G06Q10/10Office automation; Time management
    • G06Q10/107Computer-aided management of electronic mailing [e-mailing]
    • HELECTRICITY
    • H04ELECTRIC COMMUNICATION TECHNIQUE
    • H04LTRANSMISSION OF DIGITAL INFORMATION, e.g. TELEGRAPHIC COMMUNICATION
    • H04L12/00Data switching networks
    • HELECTRICITY
    • H04ELECTRIC COMMUNICATION TECHNIQUE
    • H04LTRANSMISSION OF DIGITAL INFORMATION, e.g. TELEGRAPHIC COMMUNICATION
    • H04L51/00User-to-user messaging in packet-switching networks, transmitted according to store-and-forward or real-time protocols, e.g. e-mail
    • HELECTRICITY
    • H04ELECTRIC COMMUNICATION TECHNIQUE
    • H04LTRANSMISSION OF DIGITAL INFORMATION, e.g. TELEGRAPHIC COMMUNICATION
    • H04L51/00User-to-user messaging in packet-switching networks, transmitted according to store-and-forward or real-time protocols, e.g. e-mail
    • H04L51/52User-to-user messaging in packet-switching networks, transmitted according to store-and-forward or real-time protocols, e.g. e-mail for supporting social networking services
    • HELECTRICITY
    • H04ELECTRIC COMMUNICATION TECHNIQUE
    • H04LTRANSMISSION OF DIGITAL INFORMATION, e.g. TELEGRAPHIC COMMUNICATION
    • H04L12/00Data switching networks
    • H04L12/02Details
    • H04L12/16Arrangements for providing special services to substations
    • H04L12/18Arrangements for providing special services to substations for broadcast or conference, e.g. multicast
    • H04L12/1813Arrangements for providing special services to substations for broadcast or conference, e.g. multicast for computer conferences, e.g. chat rooms
    • H04L12/1827Network arrangements for conference optimisation or adaptation
    • HELECTRICITY
    • H04ELECTRIC COMMUNICATION TECHNIQUE
    • H04LTRANSMISSION OF DIGITAL INFORMATION, e.g. TELEGRAPHIC COMMUNICATION
    • H04L12/00Data switching networks
    • H04L12/02Details
    • H04L12/16Arrangements for providing special services to substations
    • H04L12/18Arrangements for providing special services to substations for broadcast or conference, e.g. multicast
    • H04L12/185Arrangements for providing special services to substations for broadcast or conference, e.g. multicast with management of multicast group membership
    • HELECTRICITY
    • H04ELECTRIC COMMUNICATION TECHNIQUE
    • H04LTRANSMISSION OF DIGITAL INFORMATION, e.g. TELEGRAPHIC COMMUNICATION
    • H04L12/00Data switching networks
    • H04L12/28Data switching networks characterised by path configuration, e.g. LAN [Local Area Networks] or WAN [Wide Area Networks]
    • H04L12/46Interconnection of networks
    • H04L12/4604LAN interconnection over a backbone network, e.g. Internet, Frame Relay
    • H04L12/462LAN interconnection over a bridge based backbone
    • H04L12/4625Single bridge functionality, e.g. connection of two networks over a single bridge

Definitions

  • the present invention is in the fields of collaborative filtering and online community, typically as implemented on networks of communicating computers.
  • Collaborative filtering systems are well known, as are online community systems. Examples of the former include Amazon.com's recommendation technology and other similar systems such as eMusic.com's. Examples of the latter include Google Groups.
  • the present invention puts the computer used by a particular end-user (the ‘client computer’ or ‘client machine’) to work in finding his or her best matches, thus offloading that computational load from the server. (In some variants, some users' computers may do that work for a manageable number of other users; for purposes of example this summary will not discuss those details.)
  • This data consists, at least in part, of ‘profiles’ of various users.
  • the common denominator being that profiles that are relatively likely to be matches to the user for whom neighbors are being sought arrive first.
  • the client computer conducts a substantially (or completely) exhaustive search of that available data for the very best matches.
  • the profile data typically performs a dual purpose. First it is used for similarity calculations. Second, it is used for display purposes, so that a user can view taste information pertaining to his neighbors. For instance, in a typical music application, this will include song title and artist information for songs in the neighbors' collections.
  • a networked computer system for supplying recommendations and taste-based community to a target user comprising:
  • networked means for providing representations of nearest neighbor candidate taste profiles and associated user identifiers in an order such that said nearest neighbor candidate taste profiles tend to be at least as similar to a taste profile of the target user according to a predetermined similarity metric as are subsequently retrieved ones of said nearest neighbor candidate taste profiles,
  • said neighbor-finding user nodes each having at least one similarity metric calculator calculating said predetermined similarity metric
  • At least one selector residing on at least one of said neighbor-finding user nodes using the output of said at least one similarity metric calculator for building a list representing the nearest-neighbor users
  • a nearest-neighbor based recommender which uses said associated ones of said candidate profiles to recommend items
  • a display for viewing identifiers of a plurality of nearest neighbor users
  • ASPECT 2 The networked computer system of ASPECT 1 , further including means to facilitate communication with at least said nearest neighbor users where the type of communication comprises at least one selected from the group consisting of online chat, email, online discussion boards, voice, and video.
  • ASPECT 3 A networked computer system for supplying recommendations and taste-based community to a target user, comprising
  • networked means to receive said nearest neighbor candidate taste profiles and associated user identifiers on at least one neighbor-finding user node
  • said neighbor-finding user nodes each having at least one similarity metric calculator calculating said predetermined similarity metric
  • At least one selector residing on at least one of said neighbor-finding user nodes using the output of said at least one similarity metric calculator for building a list representing the nearest-neighbor users
  • a nearest-neighbor based recommender which uses said associated ones of said a nearest-neighbor based recommender which uses said associated ones of said candidate profiles to recommend items
  • a display for viewing identifiers of a plurality of nearest neighbor users
  • ASPECT 4 The networked computer system ASPECT 1, further including a single downloadable file that contains software that executes all necessary non-server computer instructions.
  • representations may be the user profiles themselves (including the taste profiles), or just the taste profiles (which should include an identifier of the user)—or they may be user ID's of the users, or URL's enabling the data to be located on the network, or any other data that allows taste profiles and associated user ID's to be accessed. These are all functionally equivalent from the standpoint of the invention.
  • TASTE PROFILE This term refers to data representing an individual's tastes or interests. It can take many forms. It may be the XML file generated by Apple's iTunes application which contains a list of music files in the user's collection as well as how many times he has played each one, and other related information. This is a fairly complete profile, having the disadvantage that it tends to consume a fairly large number of bytes that thus take significant bandwidth to download.
  • profile types include simple lists of song identifiers or album or artist identifiers, or various combinations thereof.
  • other examples include book ISBN's, or author names, or combinations thereof; or weblog URL's, or weblog posting identifiers, or combinations thereof; of any of a multitude of other represenations of a user's tastes and/or interests.
  • XML is one, but such specifications as CORBA and many others provide ways that data objects can be represented and transported across a network, and in general such formats as vectors or other binary or text-based formats can be used.
  • a taste profile is data that represents a user's tastes and/or interests.
  • the format and contents are particular to particular embodiments, and it must not be construed that the present invention is limited in scope to particular contents or formats as long as the data comprises a user's tastes and/or interests or some useful summary thereof.
  • a user may have a plurality of taste profiles. For instance, a user may have one type of music he likes to listen to while studying, and another type he likes to listen to while dancing. Preferred embodiments of the invention allow the user to choose different taste profiles—and correspondingly different nearest neighbors and recommendations—according to mood.
  • taste profiles may be either manually or passively generated.
  • the iTunes application captures user activity in the course of playing music, and stores it to its associated XML file. The user does not have to make any separate effort to cause a taste profile to be generated based upon that data.
  • taste profiles can be manually generated by manually supplying ratings to items such as songs, movies, or artists.
  • a playlist a list of songs a user likes to play together, and which has usually been generated manually—can be considered in some embodiments to be a taste profile.
  • Some embodiments use taste profiles that incorporate a combination of passively and actively collected data. For instance, a profile may include manually-generated ratings of songs, as well as the number of times each song has been played.
  • taste profiles do not necessarily include data directly entered by the user; they can instead be a computer-derived representation. For instance, in embodiments which associate information such as genre or tempo for songs, software developers of ordinary skills will be able to see how to summarize data for songs the user has in has his collection to create a profile showing which genres or tempos the user likes most; that information may then comprise the user's taste profile. Or, in certain embodiments with numeric values for attributes, the log of the values may be used.
  • TARGET USER The aspect discussion describes the invention in a way that focuses on serving a particular user, who we call the “target user.” There are a plurality of users who could be considered to be target users, but for descriptive purposes we focus on one such user.
  • USER PROFILE A user profile contains information related to the individual such as his name, contact information, and biographical text. It also contains his taste profile. An embodiment may make all, some, or none of this information publicly available.
  • SIMILARITY METRIC Degrees of similarity are computed according to a similarity metric, which is not necessarily a “metric” in the formal sense of a “metric space” as that term is used in mathematical literature (for instance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric.space). A very great variety of similarity metrics are available. There is necessarily a correspondence between the nature of the similarity metric and the taste profile, because similarity metrics often require particular types of data.
  • data is massaged to make it more appropriate use with certain popular similarity metrics. For instance, in a music application when song play counts are included in the taste profile, the songs may be ranked in order of frequency of play; songs in the top seventh have an “implied rating” of 7, songs in the next seventh have an implied rating of 6, etc. This data can then be used with similarity metrics such as those mentioned above.
  • Some embodiments combine different similarity metrics. For instance r can be used to compute a degree of similarity in ratings of items that are in common between two users, and Jaccard's Index to compute the degree of similarity implied by the numbers of items that are and are not in common between the users.
  • An average or geometric mean may be used to combine the metrics into one that incorporates both kinds of information; other techniques such as p-value combining with respect to a null hopothesis ([16]) can be sued as well, by converting the metrics into p-values.
  • Source code described in the file tasteprofileclass.py in Appendix 4 and included in the computer program listingappendix submitted on CD pursuant to 37 C.F.R. 1.96 takes a different approach for computing similarity based on iTunes' XML file.
  • a “shared song” to be a song that is in the collection of both users. This method calculates an approximate probability that the next shared song to come into existence will be the next song played. That is, if user A takes a recommendation from B's collection, it will be a song that A doesn't have yet. When he has it, it will be another shared song. What is the probability that it will be the next song played, once it is in A's collection?
  • the only requirement of the similarity metric is that, for a significant portion of pairs users which includes those who tend to be the most similar in taste, the following applies: if the calculated similarity of two taste profiles A and B is greater than the calculated similarity of two taste profiles A and C, then it is likelier than not that users A and B are actually more similar in relevant tastes than are users A and C. This likelihood will be greater for similarity metrics that will be associated with the highest-performing embodiments of the invention. For instance, simply using the average distance between ratings may be acceptable for some applications, but using Euclidean distance is better than a simple average.
  • MEANS FOR FACILITATING RETRIEVAL OF REPRESENTATIONS There are a variety of ways to provide the functionality needed. It must be stressed that all provide identical or equivalent functionality for the purposes of the invention. While there are several basic structures available, there are many variants for each that are only insubstantially different and should not be construed as different in a way that would make them fall outside the scope of the invention.
  • What is needed is a means for facilitating retrieval of representations of nearest neighbor candidate taste profiles and associated user identifiers in an order such that said nearest neighbor candidate taste profiles tend to be at least as similar to a taste profile of the target user according to a predetermined similarity metric as are subsequently retrieved ones of said nearest neighbor candidate taste profiles.
  • the representations mentioned in the previous paragraph may be the user profiles themselves (including the taste profiles), or just the taste profiles (which should include an identifier of the user)—or they may be user ID's of the users, or URL's enabling the data to be located on the network, or any other data that allows taste profiles and associated user ID's to be accessed. These are all functionally equivalent from the standpoint of the invention.
  • the means for facilitating this retrieval does not need to make use of the predetermined similarity metric or a calculator that can calculate it. In particular, it isn't required that the retrieval of representations is exactly in the same order that would be given by the similarity metric.
  • the data used in facilitating this retrieval is a subset of the data used in the similarity metric, or a summary derived from that data, or a combination of the two, in order to lower computational costs.
  • Data structures may be created that provide the foundation for retrieval in the necessary order or sequence. For instance, clustering may be done using a variety of methods. See, for example, [1] and [2] which apply to “metric spaces,” that is, a structure involving a distance function where the function used to compute the distance between any two objects satisfies the positivity, symmetry, and triangle inequality postulates. Such a distance function can be a similarity metric; examples include Euclidean distance.
  • Appendix 4 describes source code (genrerankhandler.py), which appears on the computer program listing appendix, and which contains an algorithm which uses genre data (genrerankhandler.py), but a practitioner of ordinary skill in the art will see how to modify it for use with other kinds of data which is of limited dimensionality.
  • the cluster with the most computed affinity to the given taste profile is first in the retrieval order, the cluster with the next most computed affinity is the returned next, etc.
  • retrieving a cluster we mean either a set of representations of nearest neighbor candidate user profiles, or a representation of such representations.
  • a representation can be the name or Internet address of a file containing the representations of candidates.
  • Clusters are not the only kind of structure that can be used. See, for example, [6] and [4]. Practitioners of ordinary skill will see how to use such structures for retrieving in an order consistent with the needs of the invention. Many such structures with different details of implementation, but these details are not substantial differences for the purposes of the invention. It is not possible to list all possible combinations of such details, and it must not be construed that one can move outside of the scope of the invention merely by finding such variations on the structures listed here, which it cannot be stressed enough are listed for reasons of example only.
  • the source code in Appendix A provides the exemplary key aspects of one particular method for causing the representations to be retrieved an order consistent with the needs of the invention. See the explanatory text in the section for clusterfitterclass.py.
  • preferred embodiments update or replace these structures over time as taste profiles associated with users change, and users are added to or removed from the database associated with the embodiment.
  • the data structure may be built and stored on a central server, on machines owned by end-users of the invention which communicate their results directly to a server and/or to other end-user machines via peer-to-peer means, or on a combination. It must not be construed that a system falls outside of the scope of the invention merely because the necessary computational and storage resources for the foundation for retrieval are provided at one location or set of locations rather than another, or one type of network node rather than another.
  • Each end-user machine is a node in such a network, also known as a “cloud.”
  • Each end-user machine then conducts a search for each file, or a substantial subset, of files that are already in that machine's collection, using the words in the name of each fie (or a substantial subset of them).
  • a “hit” occurs when the protocol returns an identifier of a node that has a file with matching words in its name.
  • “nearest neighbors” will have a different definition than the one involving the predetermined similarity metric of the present invention. It involves a couple of components.
  • the first component is “hit-nearness.”
  • a query returns only 1 hit. That means that the node identified by that hit is considered to be in the first tier of hit-nearness. If it returns 2 hits, each of the nodes are considered to be in the second tier of hit-nearness. And so on.
  • the tiers are ranked, and the ranks are divided by the number of tiers. If T is the number of tiers, the best hit-nearness is 1/T, the next best is 2/T, and the worst is T/T (1).
  • the next component is “quantity-nearness”.
  • Quantity-nearness We count the number of times a particular node's identifier is retrieved in the process of seaching for files.
  • tiers based on those numbers using the same tiered approach as for hit-nearness, and again resulting in a number between 0 and 1 where the worst node—the node with the smallest number of hits—has a quantity-nearness, Q, of 1.
  • the algorithm could include Gnutella protocol code, and use the procedure described above to cluster similar taste profiles together, where similarity is determined by having more neighbors in common (rather than by our predetermined similarity metric).
  • a server-based system with a table of attributes culled from the taste profiles, one row per user.
  • these attributes are bits representing the presence or absence of particular genres. So, if there are 100 defined genres, each row has 100 bits.
  • the server simply checks each row and counts the proportion of matching genres to total genres in the other user's taste profile.
  • the representations of taste profiles with the highest proportions are retrieved first.
  • the table could be a RAM-based bitmap, a database such as based upon SQL, or any other convenient configuration. Of course they data used wouldn't have to be genres. It could be a selection of artists or songs or ablums, or in non-music domains, book titles, web logs, paintings, news articles, school subjects, course numbers, etc.
  • server processing is to supply network addresses for a set of seed nodes that may be online at the time, which may in fact be included with the download of the software that executes the computer steps involved in the invention.
  • a peer-to-peer protocol such as Gnutella's is used to conduct searches for files, as described above in this text. Note that if a pre-existing, popular protocol such as Gnutella's is used it should be modified so that a node can respond to a request for a complete taste profile; if that does not include a list of all (or a substantial subset of) items on the node's machine, then nodes should also be able to respond to a request for such items.
  • a node (we will refer to it as the “target node”) initiates searches for files it has in its collection. Nodes that are the subject of hits are candidate nearest neighbors. Nodes that have more files matching the target nodes files than others are statistically more likely to be hit before nodes with a smaller number of files. The representation that comes along with the hit is then used the taste profile and if necessary the list of files. So, that satisfies the requirement of the means for facilitating retrieval in the desired order. No other server activity is required.
  • these come directly from the server. In others such as peer-to-peer techniques like those described above, they may be the result of direct communication with the machine owned by the user whose profile is required.
  • caching solutions such as BitTorrent [8], FreeNet [9], FreeCache [10] and Coral [11] are used to distribute the represenations and/or the profiles. It is preferred to use BitTorrent to distribute cluster files, where the clusters contain the profiles.
  • NEAREST-NEIGHBOR A target user profile's nearest neighbors are the other user profiles whose taste profiles are closest to the target user profiles according to the predetermined similarity metric.
  • users can cause entries to be added to the nearest neighbor list that may not be ones that have the most computed similarity, and they may delete entries from the list, and they may cause an entry to become permanent (though manually deleteable). They can do these actions manually or through automatic means such as a program that runs through ones email address book and makes the user profiles associated with email address found there permanenty. Such features may detract from recommendation accuracy while adding to the user's pleasure in the nearest neighbor community.
  • NEAREST-NEIGHBOR BASED RECOMMENDER Nearest-neighbor-based recommendation algorithms are well-known in the literature. See for example, [13] and [14].
  • the source code file recommenderclass.py described Appendix 4 and included the the computer program listing appendix also includes a technique.
  • server means one or more networked computers, incorporating a central processing unit and temporary storage such a RAM and also persistent storage such as hard disks. They perform central functions such as storing a central list of users. While there may be more than one server, they usually do not have to be separately accessed by user-associated computers; rather they present a unified interface.
  • server computer running software that interacts with client software running on user-associated computers, which uses other computers for database storage and to provide database redundancy.
  • USER NODE The computer (also referred to as the “machine”) associated with a human user of the computer, providing one or more input devices such as a keyboard and one or more output devices such as LCD screen. It is networked, preferably through the Internet, to other user nodes. A common protocol such as TCP/IP is used for communication with other user nodes.
  • TCP/IP Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol
  • NEIGHBOR-FINDING USER NODE In currently preferred embodiments all nodes are essentially the same, and play the role of ” neighbor-finding user nodes; but in some embodiments, certain tasks are relegated to certain of the user nodes. For instance, it may be that certain users are willing to make their computational and bandwidth resources available to others, and that others are less willing; for instance those who are willing may get a price break.
  • neighbor-finding user nodes take it upon themselves to do work for multiple users. For purposes of neighbor-finding, they work either independently of the user nodes they are helping or in concert with them. For instance, they may receive the candidate nearest neighbors for other users, and use their taste profiles to compute the similarity according to the similarity metric, and then pass on only the most similar nearest neighbors to the user nodes across the network.
  • IDENTIFIERS FOR DISPLAY Identifiers of items and nearest neighbors are displayed in such visual constructs on a visual computer display as tables in a window or menus such as pop-up menus. Some embodiments may use audio means as a kind of display when visual display is not possible.
  • the identifiers may be identifiers used internally to keep track of the items and users, or they may be special public identifiers supplied by the users or item producers, or any other identifier that is thought would be convenient for the users.
  • Other information besides the taste profiles may be used in finding nearest neighbors.
  • some embodiments allow the list of nearest neighbors to be restricted to individuals who live in particular physical localities.
  • FIG. 1 is an overall flowchart illustrating an embodiment in which each client node is responsible for determining its own user's nearest neighbors.
  • FIG. 2 is a chart showing how the nearest neighbor list 110 is put to use
  • FIG. 1 illustrates an embodiment in which each client node is responsible for determining its own user's nearest neighbors.
  • Representations of user profiles and associated user identifiers 5 are provided in order of likely similarity to the user. See, for example, the descriptive text for clusterfitter.py in Appendix 4, which describes a way a client node can determine the order in which to download each one of a set of clusters. (The source code itself appears the computer program listing appendix.)
  • these clusters are downloaded with the help of other client nodes using BitTorrent.
  • the profiles are received at the user nodes 20 a - c.
  • the similarity of each one to the local user is calculated 30 a - c.
  • the ones that are similar enough 40 a - c to the current user (for instance, by being more similar than the least-similar current member of the nearest neighbor list) are put into the appropriate position 50 a - c in the nearest neighbor list. In preferred embodiments that position is consistent with an ordering by similarity.
  • the nearest neighbor list 110 is put to use.
  • recommendations are generated 130 for the user (see, for example, recommenderclass.py, described in Appendix 4 and included on the computer program listing appendix for an example of how to accomplish that).
  • Interactive communications are also enabled 140 .
  • preferred embodiments display the user identifiers of nearest neighbors in a list on a computer display.
  • An interaction means such as clicking on a particular icon enables an email to be automatically generated addressed to the neighbor and indicating that the sender is the current user; the user then fills in the message text and sends it.
  • Some embodiments of the invention use “playlist sites” or “mp3 blogs” or “music blogs” to supply profile information, rather than, or in addition to, profile information stored on a local disk such as the XML database generated by Apple's iTunes product.
  • this information is collected by a “screen scraping” procedure, either by a process or processes running on the server system, or on user nodes.
  • such sites publish song information using OPML or other XML formats such as RSS, which reduces or eliminates the need for screen scraping.
  • profile information will be provided to users of the system that may represent the tastes of other individuals who are not users of the system. To a large degree, the data associated with these individuals is treated identically to the data associated with users.
  • Another source of ghost user data is services such as audioscrobbler that make identifiers of songs currently being played by a given user available on the Web.
  • audioscrobbler that make identifiers of songs currently being played by a given user available on the Web.
  • One of ordinary skill in the art will immediately see how to monitor such a service to build up a profile, over time, of users whose currently-played-song is displayed.
  • Some embodiments provide a facility whereby simply loading a web page (and optionally giving permission for security reasons) will cause software to be automatically loaded into the user's machine that provides the necessary functionality; this avoids the separate step of downloading and installing application software. This can be accomplished, for instance, by means of Java-language code called by a Web browser.
  • Preferred embodiments have a “permanent neighbors” feature, as well as a “machine-generated neighbors list” feature.
  • the machine-generated neighbors list displays identifiers for those users that have been determined to be very close matches in taste or interest to the current user.
  • the permanent neighbors list displays identifiers for users that have been selected by the current user.
  • user-interface techniques are provided for turning machine-generated neighbors into permanent neighbors. Typically this is done by a drag features where a member of the displayed list of machine-generated users is dragged to the displayed list of permanent neighbors.
  • Other techniques include allowing the user to select member of the displayed list of machine-generated users and call a menu option to cause it to be listed as a permanent neighbor; this can be a pop-up menu, a contextual menu, or a standard menu.
  • Permanent neighbors may be manually removed from the permanent neighbors list by the user; for instance, by means of a menu choice or drag operation. Another option is a checkbox where multiple permanent neighbors can be marked for removal, accompanied by a separate button to cause the removals to happen.
  • UI elements are provided to enter an email or IM address for an individual, and cause him to be emailed such that the said email includes a link (or other technique) for enabling easy download of client software implementing the invention.
  • the other user is automatically added to the permanent neighbors list when the other individual becomes a registered user of the system. This may be accomplished in many ways, readily discernable to one skilled in the art; the scope of the invention should not be construed as being limited to the examples listed in this paragraph; they are listed for reasons of example only. For instance, as the user profiles arrive on the client machines for determining which are nearest neighbors, they can be checked to determine whether an emailed individual is among them. (The addresses of emailed users would be stored on the local user's machine for this purpose.) Alternatively, the client can periodically query a database table residing on the server, to check whether the emailed user has become a registered user.
  • permanent neighbors can include ghost users, where the ghost users are identified by the local user by appropriate network identifiers. For instance in the case of online playlists, a URL that identifies the playlist of the particular individual would be one appropriate type of identifier.
  • the data for such neighbors is retrieved directly (across the network) by the client node without interaction with the server that implements the server portion of the invention.
  • users may click on the identifier for a permanent neighbor and cause information to be displayed that represents the user's musical tastes; such as a list of artists and/or songs in the user's collection, possibly including such elements as the number of times each song has been played, the date added to the collection, and others; this list is for example only and not intended to be inclusive. Further embodiments display this data for permanent users in the same onscreen list area that is also used for displaying the analogous data associated with machine generated neighbors.
  • neighbors are used as the basis for generating recommendations
  • permanent neighbors may or may not be the ideal individuals to generate recommendations from.
  • an individual may be made into a permanent neighbor because he is a friend, rather than because his tastes are remarkably similar to those of the local user.
  • the option is provided to leave permanent neighbors out of the recommendation process. In some such embodiments, this is done as a single binary choice for all permanent neighbors, for instance, using a checkbox that appears in a Preferences dialog. In others, it is done on a one-by-one basis, for instance, with checkboxes accompanying each listed, displayed identifier for permanent neighbors in the user interface.
  • a screen widget such as a collection of 3 radio buttons or a standard menu which “sticky” indicators of a previously made selection, where the user can choose between not using permanent neighbors in the recommendations processing, only using permanent neighbors, or using both.
  • Preferred embodiments display the most recent date and/or time that each permanent or machine-generated neighbor last used the system, to the extent that the client may be easily aware of that information. For instance, it may be included in profile information that arrives at the local user's node for processing of candidate neighbors; in which case it may not be the most recent data available to the system as a whole. Alternatively it is retrieved directly from the server when it is to be displayed, and is thus up to date.
  • Preferred embodiments contain on-screen lists of neighbors (which may include permanent neighbors or where permanent neighbors may be in separate, similar lists); in further preferred embodiments these lists contain screen elements of the presence or absence of email addresses for the users (needed because, in preferred embodiments, it is optional to supply an email address and/or to allow other people, preferably including other users, to be made aware of them).
  • clicking on such an element causes an email application opened and an automatically-addressed email to be generated, to be populated with content by the user.
  • elements indicating an IM address, or other communications handles may be displayed, and UI functionality provided to facilitate such communications.
  • one element is provided for each neighbor to indicate one or more than one modes of communication as available, and clicking it causes a menu to appear that lists them; choosing one facilitates communication by the chosen mode.
  • the user selects the list row containing the user identifier, and brings up a standard menu to choose a mode to communicate with the selected user; when communication handles are not provided for a particular mode, that one is greyed-out.
  • a software developer of ordinary skill will readily see other variations of how to facilitate user interaction regarding what modes are available and how to facilitate engaging each one. Such variants which contain some on-screen indicator of the availability of communications with a given user are within the scope of the invention. Software developers of ordinary skill in the art will immediately see how to implement this.
  • certain individuals are registered as being artists.
  • an item such as a song by such an individual is displayed on screen, and if the artist has indicated that he wishes communications with him to be enabled, an indicator of that is provided, and UI techniques for facilitating such communications are provided; these techniques will generally be similar to those already discussed for user-to-user communication. Software developers of ordinary skill in the art will immediately see how to implement this.
  • Some embodiments provide UI functionality that allow the user to specify a genre or artist or other criteria for determining a subset of items, and then causing item recommendations to be selected from that subset.
  • Some embodiments enable recommendations to have their order at least partly determined by the similarity of the item to the items associated with some specified artist(s), item(s), or other grouping of items (such as an album of songs).
  • Some embodiments provide professional-interest-matching or dating services by examining files on the user's local computer, for instance words in documents, and possibly words in linked URL's where the links themselves are stored on the user's computer, to build interest profiles; neighbors and, in preferred such embodiments, item recommendations, are based on this data.
  • Some embodiments use a bar-code reader or other automatic means for identifying physical objects in order to generate, or as a contribution to, the data in the user's taste profile.
  • music CD cases typically have bar codes that can be used for that purpose.
  • a software product for the Mac OS X operating system, called Delicious Library has the ability to take data supplied by a bar code reader to build a digital library of physical CD's and other items; however it has none of the other features described in this invention.
  • Some embodiments add a gift suggestion feature.
  • the individual for whom gift recommendations are to be made available makes his relevant data available to the machine associated with the user who wants to give a gift. For instance, an once such embodiment, an iTunes user might email his iTunes Music Library.xml file to the user who wants to give him a gift.
  • Other techniques for getting the relevant information to the local user are equivalent from the standpoint of the invention.
  • local processing occurs for that other user's data that is basically the same as for the local user's own data. For instance, in embodiments involving recommendations by means of neighbors, a collection of machine-generated neighbors is found relative to the gift recipient's data, and recommendations are generated from that and displayed on the screen. The value of this is that the local user already has the code necessary for such functionality, for his own recommendations; and in this case much of that same code is re-used for purposes of gift suggestions.
  • Some embodiments interact with an online music store in such a way that highly recommended music is automatically purchased at regular intervals of time. For example, on a monthly basis, an embodiment that works with the iTunes music store could cause the most recommended n songs where n is 1 or some greater number to be automatically purchased and downloaded to the user's machine.
  • the user is alerted before this occurs and given the choice to modify the list of songs to be purchased; for instance, the application software might display an alert dialog, the day before the purchase is to be made, which indicates that the top 10 songs will be purchased; input means such as checkboxes next to the listed songs may be used to indicate that certain songs should excluded from the automatic purchasing.
  • Preferred embodiments allow the user to choose the periodicity and number of songs to be automatically purchased. In some embodiments, this process is used to cause the creation of a physical CD by a store, containing recommended music (or, in other embodiments, videos, books, etc,), which is subsequently shipped to the user.
  • Preferred embodiments give the user control over which artists are considered to be part of the user's effective taste profile. For instance, in one embodiment the local user can view a list of the artists in his music collection; there is a checkbox next to each one, defaulting to checked; if it's unchecked, that artist is effectively ignored in other processing based on the taste profile. In the embodiment in question, this is accomplished by means of a tuned taste profile and untuned taste profile; the only real use of the untuned one is to present that list to the user for tuning by unchecking checkboxes.
  • An interest profile is built based upon a) the words the local user types into his chat client and/or b) the words that appear in messages types by other people into the same chat room.
  • a subset may be used where the only messages that are at least somewhat likely to be responses to messages from the local user are used—for instance by distance in time from the time of a message sent by the current user to the chat room where the potential response appeared.
  • a user clicks on a user identifier to start a chat session with them.
  • chat rooms are automatically initiated for groups of similar users.
  • no other recommendations are necessary.
  • variants of this set of embodiments use different techniques to match people together according to the words they type. The simplest way is to simply treat the words used by a user as a document; then techniques for document similarity which take word frequency into account can be used. (A search on Google for “document similarity” will bring up numerous techniques.) But any technique that calculates useful similarities based on the word content is equivalent for purposes of the invention.
  • Some embodiments provide means to restrict candidate neighbors by certain criteria such as physical locality.
  • One way to do this is to simply assign the lowest possible similarity to people who don't meet the restriction requirements; another is to exclude them at the outset from the neighbor-searching process. Techniques to do this will be immediately apparent to a software developer of ordinary skill.
  • One advantage of having software running in user nodes is that certain parameters for recommendation quality can be tuned on the user node, for the given user, by computationally expensive techniques such as genetic algorithms.
  • Some embodiments take advantage of this fact by using iterative testing, genetic algorithms, simulated annealing, or other optimization techniques to tune parameters such as the following: the number of neighbors to use in recommendation calculations (assuming only the must similar neighbors are chosen), the optimal adventurousness (see elsewhere in the specification for discussion of adventurousness), a cutoff release date for recommended items (for instance, the user may not be interested in old music), and others.
  • One such other is a number representing the lowest weight to be associated with any user's information; the least similar of the nearest neighbors is assigned this weight and interpolation, with a max of 1 for the single nearest neighbor, is used to assign weights to the other neighbors according their rank or another measure.
  • the optimization may be based on tuning the parameters to get the best match between recommended music and the music actually already in the user's collection. (Obviously under normal processing, preferred embodiments do not recommend music that the user already has, and this screening is disabled for optimization purposes.)
  • Preferred embodiments in the music domain try to optimize the match between ranks based on song plays per day and order of recommendation. For instance, Spearman's Rank Correlation can be used to do this.
  • Some tuning operations may change the number of recommended songs; to find the optimal setting it may be useful to compute the p-value associated with each pair of rankings; the more statistically significant the p-value, the better.
  • rank correlation When rank correlation is used, preferred embodiments only consider the ranks of the top recommendations, because we are less interested in the exact rank of songs that are not particularly recommended.
  • some embodiments uses Koza's Genetic Programming technique to generate at least part of the algorithm used in the recommendation process, using similar fitness criteria to the optimization measures mentioned already in this paragraph.
  • the invention has useful ramifications for multiprocessing. For instance a each user node evolves chromosomes (such as hierarchical programs in a genetic programming environment) which best suit the needs of the local user. It is likely that those same chromosomes will be relatively high-performing for other users who have the local user among their neighbors. So in preferred evolutionary computation embodiments, one or more of the highest-performing genomes that has resulted from the evolutionary process on a user node becomes part of the profile, which also includes the taste profile. Then other user nodes that select a particular user as a neighbor will also have his highest-performing genome(s) available.
  • chromosomes such as hierarchical programs in a genetic programming environment
  • some embodiments give more or less probability to a foreign genome being added commensurate with the other user's similarity to the local user.
  • Many variants of taking advantage of the similarity information and the overall structure of the invention will occur to those of ordinary skill in the art of genetic programming, and it must not be construed that such variants are not within the scope of the invention; that is, variants are within the scope if they result in better performance due to the following attributes of the invention: a) the fact that the mechanism that transports taste profiles from user node to user node (which may involve using the server as an intermediate step) can also be used to transport genomes, either as a separate data package or as part of the same data package, and b) that mechanism is set up so that profiles with a higher similarity to the local user have a higher probability of arriving sooner (and, in some embodiments, at all), and those genomes are more likely than randomly-chosen ones
  • direct peer-to-peer communication of individual taste profile information occurs between neighbors. This can enable faster updating of neighbor taste profile data than would occur through the usual mechanism described in this specification.
  • Further embodiments provide an output mechanism for showing identifiers of the digital item currently being experienced by other neighbors; in some such embodiments that information is also used to update the neighbors'taste profiles stored on the local node while waiting for full updated taste profiles to arrive through the usual mechanisms.
  • the fact that some nodes may be behind firewalls that prohibit incoming connections from being made are handled by sending the necessary data through other nodes that do have the necessary ports open. Any software developer of ordinary skill in the art of peer-to-peer network programming will immediately see how to create the necessary peer-to-peer mechanisms for the functionality described in this paragraph; it should not be construed that only particular implementation mechanism are within the scope of the invention.
  • users can create different taste profiles for themselves which fit different moods or interests. Most or all of the overall mechanism described in this specification then applies to each separate taste profile. Neighbors are found and recommendations are generated for each one. For instance, playlists generated in Apple's iTunes program can comprise music taste profiles.
  • At least some users run a special version of software that implements the invention, in which not all the usual user interface features are necessarily present.
  • certain musical tracks are indicated as being free of charge—for instance, in the names of the files, or in a database.
  • the user is recommended a collection of free songs. Identifiers for the songs are then uploaded to server system (not necessarily the same one as for other functions). Then the free songs are copied into a portable music player from a computer that is networked to the that server. Then the portable music player is packed and shipped to the user. Facilities are provided where there is a web site where the user orders and pays for the the player, and is informed about how to get the software that will make the recommendations.
  • a list of recommended free songs is presented to the user and the user can choose which ones he wants; identifiers of the chosen songs are sent to the server.
  • Networking software and online store developers of orderinary skill will immediately see numerous ways to implement the required functionality; various implementations are equivalent from the standpoint of the invention; the scope of the invention is therefore not limited to certain implementation techniques. Note that this functionality may be removed from other aspects of the present invention; recommendations may be wholly made on the server based on data that is input, via the Web, to the server, using any recommendation methodology; the recommended songs are then loaded onto a portable players and shipped as described.
  • Some embodiments which involve artists having special accounts enable chat rooms for each artist, and provided indicators in the UI associated with artist names (such as next to the artist names in a list of artists) that show whether they are in the chat room or not, and means are provided for the user to click or otherwise interact with an onscreen control to cause them to “enter” the artist's chat room and chat with the artist.
  • Practitioners of ordinary skill in the relevant programming techniques will immediately see numerous ways to implement this and these are equivalent from the standpoint of the invention.
  • special taste profiles are created that are structured like user taste profiles, but actually are taste profiles for an item. For instance in an emodiment which calculates user similarity based on the musical artists they have in common in their libraries, taste profiles are manually created for certain songs (such as songs that are sponsored by commercial interests) that mimic user taste profiles in the sense that each one contains a list of artist. Then the same similarity-calculating code can be used to find the songs that are most similar to the current user, and these may appear in a special recommendation list or mixed in with other recommendations
  • User Nodes machines that are on the network that also directly interact with users; typically these are machines owned by users or associated with them at their work locations.
  • Screen scraping a software process that reads an HTML (or other) page on the World Wide Web (or other network system) that is intended for human use, and extracts useful data from it for machine use.
  • Ghost user data representing an individual that is derived from an external source such as a music blog.
  • ghost users may be treated identically to regular users of the system.
  • IM instant message, typically associateed with chat software.
  • Neighbor may be used to indicate machine-generated neighbors and/or permanent neighbors. Note that different embodiments may use different terminology for these.
  • Nearest neighbors the set of neighbors who are most similar in taste to the local user; normally the same as machine-generated neighbors; though it is not impossible that a user will manually find a neighbor that is actually more similar in taste than the machine-generated ones, and add him to permanent neighbors.
  • Artist a creator of items of interest to the subject domain or one of the subject domains of an embodiment of the invention. We use the term for shorthand, and, for example, in some domains such as academic papers, it could refer to an academic who wrote or co-wrote such a paper.
  • UI user interface.
  • the user interface will involve a computer with a CRT or flat-panel screen and a keyboard, displaying a windowing system such as Microsoft Windows or Mac OS X.
  • a windowing system such as Microsoft Windows or Mac OS X.
  • Such systems normally provide standard means to create menus, lists (or tables), checkboxes, etc.
  • the UI may be audio with input by means of telephone touch-tones. The requirement is that it provides functionality that facilitates human-computer interaction.
  • Item an item is the basic unit of content, such as a song
  • Interest profile or taste profile data which is indicative of the interests or tastes of a user. Often used interchangeably in this specification. For instance, digital music user will normally have identifiers of the songs he likes (or that are in his collection) in his taste profile.
  • Server a server is a central computer, or networked group of central computers that handle certain tasks for the benefit of the client nodes, such as storing a database containing login ID's, passwords, and profiles.
  • Goombah The specification describes a product named Goombah. However, the focus on Goombah is for clarity and descriptive purposes only and it must not be construed that the scope of the invention is limited to that particular embodiment or to the field that Goombah operates on (music).
  • Goombah's first purpose is to build a list of “nearest neighbors” for each user. They then form a community of like-minded people for communication purposes, and they also form a source for recommendations of items—if you have extremely similar tastes to me and you have an album I don't have and you play it all the time, I should probably give it a try. So that's the basis of the recommendations.
  • Goombah whose purpose is to solve the above problem, is that the computations for finding the local user's nearest neighbors are carried out on that user's machine. So, if we have a million users, we have a million CPU's doing the work of finding nearest neighbors.
  • BitTorrent has emerged recently which offload bandwidth concerns for sending large files from a central server to the user nodes.
  • the central server has a copy of the file that people need, but once one user has it on his machine, he is automatically set up as a server as well, and so on for every other user. Transfers are carried out from other users invisibly. (This is different from something like napster where you have to choose another user and request a download. Instead, the central server knows where all the copies of the files are, and tells a node that needs a copy the addresses of several machines to simultaneously get different chunks of the file from until the whole file is build.
  • Goombah will download a single very large file—10's or even 100's of megs—that contain the candidate profiles. This will happen by means of BitTorrent.
  • the local user will download a large BitTorrent file containing all nearest neighbor candidates and do an exhaustive search on his machine for nearest neighbors.
  • the large file will be updated on a regular basis with further BitTorrent downloads.
  • the clustering algorithm can be any clustering algorithm that is capable of clustering a large number of users according to their degree of interest in a large number of subject items. (Where the degree of interest may be indicated by real-valued, binary, integer or any other that can represent a degree of interest.)
  • the commonly-used C4.5 algorithm can do this.
  • the open-source Java software WEKA has a module, weka.classifiers.treesj48, which implements C4.5.
  • each user is an “Instance” and the song identifiers, such as strings containing the artist name, album name (if any), and song title, are used as the values of a “nominal attribute” representing the songs.
  • the step of using the local CPU to find nearest neighbors can be conducted in various ways. Any sub-algorithm which accomplishes the function “find nearest neighbors out of the downloaded large file” is considered equivalent for the purposes of the present invention. Possible ways to do it include an exhaustive search for the other users that are most similar to the local user according to some similarity metric. (The attached Python scripts, recommenderclass.py and tasteprofileclass.py contain code for generating a similarity metric. However it must be stressed that there are innumerable ways of generating a similarity metric for nearest-neighbor purposes, and they are all functionally equivalent from the standpoint of the present invention and all fall within the scope of the present invention.
  • the step of using peer-to-peer techniques for downloading the large files can also occur in various ways which are functionally equivalent from the point of view if the current invention.
  • the invention does not depend on any particular technique for getting files from peers and all such techniques should therefore be considered functionally equivalent from the point of view of the invention.
  • BitTorrent provides a particularly compelling model for how this may be accomplished
  • the Gnutella provides an alternative model.
  • BitTorrent BitTorrent
  • Gnutella A difference between the BitTorrent and Gnutella approaches is that with BitTorrent, each file has a distinct URL which is understandable by a server machine which runs BitTorrent “tracker” software. By means of this URL, client software is told by the tracker which peers store the file (or parts of the file) so that the client can cause downloads to be started from a subset (or all) of those peers.
  • the Gnutella approach there is no central server, and the local computer sends queries into the “cloud” of known peers and machines known to those peers, looking for files with particular filenames. Then, normally, one of those peers is chosen to be the source of the download.
  • One key step is determining which large file a particular client should download in order to meet the needs of its user.
  • all the profiles are in one large cluster, there is no issue.
  • each cluster is represented by a particular large file, however, this step needs to be carried out.
  • centroid for the cluster may be calculated, and the new user added to the cluster whose centroid it is most similar to.
  • the average similarity between the user and each cluster member may be calculated for each candidate cluster, and the most appropriate cluster chosen on that basis.
  • the change in entropy that would arise in the system as a whole due to each possible choice of cluster can be calculated, and the choice taken that minimizes the change in entropy.
  • clusters have consistent meaning over time, and the user can stay in the same cluster, until a further split is deemed necessary.
  • this is handled by the expected large file simply not existing at a particular point in time, and this is detected by the client, which thus assumes it needs a new cluster assignment. It then queries the server system for a new assignment. For a pre-existing user this is easily determined because the new assignment was made during the split process, so the server returns another cluster identifier consistent with that split. For example, if a user was in cluster U 0 , he may now be in cluster U01 (where the leading 0 represents the lineage). (Of course any cluster naming convention can be used, but preferred ones encode the lineage in the name).
  • Still other embodiments have relatively stable clusters but continuously work to refine them by moving users from one cluster to another if such a movement provides superior clustering. For instance, periodically each user may be considered again as if it were a new user, and a decision made about what cluster it should go into. If it changes then that will be reflected in future communications between the client and the server (although the change does not need to be reflected immediately).
  • the client has no persistent “knowledge” about what cluster the user is in, and when it's time to get a new cluster, queries the server for the information required to start a download of the appropriate one.
  • users may be assigned to more than one cluster.
  • a number of standard clustering approaches such as C4.5, assign probabilies for cluster assignments; thus a user might with a higher probability reside in one cluster than another. It would be possible to take the two clusters with the highest probability for a given user, and say that he resides in both of them.
  • the invention is not limited to any particular approach to putting users in more than 1 cluster. The functionality is simply that the user would go in the clusters that provide a high match to his interests, and any technique that accomplishes that is functionally equivalent from the perspective of the present invention and is therefore within the scope.
  • different clustering arrangements exist for different genres. For example a user who has both classical music and jazz in his collection might benefit from different nearest-neighbor communities generating different recommendations in each area. So, the entire clustering and downloading structure and steps, in some embodiments, are carried out more than once. In other (preferred) embodiments, each user still is in only one (or a small group of) cluster(s), but his client software finds different nearest neighbor sets, depending on genre, from within those clusters.
  • this concept is extended by means of the analogous principle to “genre” that exists in that other subject area. For instance, if the items are weblogs, then an individual might be interested in weblogs about Perl scripting and also weblots about Republican politics. These different subject areas are handled analogously to genres in the music world.
  • download file identifiers (which may be URL's, terms, etc.) are constructed based on two pieces of data: the cluster identifier plus the date. For instance a user might be in cluster U011. If the date is Jan. 27, 2004, the download file identifier might be U01120040127. The client can then get an update by, for instance, downloading the file containing that string in its name or by constructing a BitTorrent URL based on that string.
  • the client machine can then download the file upon whatever schedule is most consitent with the user's needs and desires. Bandwidth will be a constraint, so there is reason not to download the files too frequently. In preferred embodiments, there is a choice in the “preferences” section of the program whereby the user can specify how often he wants to update the file. He will probably do so less frequently if he has a dialup modem connection than if he has a cable modem. Some embodiments use information available in the computer (for instance, provided by the operating system) to determine the connection speed, and automatically choose a download schedule accordingly. Some ask the user to specify the download speed and automatically choose a download schedule accordingly. Other ways of determining a download schedule, including the user's manually starting each download, are all functionally equivalent and within the scope.
  • Some embodiments automatically cause files of different sizes to be downloaded according to connection speed (or at the choice of the user).
  • connection speed or at the choice of the user.
  • the server to store a tree of cluster arrangements. For instance, suppose clusters are arrived at by splitting bigger clusters in half, and the lineage of the cluster is represented in the file name. Then, for example, U0 might be the parent of U01, and U01 might be the parent of U011. Then a client with less bandwidth available to it might retrieve cluster U011 and one with a great amount of bandwidth but with a user with a very similar taste profile to the first client, might retrieve cluster U0. The difference is that the larger the downloaded cluster, the more likely it is that the true most similar neighbors, out of the whole universe of neighbors, will be found by the client.
  • U01120040127-20040126 might be the identifier of the file that contains the difference data between an up-to-date representation of cluster U011 as it appeared on Jan. 26, 2004 and the version that was current on Jan. 27, 2004. Then a preferred embodiment will automatically choose whatever method will result in getting current more quickly. For instance, if no update has occurred in a number of days, it may be more efficient to download the complete file. But if the last update was recent, it may be more efficient to download a series of daily updates.
  • the server stores, for each cluster, files representing the current complete cluster, individual updates for the last 6 days, and the last 4 weekly update files (files that update for a whole week). BitTorrent requests for any of these files cause them to be loaded to client machines, where they are henceforth made available in a peer-to-peer manner. Any such manner of scheduling updates is functionally equivalent.
  • an update file may consist of a list of user ID's of users who downloaded new songs in the corresponding time interval, with each user ID followed by a list of the new songs and a list of songs that used to be on the user's disk and no longer are. All such representations are functionally equivalent and fall within the scope of the invention.
  • Another aspect is the fact that changes on the user's machine need to be uploaded to the server. In some embodiments this is done on a regular schedule when there are changes to upload. Preferred embodiments only send changes since the last upload rather than uploading the entire interest profile. Preferred embodiments don't send changes until sufficient changes have accrued that it is “worthwhile” to do an update. For instance, in embodiments where taste profiles include information about the number of times a song has been played, it makes a big difference when that count goes from 0 to 10, but very little difference when it goes from 1000 to 1001. A simple way to determine significance is to have a cutoff for the percentages involved. For instance, if play counts are used, the if overall they have changed by 1%, that might be considered significant.
  • the entropy of the data may be used. For instance, entropy can be calculated based on the exercise of choosing a “play” at random, and computing the probability that such a randomly chosen play instance would arrive at a particular song. So there is one probability for each song. Based on those probabilities the song entropy may be calculated. Then significance may be determined by a particular amount of change in entropy occurring, either on a percentage basis or based on a fixed minimum change in value. Any technique that determines that a desirable amount of change has occurred is considered functionally equivalent from the standpoint of the invention and thus falls within the scope.
  • the user can determine how much significance is required before an update occurs; in others it is automatically determined based on bandwidth; in others it is determined on a global basis by the server; in others some combination is used such as a maximum upload frequency being determined by the server with the user having the ability to set the frequency or significance required as long as it is below the global value; any number of other techniques are possible and considered functionally equivalent within the scope of the invention.
  • the overall invention in broadest form, consists of a server (or networked group of servers) that stores the cluster files containing interest profiles and distributes them to client machines, and client machines that then distribute those files to other client machines; the nearest neighbors are then chosen on client machines and used for purposes of recommendation and community.
  • Clusters should be large enough to include most users whose profiles are reasonably likely to be global “nearest neighbors” for any given local user.
  • this embodiment adds functionality for making it visible to other users that one has DVD's one is willing to lend out, and for keeping track of DVD's that have been lent. Additionally, preferred embodiments have functionality for rating lenders of DVD's according to their reliability (much as is done on eBay or various action sites with respect to sellers). Skilled practicioners of the art of Web programming will immediately see how to create appropriate user interfaces.
  • this lending data is stored on the server for easy access by various clients and in others it is made available by peer-to-peer means.
  • CD's is one applicable subject area.
  • This appendix describes another way of implementing key functionality of the invention, including but not limited to facilitating retrieval of representations of nearest neighbor candidate taste profiles and associated user identifiers in an order such that said nearest neighbor candidate taste profiles tend to be at least as similar to a taste profile of the target user according to a predetermined similarity metric as are subsequently retrieved ones of said nearest neighbor candidate taste profiles.
  • the representations mentioned in the previous paragraph may be the user profiles themselves (including the taste profiles), or just the taste profiles (which should include an identifier of the user)—or they may be user ID's of the users, or URL's enabling the data to be located on the network, or any other data that allows taste profiles and associated user ID's to be accessed. These are all functionally equivalent from the standpoint of the invention.
  • the present invention is a new approach to dynamically creating online groups of similarly-minded people for both community-building and generating recommendations of items of interest to the communities.
  • the invention is a form of distributed computing for searching which we will refer to as “distributed profile climbing” or “DPC”.
  • distributed profile climbing or “DPC”.
  • it is a kind of middle ground between a server-based Internet service and a peer-to-peer one.
  • the invention consists of a networked computer system running special software.
  • the network is typically the Internet (but can be any network which interconnects computers) and the computer can be a broad range of computer hardware that a user might own, a typical personal computer running with 256 megabytes of RAM a Pentium processor being one example.
  • the connection to the network may be a direct connection, or may be wireless, based on radio, light, Ethernet cabling, etc.
  • Peer-to-peer networks are a popular way to handle such challenges as sharing files between many users.
  • the main problem is that not everyone who wants to participate in such a network can do so fully. This is for a number of reasons—computers may not be on all the time, or they may be portable, or they may have firewall and/or network address translation issues.
  • Pseudo-peer-to-peer networks handle that problem by creating proxies for the machines of each user who wants to participate. These proxies exist on server systems, but typically the technical requirements for those servers are light because the proxies merely store and transmit data related to the machine they are proxying.
  • Radio UserLand is a software package that runs on end-user computers and lets users create weblog entries. Those entries may then be sent (“upstreamed”) to UserLand's servers. Web users who wish to view a Radio UserLand customer's weblog can then look at the proxy data on UserLand's servers. Note that, in a world where everyone had computers always able to allow access to other users, there would be no need for this upstreaming to take place. Each weblog writer's machine could serve their weblogs to the rest of the world.
  • DPC networks share a common foundation with pseudo-peer-to-peer networks like UserLand Radio in the sense that each user's data is represented by a proxy data object located on a remote server.
  • this data contains a profile of the user in order to compare similarity of interests.
  • the proxy object for a user further contains key information for other users who have already been found to be similar in interests to that user. This key information is sufficient to enable the proxies of those other users to be accessed (typically, this would be by means of constructing a URL that accesses the proxies).
  • One very important aspect of searching for similar profiles is intelligently handling users that have already been compared at least once. In some cases, it may be desired to never compare them again; in others it may be desired to compare them again after a certain amount of time or a certain number of updates have occurred. Most approaches for taking care of this involve storing representations of which pairs of profiles have already been compared.
  • the similarity metrics are computed on the user's machines rather than on the server. This is not a requirement, but it does help to distribute the workload and simplify the scalability issues for the server.
  • proxies for various users among separate servers residing in one or more physical hosting sites.
  • proxies are divided up in such a way that a hash function based on the user's ID can be used to determine which server (or subgroup of servers) hosts that user's proxy.
  • the benefit of dividing the server side up this way is one of simplicity and cost—there is no need for a high-performance central database system. Instead the servers can operate in relative isolation to each other, even storing all data in local RAM for speed, using communicating with other server hardware for control and backup purposes.
  • Steps are carried out in the order shown. Deeper indentation is used in the representation of repeated groups of operations, or operations that are dependent on the result of an “if” test. An “else” relates to the previous “if” at the same indentation level. A “break” causes the process to immediately terminate the currently innermost loop, while allowing outer loops to continue undisturbed. The operations depicted carried by the software operating on end-user machines, except that the server is invoked to provide data on occasion.
  • THISUSER is the user whose machine the algorithm is running on.
  • Each user has an associated NEIGHBORBAG which is his current list of ID's of similar users.
  • the NEIGHBORBAG has a fixed maximum size.
  • PREVIOUSLYCHECKEDBAG is collection of users that have already been checked as potential neighbors (members of NEIGHBORBAG).
  • the climbing is accomplished by means of calculating the similarity metric with respect to the nearest neighbors of a user for which the similarity has previously been calculated, where the latter was found to be at a level high enough that it is worth the expense of going on to retrieve the interest profiles for that user's neighbors to determine whether one or more of them will have an even greater similarity to the target user.
  • Some peer-to-peer networks such as the Morpheus file-sharing network, have an architecture which causes data which would traditionally be stored on a server to instead be stored on a subset of user computers.
  • servers in the context of this invention (not necessarily in the Morpheus context) as user-associated servers.
  • the main “advantage” of this technique is ideally that there is no company which controls the master index and which can therefore be prosecuted or sued.
  • a central server in one set of embodiments there is still a central server but rather than serving the taste profiles, it contains a list of identifiers which can be used to construct the URL's where the taste profile for each user may be found. So the actual amount of data that needs to be stored on, and sent from, the server is far less than in the earlier description. For many implementations, the load will be light enough that a single desktop computer with cable modem or DSL (or similar) connection to the Internet will be enough.
  • the Gnutella network provides a “cloud” of user-associated servers, many or all of which store the URL's (or data that can be used to construct the URL's) of many or all of the other user-associated servers.
  • Gnutella-compliant software whether by download or by other means
  • the software then contacts those servers, and can get lists from them of other such servers.
  • the local node is then updated with this information, and it is available to other nodes that might eventually contact this node. Thus, no single central server is required.
  • Preferred embodiments of the invention where the profile data is stored on user-associated servers generally use the same computers for storing that data as are used by their associated users as their day-to-day computers, with the exception that they must be accessible to inbound connections (i.e., few if any Firewall or NAT issues should apply and they should be connected to the Internet, and turned on, a substantial amount of the time).
  • Each user-associated server stores the profiles and neighbor lists of a number of other users.
  • the step of retrieving a random user ID is modified so that instead of asking a central server, first a random user-associated server in the cloud (or semi-random, influenced by the fact that only a subset of the cloud may be known to the node at the time) is chosen, and then that server is asked to provide a random user ID of those whose profiles and neighbor lists are stored on that computer. Then the algorithm proceeds as before, with the exception that instead of retrieving just the ID of other users, enough data is retrieved to construct a URL where that user's information is available. Then it is accessed at that location. Further, if an access fails because the URL doesn't respond or the data that is supposed to be there isn't, a “break” is executed and the innermost loop explicitly spelled out in the pseudocode is exited.
  • user-associated servers take responsibility for serving the nearest neighbors of that particular user to the broader community. This causes data for similar users to be gravitate toward being stored on the same machines.
  • One advantage of this technique is that if user-associated server A is being accessed and provides a NEIGHBORBAG for similarity testing, it is likely that when the accessing node wants to get the taste profiles for the users in the bag, seconds or minutes later, that machine will still be available on the network.
  • a further improvement is that, instead of sending the taste profiles for the accessing user for the similarities to be calculated, they can be calculated on the user-associated server in cases where it is judged that it would be more efficient when data transmission expenses are calculated, to send the data there.
  • the querying node would upload its taste profile to the user-associated server so that multiple comparisons can be carried out there without further need for network data transmission.
  • such user-associated servers not only store the neighbors of their associated users, but also other neighbors with relatively high similarity to other users that are stored on that user-associated server.
  • a centroid may be calculated that represents an average of the taste profiles of the users stored on that server.
  • One type of taste profile contains identifiers for every song a user has played on a particular target platform (such as Apple's iTunes), together with the date it was first added to the user's collection and the number of times he has played it.
  • a centroid averaging a number of such user profiles might contain the identifiers for all the songs played by any of the associated users, together with, for each song, the average of the dates it was added to the system and the average number of plays of that song per user.
  • the algorithm described above to find the most similar neighbors for a user may be carried out but with respect to this centroid rather than with respect to the user.
  • the ID's of the users most similar to this centroid are stored in a neighbor list for the centroid, and their profiles and neighbor lists (together, their proxies) are the ones that that particular user-associated server takes responsibility for serving to the community. But it should not be construed that the invention is limited in scope to the concept or “centroid” or “averaging.” Any summary of multiple user's profile information that is comparable via a similarity metric to an individual user's profile is equivalent for the purposes of the invention.
  • a user's interests may be captured in a list of the most unusual keywords that regularly turn up in text they read. For instance a paleontologist might read text containing the word “archaeopteryx” fairly frequently. The exact frequency isn't as important as the fact that the population at large very rarely reads text with that word whereas the paleontologist frequently does. So, the paleontologist's interest profile can be realistically represented by a list of such words that meet certain predetermined thresholds for “unusualness” with respect to the general population, and “frequency” with respect to the user himself.
  • a simple similarity metric is to calculate the percentage of words out of the total pool of words formed when the lists are combined are held in common.
  • a more sophisticated approach is to consider every word in the combined list to be a “trial”, with success being that the word is held in common; the similarity metric is then the posterior mean based on a binomial distribution and a beta prior.
  • this process may frequently result in more than one user-associated server hosting the proxy of a given user. That is good, because that allows for redundancy in the system for times when a user-associated server is not available.
  • the summary is simply the taste profile of the user associated with the user-associated server that is directing the search.
  • finding nearest neighbors to that such a user is also finding neighbors who are relatively similar in taste to other users whose profile is stored on that user-associated server, as long as the question of whose profile shall be stored is also resolved by virtue of having a high similarity metric with respect to the user associated with the user-associated server.
  • each user-associated server carries out searches using an algorithm almost identical to one of those described above, with the exception that the search is done with respect to similarity to the collection of users whose proxies (whether the proxy contains the taste profile or the user's neighbor list or both and/or contains other items) are already being served from that particular user-associated server. (This is as opposed to doing such searches with respect to each individual user whose proxy is stored on the server or facilitating, by serving data, such searches carried out by the individual user-associated nodes.) This may be done, as described above, by comparing other users to a centroid of the collection or it may be done by other summary means (all of which fall within the scope of the invention).
  • the user who is associated with the user-associated server is always among the users whose proxy would be added to that collection if the user wasn't already there. For instance, in the method which involves a centroid produced by averaging the profiles of the users, the algorithm would never remove the user associated with the user-associated server from the list of users whose profiles are averaged to produce the centroid.
  • a central server may be not only a single server computer, but a set of such computers, the distinguishing characteristic not being the number of computers in the central server, but rather the fact that they are not associated with a particular user but rather made available on the network to serve data to a substantial number of user-associated computers.
  • the computer is the computer that the user normally accesses to get the benefits of the system, for instance, viewing a list of the users that are more similar to him than any others that have been examined.
  • target user is used occasionally in this specification to refer to a particular user who is using the invention and for whom the invention has found, and/or is finding, other users with similar interests and/or tastes.
  • Preferred embodiments make a display of the individual users who have been found to be most similar to the target user available through a computer user interface. In some embodiments this takes the form of a list; in others there are other displays such as images representing the users in 2D or N-Dimensional space. In some embodiments the positions such images take with respect to each other in the visual plane represent how similar they are to each other.
  • Preferred embodiments make recommendations to the target user of specific items based on a list of nearest neighbors, that is, a list of neighbors who are relatively similar to the target user in taste when with respect to other users of the system. They do this by processing the preferences of the nearest neighbors in ways that are similar to how this is done in other nearest-neighbor-based collaborative filtering systems such as, for example, in the GroupLens Usenet filtering system, http://www.si.umich.edu/ ⁇ presnick/papers/cscw94/GroupLens.htm, incorporated herein by reference, or the system described in Upendra Shardanand's 1995 thesis, Social Information Filtering: Algorithms for Automating “Word of Mouth,” http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/rd/61053528%2C323706%2C1%2C0.25%2CDownload/http://citeseer.nj.nec.
  • the present invention may be used in situations where no such ratings are available. Instead other information may be available, such as the fact that the user has purchased particular items, or has chosen to experience them a certain number of times (for instance, has played a musical track a certain number of times).
  • a purchase can be considered to be equivalent to a rating of “good” and no purchase can be considered equivalent to a rating of “poor”.
  • an easy way to approximate the effect of having ratings is to rank the items by the number of experiences. Then divide the rank by the number of items.
  • This technique is to simply add up the number of experiences for each item for all nearest neighbors. For example, assume that out of a universe of 1,000,000 music fans, the system has found 100 nearest neighbors for the target user. For each item associated with each fan, there is a count of how many times each song has been played. If the system simply adds up these counts for each item, the item with the highest total count may be considered to be the most popular item in that community, and should be recommended to the target user if he hasn't already experienced it. Equivalently, one can compute the arithmetic mean of the number of plays, where the number of plays is 0 for users that haven't experienced the item at all.
  • a variant of the approach described in the previous paragraph that is arguably more reliable is to compute log(1+K) for each neighbor/item combination, where K is the number of times the user has experienced the item in question, and then calculate the sum of these values for the population of nearest neighbors. The higher that sum is, the more highly the item should be recommended.
  • the advantage of using the log is that for an item to be recommended highly, it is more important for the item to be experienced often by a large number of nearest neighbors than it is for a few nearest neighbors to experienced the item a huge number of times.
  • a similarity metric that is used in preferred embodiments where explicit user-entered ratings are not available is the following. Assume user A is the target user, and we want to know how similar user B is to user A. We calculate an approximation, subject to certain assumptions which are useful to us but may not be true in the real world, of a certain probability. This can be loosely summarized as being probability that, if a randomly chosen item X not in A's collection but in B's collection is put into A's collection, that if we pick a random time in the future when A is experiencing an item from his collection, it will be X. An implementation of this concept that teaches the technique is included in the tasteprofile.py module included the computer program listing appendix and described in Appendix 4.
  • Embodiments of this invention serve the useful purpose of determining which other participating users are most similar to a user who is a participant in the system, and storing that information in the computer for purposes of displaying that community and/or making recommendations of desirable items. Further embodiments not only store that information, but display the community members and/or recommendations through the system's user interface.
  • Some embodiments store each user's profile on their associated computers. Due to issues mentioned above, many user-associated computers may not be accessible to other users from the internet. So a technique must be provided by which users can serve their profiles when they are stored on user machines. Gnutella-style networks provide an example for this. Nodes which are accessible from the Internet allow incoming connections to be made from nodes which are not necessarily connected. Then, data on those not-otherwise-accessible nodes is made available to other nodes on the network, through the network-accessible nodes which the not-otherwise-accessible nodes are connected to. In the case of Gnutella, this data includes lists of available files and the files themselves.
  • the network-accessible servers usually store lists of the user ID's associated with the nodes they are connected to, and when a request arrives for data associateed one of those ID's, the request is routed to the appropriate connected node, the data is retrieved by the network-accessible node, and then sent by the networkdd-accessible node to the requesting node.
  • the presented algorithm is modified so that where, originally, ID's of similar users are requested, information is provided that can be used to constract a one or more URL's where the information can be found. If the information is not found on a directly network-accessible computer, the URL of a network-accessible one (such as the one providing the URL!) can be given, which includes parameters such as the ID of the user whose information is desired, to tell that node which possibly-connected node to get the information from.
  • two forms of interest profiles are created and stored.
  • One is a very small (in terms of the amount of data) representation.
  • the main interest profile contains the song names, and artist names for songs in the user's collection and the number of times he has played each one, which could have thousands of entries
  • this miniature profile may contain only the user's most frequently-played 10 songs identified by a hash such as that generated by Python's built-in hash( ) function.
  • Preliminary screening, including climbing happens as described elsewhere in this specification using the miniature rather than the full profile.
  • the fall profiles are checked to be sure the similarity metric is really high enough that the user should be a nearest neighbor (for instance, that it's higher than the metric associated with the least similar neighbor). If it doesn't meet this final test, it doesn't go on the list.
  • any technique that serves to produce a relatively small (from the perspective of number-of-bytes), not necessarily complete, representation of the data in the interest profile may be used.
  • the scope of the invention is not limited to particular miniaturizing technologies. For instance, in addition to the simple approach described above, applicable approaches include using all of the item hashes without any counts, using a random selection of items and including the song name itself rather than a hash and optionally further using standard compression algorithms such as are in the standard Python zlib library.
  • the source code is contained on the computer program listing appendix. Notes about several specific modules follow:
  • Each TasteProfile object may have a number of associated CalcData objects.
  • the CalcData objects represent one song in the collection of the user whose TasteProfile it is.
  • TasteProfile calculateSimilarity( ), which compares the current called TasteProfile object with another one passed to it as a parameter. Usually this is used for the local user to sequentially compare his profile to those of other users, in order to find the best ones—the nearest neighbors.
  • a nearest neighbor list is maintained of a predetermined length is maintained, and when a profile of greater similarity to the local user comes along, compared to the least similar of the current nearest neighbors, the least similar one is removed from the list and the new one added.
  • This module handles the task of using the list of nearest neighbors, and their associated profiles for recommendation purposes.
  • the code in this module represents one way of clustering cluster data containing songs where the songs (or most of the songs) have associated genre information.
  • it can be used analogously for other subject areas; for instance in the area of academic research, it could make use of the papers in the users' collections (rather than songs), and their associated keywords (rather than genres).
  • This algorithm has the advantage that it is much faster than most general clustering algorithms, due to making use of the effort that originally went into creating the genre information. Furthermore, programmers of ordinary skill in the art will readily see various ways of improving the speed of the code further (at the cost of more code complexity).
  • this is a helper class for genrerankhandlerclass.py.
  • it serves to tell the clients which identifier is associated with the cluster a client should download first. That is, it outputs a sorted list of clusters with the ones most likely to yield high similarity to the local user.
  • this code enables clients to request the clusters that are most likely to have good similarity matches first; this downloading is accomplished via BitTorrent.
  • BitTorrent-related code here because techniques for accomplishing a BitTorrent download are readily apparent to a programmer of ordinary skill.
  • This Appendix describes a class of embodiments wherein some of the user nodes run software that has only a one-way connection to the other nodes and server (if one exists). These embodiments include cases where the connections to the other nodes and server (if one exists) involve more than one medium.
  • Some of the user nodes which may be full personal computers or may be hand-held devices such as Apple Computer's ipod, have radio circuitry incorporated into them which allow them to receive transmissions from terrestrial or satellite radio broadcasters. (In the case of satellite transmitters, these may include the specific hardware associated with the Sirius or XM satellite radio services.)
  • Sirius Satellite Radio has announced a handheld device, to be called the S50, which will work with its satellite network and save songs on its internal data storage. It does not have the ability to receive satellite signals on its own. Rather it can only receive songs when attached to a docking device.
  • Samsung has announced its neXus XM Satellite Radio/MP3 Players. Users will be able to “tag” songs they hear on the radio for purchase through the XM+Napster online service.
  • the neXus unit will not have a built-in antenna; rather it will connect to a dock which has an antenna, and will record songs from the satellite service for later play without the dock attached.
  • XM Satellite Radio sells a Delphi XM SKYFi2 units which includes internal storage for pause and 30-minute replay, although the antenna is separate. It has announced a Delphi XM MyFi unit which is handled and includes an internal antenna.
  • the present invention provides a solution to this need.
  • the nodes with two-way connections work as described elsewhere in this specification.
  • reference data is collected, nearest neighbors found, recommendations are generated, and the taste profile of the local user is distributed to other user nodes to be used by them in a similar way if they are deemed by the software to be similar enough in represented taste and interests to those local users.
  • Not all embodidiments of this variant that fall within the scope have the nodes with two-way connections receiving the taste profiles in an order related to likely similarity to the local user's tastes.
  • these nodes are connected by a network such as the Internet which readily handles two-way communication.
  • the nodes with one-way connections receive taste profiles via satellite radio.
  • Satellite radio uses digital signals that can easily send taste profile data on one or more channels while sending audio and/or video content such as podcasts on others, and/or it can send a subset of those types of data on a single channel by transmitting one type at one time and other types at other times.
  • the one-way nodes which in further embodiments may be one-way at some times and two-way at other times, are hand-held devices like the Apple ipod which include a CPU and memory to store content data such as audio and video data, where such memory will include RAM and may include hard drives, flash memory, or other kinds of persistent storage storage.
  • Hand-held devices are meant to be carried from place to place by an individual, and many such devices do not have ongoing two-way communication abilities due to the difficulties and expense of maintaining network connections from remote locations.
  • satellite radio provices an excellent transmission medium for the taste profile and digital content information used by the present invention.
  • the one-way devices receive taste profile and content information. They also have at least one way of inferring the user's tastes and interests. In various embodiments these may include buttons to rate content he is hearing and/or viewing, or they may include monitoring which content the user stops prematurely or skips over using a mechanism such as a fast-forward button, and which content the user repeats. Some embodiments monitor whether a user uses a rewind-like button to experience portions of content more than once; for instance in a listening to spoken word content, the user may want to hear some of it more than once to aid his understanding. Preferred embodiments have an input mechanism such as a button that indicates that a user likes a unit of content (such as a song) and would like to hear it again.
  • buttons to rate content he is hearing and/or viewing or they may include monitoring which content the user stops prematurely or skips over using a mechanism such as a fast-forward button, and which content the user repeats.
  • Some embodiments monitor whether a user uses a rewind-like button to
  • Taste profile data received via the one-way medium is then processed as described elsewhere in this specification.
  • Taste profiles that are similar to those of the local user are stored and used for recommendation purposes.
  • User profile information may also be used for community purposes; for instance, in a cell phone embodiment, a telephone number or address may be provided whereby the local user can call the other user whose taste profile matched.
  • a contact recipient will receive bio and/or taste profile information from the local user and hear or view it before deciding whether to take the call; in further such embodiments the receiver has criteria set in his software that automatically screen for certain biographical characteristics or a certain degree of similarity before the user is alerted to the incoming call.
  • location data such as GPS information is used, so that the local user is made aware of the location (which may not be current) of the remote user, or the software screens on location data so that the local user is only alerted to profiles associated with nearby locations, and/or, alternatively, the remote user's software screens attempted contacts based on the location of the local user.
  • Satellite radio reception may be maintained with typically lower consumption of bandwidth and energy resources than cell phone connections, and typically have higher data transfer rates, so it is helpful to receive a stream of data from the satellite, while also having the hardware required to allow the user to make a cell phone call.
  • a key to this class of embodiments is the fact that the overall network contains both one-way and two-way nodes at a given instant in time (again, some of these nodes may change roles at other times).
  • This enables taste profile and (in preferred embodiments) biographical information or other data such as location to be sent on the network to be received and used by the one-way, receive-only nodes. Because of this mix of node types, it is practical to collect the taste profile data on the two-way nodes which is used to make recommendations on the one-way nodes.
  • two-way nodes containing a broadcast (for instance, satellite) radio receiver as well as wi-fi, ethernet, or other connection to a typical Internet service such as a dial-up service, cable modem, or DSL
  • a typical Internet service such as a dial-up service, cable modem, or DSL
  • data derived from other users is substantially or wholly received via the broadcast radio receiving circuitry, while data is uploaded via the Internet. This minimizes the use of limited Internet “bandwidth” for receiving large amounts of data.
  • Goombah software Software incorporating all or much of the software contained in this specification runs on a large number of desktop personal computers, connected to the Internet. We will refer to it as the Goombah software, since there is presently software of that name that incorporates much of that code.
  • the users of those computers use Apple Computer's iTunes software to play music. iTunes writes an XML file XXX on disk containing the identifiers for each track in the user's collection.
  • the Goombah software XXX reads this XML file and uses it as the user's taste profile data.
  • This data is sent to a server XXX, under the control of which the data is communicated, not only to other personal computers, but to a terrestrial radio transmitter XXX that sends the data to the satellite XXX or satellites being used to facilitate a satellite radio service such as XM or Sirius. From the satellites it is broadcast to portable units XXX which could be, for instance, Sirius or XM-enabled versions of Apple Computers ipod device.
  • the taste profiles contained in the data play the role of candidate nearest neighbors; the nearest neighbors are selected and used to provide content recommendations, as described elsewhere in this specification.
  • the recommended music takes the form of at least one virtual channel. That is, from the user's point of view, it behaves much like a standard satellite radio channel, but at least much of the time, the content is selected, scheduled, and played on the user's local portable device.
  • buttons are not a dedicated physical button for this purpose, but instead controls are provide whereby the user can navigate through a menuing system to choose a “Save” option.
  • Samsung's neXus player will have a mechanism through which the user can “tag” a song for purchase; since available photographs do not show a dedicated button for this purpose but rather an input machanism that appears similar to the ipod's for navigating a menu system.
  • the tagging function is undoubtedly activited through that menu system.
  • tagging a song implies the user probably likes it becuase most people will tend to buy songs that they like [although some will buy songs for others such as their children; still the statistical likelihood that tagging implies liking a song makes it appropriate for our purposes].
  • So embodiments built into an improved neXus device may use the tag function for this purpose.
  • a separate “I like this” option may be available through the same menu structure which would serve the purpose here attributed to the Save button.
  • such a future device will have a built-in antenna akin to the Delphi XM Myfi's antenna. All such variants fall within the scope of the present invention.
  • the song has been stored in RAM even after the earlier parts of the song were played. So it is in RAM and available to be moved to persistent storage such as flash memory or a hard drive when the Save button is pressed. Typically there is a pause between songs, and pressing Save during that pause causes the previously played song to be saved.
  • When a song is Saved it can be played again later with greater frequency than would be the case if the user simply waited for the satellite channel to broadcast it again.
  • the portable device automatically schedules the song to be played again later, and does the same for other Saved songs. For instance Saved songs may be played daily for the first week, then every other day for the next week, then every third day for the first week, etc. An unlimited number scheduling variants are possible.
  • the embodiment described here additionally mixes songs from the user's favorite satellite channels with stored songs; this is one way the user hears new songs that he can decide to Save or not.
  • the Saved song may be found and played again at the user's will by means of the ipod's standard navigation features, including being played automatically in the device's Shuffle mode.
  • the Save button has easily-understood use and value for the user. However, it also serves the purpose of being an input for taste profile data.
  • Unsaved songs may not go there, although in some variations of this embodiment, satellite songs that the user has heard in their entirety (i.e. he didn't turn the device off, select a song to play from the device's internal library, switch to another satellite channel, or perform some other action that cuts the song off), it is stored in the profile with diminished mathematical weight. And in some variants, songs that were cutoff are stored as songs that are disliked.
  • the device is permanently one-way, that is, it never has a direct or indirect (through a PC) ability to send data onto the Internet or another network
  • the taste profile built by the Save button (and/or other techniques) is never made available to other users.
  • the local user's benefit it enables him to discern which candidate neighbors are received from the satellite are nearest neighbors, and the device can therefore generate recommmendations in the usual way.
  • the embodiment currently being discussed involves a unique identifier for each song, which is an md5 hash of a concatenation of the song artist, name, album defined by the makeSongHash functioned in the accompanying code. (Other variants use other techniques such as fingerprints of the audio data, an md5 hash of a text representation of the audio data, etc.)
  • This identifier is contained in the taste profiles for the user and is used as the representation of the song in that data (or as one such representation).
  • a song When a song is recommended, it goes into a list in the device's storage, and is checked against a broadcast schedule transmitted periodically by the satellites and received by the device. The device then knows to record certain songs sent on certain channels in the future, and does so when the timee comes, saving the song data into persistent storage and adding the song to the device's music library. In this way the device builds a library of music that the user is likely to enjoy. This music is added to the user's virtual channel, and also available to play at his will through the device's song navigation mechanisms.
  • the result is as if there a radio channel dedicated exclusively to that individual user's tastes, which gets more and more finely tuned over time.
  • songs downloaded from the satellite may be transferred to the computer, either for long-term storage in that computer or played using the computer's hardware using data only persistently stored on the device.
  • the embodiment currently under discussion can be used in two modes: subscription and purchase modes.
  • the user pays a set fee per month, and can store as much music downloaded from the satellites (and/or from other sources) as well fit in the device's storage and they may be played as frequently as the user desires.
  • the tiered subscription service where for a particular monthly fee, a particular number of songs or artists's music may be stored persistently or a particular amount of storage may be allocated; or songs from the satellites may be played only a particular number of times.
  • Saving a song causes the song to be purchased.
  • the Save button is labelled “Purchase”.
  • the device is eventually connected to a two-way network or to a wireless-enabled financial “smart card” with debit capabilities, or to analogous financial technologies, the cost is deducted.
  • the schedule may be received over the Internet or other network for devices that sometimes have connections to such networks.
  • no schedule is available and instead, a directory is provided of channels together with taste-descriptive data such as a list of genres that each channel focuses on or a list of representative artists, which is used to determine which channels are likely to contain songs the user will want to hear and/or are or will be recommended.
  • taste profile data contains genre info for songs in the taste profile, or the service provides a look-up table mapping song identifiers to genres.
  • the channels have associated genre information, they can use that information for recommended songs to choose likely channels to listen to to receive the songs.
  • information such as representive artists is used to describe channels, the artists that most frequently appear in taste profiles having the recommended song can be matched against the lists of artists describing different channels, and the channels that best match the currently recommended-but-not-yet-downloaded songs are the ones that the device focuses on in waiting for the song to arrive.
  • Some embodiments use sonic descriptors of each channel to describe it. For instance, the companies Savage Beast and SoundFlavor describe each song by a set of attributes including such factors as tempo, instrumentantation, sex of the singer, and hundreds of others. Some them are human-generated, and some are software-generated (the software examines the audio data) or generated with the aid of software. It is obvious that with such a collection of attributes, average values or other kinds of summarizations may be generated for each channel that tends to describe the music played on that channel. And a vector or other structure may be provided that enables the attributes associated with recommended songs to be determined.
  • Such structures may be downloaded via the Internet or from the satellites.
  • the satellites can send the attribibutes associated with each song, either at the same time as a song's audio data is transmitted, or separately; this occurs in preferred embodiments.
  • the attributes associated with songs the user likes are summarized by software within the handheld device. For example average values of the attributes can be calculated using arithmetic or geometric averaging, or only the attributes most frequently associated with liked songs may be counted, or other summarization techniques may be used; these comprise a taste profile of the user instead of, or in addition to, the taste profile built from identifiers of liked songs (where “liked” songs may also be signified by being already-owned by the user).
  • there is an additional input device such as a button that signifies that the user does not like a song; then the averages and/or presence/absence counts used to generate the taste profile may be adjusted negatively by that control in association with a particular song.
  • each user is associated with a song attribute, and the value of the attribute depends on whether the associated user has the song or not, and/or on how often the user plays the song. So each song has an associated list of attributes corresponding to users, either instead of or in addition to other attributes such as ones derived from the sonic content.
  • factor analysis may be used to reduce the number of attributes into principle components. Based on a calculations generated on a server or using distributed systems, the local device can use these calculations to generate the principal components from locally produced data (such as the identifiers of the other users who have each song, as determined by their incoming profiles); these can be summarized to produce a taste profile for the user. Thus it is possible to arrive at a manageable number of attributes for individual songs and local taste profiles. Those of ordinary skill in the art of statistical factor analysis will see how to do this.
  • recommendations are generated by using the songs whose taste profiles most closely match the local user's taste profile.
  • the nearest neighbors are themselves recommendable items and the nearest ones are therefore recommended.
  • Some embodiments need no two-way nodes.
  • the portable devices calculate which incoming songs are nearest-neighbors without any data from other user nodes. Note that while human input may be used to decide on the appropriate attribute values for each song, this input need not be done on “user nodes” as we use the term elsewhere in this specification. Rather that data may be input through software specially designed for the manual entry of such data by a someone whose job it is to do that analysis work.
  • satellites broadcast taste profile information for each song. These may be broadcast at the same time as the songs by interleaving the music data with the song data or by using another channel, or they may be broadcast at other times.
  • the song taste profiles are broadcast a substantial amount of time before the songs themselves so that software may automatically schedule the future recording of very similar songs.
  • the user's local tasteprofile is refined over time due to input from a Save button or other passive or active indications of taste, and the portable device may never have any two-way connectivity.
  • tellite or “satellites”
  • a collection of satellites will provide a broader range of coverage than a single satellite.
  • One advantage of the techniques described here is that, especially in embodiments where the song taste profiles are transmitted in close temporal proximity to the song data, a portable device is enabled to acquire a library of satellite-downloaded music that the user may continue to enjoy even if the device goes out of range of the satellite(s) for some time.
  • no taste profiles are sent from the satellites. Instead, a software analysis of each song is done in the portable device itself, determining values for attributes such as tempo. Software to do this sort of thing exists today in, for example, the Polyphonic HMI's Hit Song Science technology. Any engineer of ordinary skill and access to such software will see how to use integrate it into the present invention. Thus song taste profiles generated by such software play the same role as downloaded song taste profiles do in other embodiments described above. However, there is a substantial advantage to downloading the song taste profiles: present software does not have the ability to examine song data for such attributes as sense of humor in the lyric. There are many such qualities that pertain to recorded music that software is not currently capable of analyzing.
  • Speech-to-text software can determine many of the words spoken, and those can be mapped to content vectors as is often done for document analysis; that can comprise the item taste profiles.
  • one set of embodiments is based upon an LCD, plasma, or nanotube display hanging on a wall. It displays different images, which may be moving or still, which it receives from a satellite.
  • Taste profiles are downloaded which contain attributes pertaining to each visual item; in some embodiments the taste profiles contain identifiers of other users who like the visual item supplied by users with two-way network connections; in other cases or in combination with such human identifiers, taste profiles containing attributes such as indications of the presence of various colors, hard or soft edges, and whether the image is realistic or abstract, landscape or portrait, etc.; in some embodiments software analysis within the local device produces a taste profile; for instance such information as color is simple to extract from digital image data, there is existing software, used to block pornographic sites, which can discern such characteristics as the presence of bare human skin.
  • Save button that protrudes slightly from a flame that surrounds the “picture”.
  • a CPU which is embedded into the device and displayed later.
  • the CPU also makes use of that information to improve a local taste profile representing the user's tastes. This enables the device to acquire more visual items that the user will enjoy, as described above for music.
  • a song would be represented, instead of (or in addition to) a taste profile containing a list of attributes, by a pattern-matching software.
  • a pattern-matching software For instance, it could be represented by a neural net, with the number of layers and nodes and the numberical values that are intrinsic to the net being defined in a way that takes a local user's taste profile information and outputs a high value if the song is likely to match the user's tastes and a low value if it is not.
  • the neural net can be trained using taste profile data of users who had two-way connections enabling the profiles to be communicated to a central server.
  • the neural net is trained so that it takes the taste profiles as input, and outputs high or low values depending on whether the user that is currently trained on liked the song or not (for instance based on whether he pressed a Save button or did nothing or “fast forwarded” past a song and never listened to it in its enirety; in such a case the net would preferably be trained to output a numerical value with a high value in the first case, a middle value in the second, and a low value in the third).
  • taste profiles based on song attributes are also provided, and a user taste profile to be input into the artificial intelligence unit is generated based on the ones associated with the songs the user likes (and/or does not like).
  • content items such as songs are accompanied by lists of identifiers of other songs that are considered to be likely to be enjoyed by the same people as the current song, as determined, for example, either by having similar sonic and/or lyrical attributes, or tending to be liked (or purchased by), the same people.
  • identifiers may be used as attributes for nearest-neighbor matching, but they may also be used as simple indicators that the listed song identifiers may be used to schedule the acquision of those other songs if the user likes the current one (as indicated, for example, by pressing a Save button while listening to it).
  • the user when the user first starts the player, and selects a virtual channel, if there aren't many songs (or are no songs) stored in the device yet, it may start playing the currently-being-broadcast song from one of the user's favorite channels, and follow that up with a song from storage if one is available, or play a song from one of the user's favorite channels.
  • the user When playing songs from the user's favorite channels, it may receive broadcasts from more than one channel at a time, and play one song while simultaneously caching another song from another channel into RAM of persistent storage; after the first song is complete it may play a song from another channel.
  • This Appendix describes a class of embodiments wherein there is two way communication between nodes, but it is limited to a particular geographical area, being enabled by such wireless technologies as Wi-Fi or Bluetooth or the like.
  • a link is set up between the two devices.
  • Communication may occur between more than two devices simultaneously, but for simplicity of example we are focusing the interactions between one pair at a time.
  • a link may be established between two devices in different automobiles or between two handheld devices such as cellular phones.
  • All or a substantial portion of the music library identifiers in each device comprises the taste profile of that devices. It is communicated to the other device by wireless means.
  • the similarity of the other user to the local user is calculated by means of the taste profiles (by local user we mean the person whose information is in onee of the two devices). If the other user's taste profile makes it one of the N most similar ones seen by the local user's device, where N is a predetermined number, the taste profile is stored and used for recommendation purposes as described elsewhere in this specification.
  • the devices are allowed to copy music from one device to another. If a track residing on a device to which the local user is currently connected has a highly recommended song on it, it is transferred to the local device either automatically or after suggesting the transfer and waiting for the user to OK it (for instance, by pressing a button on the device in respone to an onscreen notification). In other embodiments, the device keeps track of how many times the user has played a song, and to play it more than (for instance) three times, the user must buy the track. This transaction occurs at the time it is connected to the wired Internet (either through a wireless base station, a direct Ethernet connection, or a connection via USB, FireWire, or the like to a desktop PC which is connected to the Internet).
  • the wired Internet either through a wireless base station, a direct Ethernet connection, or a connection via USB, FireWire, or the like to a desktop PC which is connected to the Internet.
  • the data corresponding to each song may contain an indicator (such as a bit or particular byte value) indicating that certain songs are free—in other words they can be legally transferred between devices without legal or copyright hindrance. In that case transfers occur as described above but, in the absence of a paid subscription, only the free songs may be transferred.
  • an indicator such as a bit or particular byte value
  • the present invention is desirably implemented at least in part via a public network or internet, although some embodiments make use of satellite transmissions and/or wireless transmissions directly from device to device. It may, for example, be coupled to a private network or intranet through a firewall server or router.
  • the term “internet” generally refers to any collection of distinct networks working together to appear as a single network to a user.
  • IP Internet protocol
  • the Internet provides file transfer, remote log in, electronic mail, news and other services.
  • IP Internet protocol
  • IP Internet protocol
  • the firewall server or router is a computer or item of equipment which couples the computers of a private network to the Internet. It may thus act as a gatekeeper for messages and datagrams going to and from the Internet 1 .
  • An Internet service provider is also coupled to the Internet.
  • a service provider is an entity that provides connections to a part of the Internet, for a plurality of users.
  • Also coupled to the Internet are a plurality of web sites or nodes. When a user wishes to conduct a transaction at one of the nodes, the user accesses the node through the Internet.
  • each node is configured to understand which firewall and node to send data packets to given a destination IP address. This may be implemented by providing the firewalls and nodes with a map of all valid IP addresses disposed on its particular private network or another location on the Internet. The map may be in the form of prefix matches up to and including the full IP address.
  • a server containing an information database with representations of user profiles and associated user identifiers 5 .
  • the information may be stored, for example, as a record or as a file.
  • the information associated with each particular user is stored in a particular data structure in a database.
  • One exemplary database structure is as follows.
  • the database may be stored, for example, as an object-oriented database management system (ODBMS), a relational database management system (e.g. DB2, SQL, etc.), a hierarchical database, a network database, a distributed database (i.e. a collection of multiple, logically interrelated databases distributed over a computer network) or any other type of database package.
  • ODBMS object-oriented database management system
  • DB2 relational database management system
  • SQL e.g. DB2
  • DB2 relational database management system
  • a hierarchical database i.e. a collection of multiple, logically interrelated databases distributed over a computer network
  • distributed database i.e. a
  • a computer system on which the system of the present invention may be implemented may be, for example, a personal computer running Microsoft Windows, Linux, Apple Macintosh or an equivalent operating system.
  • a computer system typically includes a central processing unit (CPU), e.g., a conventional microprocessor, a random access memory (RAM) for temporary storage of information, and a read only memory (ROM) for permanent storage of information.
  • CPU central processing unit
  • RAM random access memory
  • ROM read only memory
  • Each of the aforementioned components is coupled to a bus.
  • the operating system controls allocation of system resources and performs tasks such as processing, scheduling, memory management, networking, and I/O services.
  • a non-volatile mass storage device which may be provided as a fixed disk drive which is coupled to the bus by a disk controller.
  • Data and software may be provided to and extracted from computer system via removable storage media such as hard disk, diskette, and CD ROM.
  • removable storage media such as hard disk, diskette, and CD ROM.
  • data values generated using techniques described herein may be stored on storage media. The data values may then be retrieved from the media by the CPU and utilized to recommend one of a plurality of items in response to a user's query.
  • computer software useful for performing computations related to enabling recommendatons and community by massively-distributed nearest-neighbor searching may be stored on storage media.
  • Such computer software may be retrieved from the media for immediate execution by the CPU or by processors included in one or more peripherals.
  • the CPU may retrieve the computer software and subsequently store the software in RAM or ROM for later execution.
  • a keyboard and a mouse are typically coupled to the bus by a controller.
  • the computer system typically also includes a communications adapter which allows the system to be interconnected to a local area network (LAN) or a wide area network (WAN). Connections may be wireless or wired,
  • LAN local area network
  • WAN wide area network
  • data and computer program software can be transferred to and from the computer system via the adapter, bus and network; although it should be noted that in embodiments without two-way connectivity, the device manufactur may load the software onto the device.

Abstract

The computer associated with each of a potentially large number of end users is harnessed to provide a massively-distributed mechanism for finding the nearest neighbors of each user, according to tastes and/or interests. Once these nearest neighbors are determined, there taste or and/or interest profiles are leveraged for highly accurate recommendations, and their online addresses are leveraged for community purposes.

Description

    CROSS-REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATIONS
  • This application is a continuation-in-part of International Patent Application: PCT/US2005/02731, filed 27 Jan. 2005 for Enabling Recommendations and Community By Massively-Distributed Nearest-Neighbor Searching, which claims priority from and benefit of the following U.S. Provisional Patent Applications: 60/540,041 filed 27 Jan. 2004, for Enabling Recommendations and Community by Massively-Distributed Nearest-Neighbor Searching; 60/611,222 filed 18 Sep. 2004 for Community and Recommendation System; and 60/635,197 filed 9 Dec. 2004 for Community and Recommendation System. Applicant hereby claims priority from and benefit of the aforesaid applications 60/611,222 and 60/635,197. Applicant hereby incorporates by reference herein to the fullest extent allowed by law the entire disclosure of each of the aforesaid applications, including all text, drawings, and code whether on paper or machine-readable media.
  • RESERVATION OF COPYRIGHT Copyright © 2003, 2004, 2005 Emergent Music LLC
  • This application includes material which is subject to copyright protection. The copyright owner has no objection to the facsimile reproduction by anyone of the patent disclosure as it appears in patent office files or records, but otherwise reserves all copyright rights whatsoever.
  • COMPACT DISC INCORPORATION BY REFERENCE
  • Applicants hereby incorporate by reference the entire contents of the material on the compact disc submitted concurrently herewith, and as listed below. The disc was created on 17 Sep. 2005. Applicants submit herewith two individual compact discs, each being identical to the other.
  • Size Mon Day Year File
  • ./cooltunes/Goombah Help:
    • 3358 Aug. 31, 2004 bittorrent.html
    • 3455 Jul. 14, 2004 blogging.html
    • 3077 Aug. 31, 2004 contacting.html
    • 2621 Aug. 31, 2004 index.html
    • 2945 Aug. 31, 2004 install.html
    • 3097 Jul. 14, 2004 neighbors.html
    • 2842 Jul. 14, 2004 playingmusic.html
    • 4019 Aug. 31, 2004 prefs.html
    • 3086 Aug. 31, 2004 profiles.html
    • 3046 Jul. 14, 2004 recommendations.html
    • 2893 Jul. 14, 2004 suggestions.html
    • 2819 Jul. 14, 2004 terms.html
    • 2665 Jul. 14, 2004 upgrades.html
    • 5738 Jul. 27, 2004 web.html
    • 3145 Jul. 14, 2004 whatisit.html
      ./cooltunes/Goombah Help/images:
    • (empty)
      ./cooltunes/bittorrent:
    • 6255 Sep. 17, 2004 bittorrentfetcherclass.py
    • 2001 Sep. 17, 2004 bittorrentfetcherclasstest.py
    • 1769 Jul. 15, 2004 bittorrenttimedfetcherclass.py
    • 1705 Jul. 15, 2004 bittorrenttimedfetcherclasstest.py
    • 2022 Aug. 30, 2004 btcreatetorrentsmain.py
    • 5061 Aug. 30, 2004 btdirectoryclass.py
    • 1112 Aug. 30, 2004 btdirectoryclassmain.py
    • 10396 Aug. 30, 2004 btdirectoryclasstest.py
    • 4786 Sep. 2, 2004 btseedmanagerclass.py
    • 5462 Aug. 30, 2004 btseedmanagerclasstest.py
    • 2346 Aug. 11, 2004 btseedsdaemonmain.py
    • 1149 Aug. 11, 2004 bttrackdaemonmain.py
      ./cooltunes/clustering:
    • 7780 Aug. 20, 2004 clusterbuilderclass.py
    • 1877 Aug. 26, 2004 clusterbuilderclassmain.py
    • 7512 Aug. 20, 2004 clusterbuilderclasstest.py
    • 17139 Jul. 13, 2004 clusterfitterclass.py
    • 12368 Jul. 13, 2004 clusterfitterclasstest.py
    • 1876 Aug. 13, 2004 clusteringcandidatesfileclass.py
    • 4060 Jun. 9, 2004 clusteringcandidatesfileclasstest.py
    • 1835 Jun. 9, 2004 extremes.py
    • 38421 Jul. 16, 2004 genrerankhandlerclass.py
    • 10305 Jul. 13, 2004 genrerankhandlerclassrefactorings.txt
    • 102592 Jul. 13, 2004 genrerankhandlerclasstest.py
    • 1778 Jun. 2, 2004 publicprofilestringclass.py
    • 1089 Jun. 2, 2004 publicprofilestringclasstest.py
    • 2315 Jun. 9, 2004 unique.py
      ./cooltunes/getblogurl:
    • 5715 Jul. 26, 2004 getblogurlclass.py
      ./cooltunes/initialcandidates:
    • 421 Jun. 22, 2004 ReadMe.Candidates.txt
      ./cooltunes/libchanges/BitTorrent:
    • 47 Jun. 3, 2004 BitTorrentVersion-3.4.2.txt
    • 9955 Jun. 3, 2004 Choker.py
    • 10802 Jun. 3, 2004 Connecter.py
    • 1016 Jun. 3, 2004 CurrentRateMeasure.py
    • 17734 Jun. 3, 2004 Downloader.py
    • 2855 Jun. 3, 2004 DownloaderFeedback.py
    • 18789 Jun. 3, 2004 Encrypter.py
    • 6054 Jun. 3, 2004 HTTPHandler.py
    • 2650 Jun. 3, 2004 NatCheck.py
    • 5014 Jun. 3, 2004 PiecePicker.py
    • 1503 Jun. 3, 2004 RateMeasure.py
    • 18347 Jun. 3, 2004 RawServer.py
    • 5653 Jun. 3, 2004 Rerequester.py
    • 5021 Jun. 3, 2004 Storage.py
    • 17029 Jun. 3, 2004 StorageWrapper.py
    • 8059 Jun. 3, 2004 Uploader.py
    • 18 Jun. 3, 2004 _init_.py
    • 7052 Jun. 3, 2004 bencode.py
    • 3733 Jun. 3, 2004 bitfield.py
    • 3831 Jun. 3, 2004 btformats.py
    • 12791 Jun. 3, 2004 download.py
    • 2240 Jun. 3, 2004 fakeopen.py
    • 3579 Jun. 3, 2004 parseargs.py
    • 2287 Jun. 3, 2004 selectpoll.py
    • 2052 Jun. 3, 2004 testtest.py
    • 24605 Jun. 3, 2004 track.py
    • 4261 Jun. 3, 2004 zurllib.py
      ./cooltunes/libchanges/macos/xml:
    • 1806 Apr. 5, 2004 FtCore.py
    • 389 Apr. 5, 2004 ReadMe.Bob.txt
    • 1083 Apr. 5, 2004 _init_.py
    • 9627 Apr. 5, 2004 ns.py
      ./cooltunes/libchanges/macos/xml/dom:
    • 4235 Apr. 5, 2004 Attr.py
    • 644 Apr. 5, 2004 CDATASection.py
    • 4094 Apr. 5, 2004 CharacterData.py
    • 603 Apr. 5, 2004 Comment.py
    • 1936 Apr. 5, 2004 DOMImplementation.py
    • 11948 Apr. 5, 2004 Document.py
    • 1296 Apr. 5, 2004 DocumentFragment.py
    • 3399 Apr. 5, 2004 DocumentType.py
    • 10264 Apr. 5, 2004 Element.py
    • 2610 Apr. 5, 2004 Entity.py
    • 1394 Apr. 5, 2004 EntityReference.py
    • 3438 Apr. 5, 2004 Event.py
    • 16628 Apr. 5, 2004 FtNode.py
    • 2259 Apr. 5, 2004 MessageSource.py
    • 5052 Apr. 5, 2004 NamedNodeMap.py
    • 937 Apr. 5, 2004 NodeFilter.py
    • 3998 Apr. 5, 2004 Nodelterator.py
    • 1442 Apr. 5, 2004 NodeList.py
    • 2056 Apr. 5, 2004 Notation.py
    • 2080 Apr. 5, 2004 Processinglnstruction.py
    • 40190 Apr. 5, 2004 Range.py
    • 1195 Apr. 5, 2004 Text.py
    • 6995 Apr. 5, 2004 TreeWalker.py
    • 7545 Apr. 5, 2004 _init_.py
    • 3481 Apr. 5, 2004 domreg.py
    • 36379 Apr. 5, 2004 expatbuilder.py
    • 19289 Apr. 5, 2004 javadom.py
    • 5287 Apr. 5, 2004 minicompat.py
    • 65671 Apr. 5, 2004 minidom.py
    • 1274 Apr. 5, 2004 minitraversal.py
    • 11978 Apr. 5, 2004 pulldom.py
    • 12384 Apr. 5, 2004 xmlbuilder.py
      ./cooltunes/libchanges/macos/xml/dom/ext:
    • 11057 Apr. 5, 2004 Dom2Sax.py
    • 13835 Apr. 5, 2004 Printer.py
    • 2344 Apr. 5, 2004 Visitor.py
    • 1584 Apr. 5, 2004 XHtml2HtmlPrinter.py
    • 1634 Apr. 5, 2004 XHtmlPrinter.py
    • 10102 Apr. 5, 2004 _init_.py
    • 13186 Apr. 5, 2004 cl4n.py
      ./cooltunes/libchanges/macos/xml/dom/ext/reader:
    • 3174 Apr. 5, 2004 HtmlLib.py
    • 3123 Apr. 5, 2004 HtmlSax.py
    • 8871 Apr. 5, 2004 PyExpat.py
    • 6381 Apr. 5, 2004 Sax.py
    • 15985 Apr. 5, 2004 Sax2.py
    • 8295 Apr. 5, 2004 Sax2Lib.py
    • 10310 Apr. 5, 2004 Sgmlop.py
    • 2207 Apr. 5, 2004 _init_.py
      ./cooltunes/libchanges/macos/xml/dom/html:
    • 9836 Apr. 5, 2004 GenerateHtml.py
    • 3788 Apr. 5, 2004 HTMLAnchorElement.py
    • 3411 Apr. 5, 2004 HTMLAppletElement.py
    • 2959 Apr. 5, 2004 HTMLAreaElernent.py
    • 1309 Apr. 5, 2004 HTMLBRElement.py
    • 1501 Apr. 5, 2004 HTMLBaseElement.py
    • 1702 Apr. 5, 2004 HTMLBaseFontElement.py
    • 2361 Apr. 5, 2004 HTMLBodyElement.py
    • 2686 Apr. 5, 2004 HTMLButtonElement.py
    • 2175 Apr. 5, 2004 HTMLCollection.py
    • 1396 Apr. 5, 2004 HTMLDListElement.py
    • 1047 Apr. 5, 2004 HTMLDOMImplementation.py
    • 1405 Apr. 5, 2004 HTMLDirectoryElement.py
    • 1509 Apr. 5, 2004 HTMLDivElement.py
    • 11633 Apr. 5, 2004 HTMLDocument.py
    • 3572 Apr. 5, 2004 HTMLElement.py
    • 1299 Apr. 5, 2004 HTMLFieldSetElement.py
    • 1690 Apr. 5, 2004 HTMLFontElement.py
    • 3327 Apr. 5, 2004 HTMLFormElement.py
    • 3564 Apr. 5, 2004 HTMLFrameElement.py
    • 1497 Apr. 5, 2004 HTMLFrameSetElement.py
    • 2016 Apr. 5, 2004 HTMLHRElement.py
    • 1312 Apr. 5, 2004 HTMLHeadElement.py
    • 1314 Apr. 5, 2004 HTMLHeadingElement.py
    • 1312 Apr. 5, 2004 HTMLHtmlElement.py
    • 3894 Apr. 5, 2004 HTMLIFrameElement.py
    • 3888 Apr. 5, 2004 HTMLhmageElement.py
    • 6481 Apr. 5, 2004 HTMLInputElement.py
    • 1553 Apr. 5, 2004 HTMLIsIndexElement.py
    • 1558 Apr. 5, 2004 HTMLLIElement.py
    • 1784 Apr. 5, 2004 HTMLLabelElement.py
    • 1798 Apr. 5, 2004 HTMLLegendElement.py
    • 3046 Apr. 5, 2004 HTMLLinkElement.py
    • 1377 Apr. 5, 2004 HTMLMapElement.py
    • 1396 Apr. 5, 2004 HTMLMenuElement.py
    • 1961 Apr. 5, 2004 HTMLMetaElement.py
    • 1514 Apr. 5, 2004 HTMLModElement.py
    • 1869 Apr. 5, 2004 HTMLOListElement.py
    • 5233 Apr. 5, 2004 HTMLObjectElement.py
    • 1623 Apr. 5, 2004 HTMLOptGroupElement.py
    • 3651 Apr. 5, 2004 HTMLOptionElement.py
    • 1322 Apr. 5, 2004 HTMLParagraphElement.py
    • 1949 Apr. 5, 2004 HTMLParamElement.py
    • 1364 Apr. 5, 2004 HTMLPreElement.py
    • 1283 Apr. 5, 2004 HTMLQuoteElement.py
    • 3150 Apr. 5, 2004 HTMLScriptElement.py
    • 4750 Apr. 5, 2004 HTMLSelectElement.py
    • 811 Apr. 5, 2004 HTMLStyleElement.py
    • 1334 Apr. 5, 2004 HTMLTableCaptionElement.py
    • 4684 Apr. 5, 2004 HTMLTableCellElement.py
    • 2421 Apr. 5, 2004 HTMLTableColElement.py
    • 9117 Apr. 5, 2004 HTMLTableElement.py
    • 3711 Apr. 5, 2004 HTMLTableRowElement.py
    • 2877 Apr. 5, 2004 HTMLTableSectionElement.py
    • 4989 Apr. 5, 2004 HTMLTextAreaElement.py
    • 1837 Apr. 5, 2004 HTMLTitleElement.py
    • 1612 Apr. 5, 2004 HTMLUListElement.py
    • 36479 Apr. 5, 2004 _init_.py
      ./cooltunes/libchanges/macos/xml/marshal:
    • 359 Apr. 5, 2004 _init_.py
    • 20344 Apr. 5, 2004 generic.py
    • 10023 Apr. 5, 2004 wddx.py
      ./cooltunes/libchanges/macos/xml/parsers:
    • 43 Apr. 5, 2004 _init_.py
    • 116 Apr. 5, 2004 expat.py
    • 19361 Apr. 5, 2004 sgmllib.py
      ./cooltunes/libchanges/macos/xml/parsers/xmlproc:
    • 22 Apr. 5, 2004 _init_.py
    • 1657 Apr. 5, 2004 _outputters.py
    • 10134 Apr. 5, 2004 catalog.py
    • 6593 Apr. 5, 2004 charconv.py
    • 22875 Apr. 5, 2004 dtdparser.py
    • 33805 Apr. 5, 2004 errors.py
    • 4852 Apr. 5, 2004 namespace.py
    • 6752 Apr. 5, 2004 utils.py
    • 2340 Apr. 5, 2004 xcatalog.py
    • 7067 Apr. 5, 2004 xmlapp.py
    • 28475 Apr. 5, 2004 xmldtd.py
    • 19970 Apr. 5, 2004 xmlproc.py
    • 32619 Apr. 5, 2004 xmlutils.py
    • 10167 Apr. 5, 2004 xmlval.py
      ./cooltunes/libchanges/macos/xml/sax:
    • 1602 Apr. 5, 2004 _init_.py
    • 4662 Apr. 5, 2004 _exceptions.py
    • 15122 Apr. 5, 2004 expatreader.py
    • 14084 Apr. 5, 2004 handler.py
    • 1250 Apr. 5, 2004 sax2exts.py
    • 6617 Apr. 5, 2004 saxexts.py
    • 15687 Apr. 5, 2004 saxlib.py
    • 24428 Apr. 5, 2004 saxutils.py
    • 18864 Apr. 5, 2004 writer.py
    • 12580 Apr. 5, 2004 xmlreader.py
      ./cooltunes/libchanges/macos/xml/sax/drivers:
    • 39 Apr. 5, 2004 _init_.py
    • 1051 Apr. 5, 2004 drv_htmllib.py
    • 3112 Apr. 5, 2004 drv_ltdriver.py
    • 895 Apr. 5, 2004 drv_ltdriver_val.py
    • 5893 Apr. 5, 2004 drv_pyexpat.py
    • 979 Apr. 5, 2004 drv_sgmllib.py
    • 2700 Apr. 5, 2004 drv_sgmlop.py
    • 3685 Apr. 5, 2004 drv_xmldc.py
    • 2709 Apr. 5, 2004 drv_xmllib.py
    • 4402 Apr. 5, 2004 drv_xmlproc.py
    • 1774 Apr. 5, 2004 drv_xmlproc_val.py
    • 2509 Apr. 5, 2004 drv_xmltoolkit.py
    • 3393 Apr. 5, 2004 pylibs.py
      ./cooltunes/libchanges/macos/xml/sax/drivers2:
    • 39 Apr. 5, 2004 _init_.py
    • 422 Apr. 5, 2004 drv_htmllib.py
    • 5931 Apr. 5, 2004 drv_javasax.py
    • 645 Apr. 5, 2004 drv_pyexpat.py
    • 3759 Apr. 5, 2004 drv_sgmllib.py
    • 4386 Apr. 5, 2004 drv_sgmlop.py
    • 2467 Apr. 5, 2004 drv_sgmlop_html.py
    • 13532 Apr. 5, 2004 drv_xmlproc.py
      ./cooltunes/libchanges/macos/xml/schema:
    • 38 Apr. 5, 2004 _init_.py
    • 60039 Apr. 5, 2004 trex.py
      ./cooltunes/libchanges/macos/xml/unicode:
    • 158 Apr. 5, 2004 _init_.py
    • 2863 Apr. 5, 2004 iso8859.py
    • 11690 Apr. 5, 2004 utf8_iso.py
      ./cooltunes/libchanges/macos/xml/utils:
    • 22 Apr. 5, 2004 _init_.py
    • 26221 Apr. 5, 2004 characters.py
    • 5676 Apr. 5, 2004 iso8601.py
    • 6160 Apr. 5, 2004 qp_xm.py
      ./cooltunes/libchanges/macos/xml/xpath:
    • 9457 Apr. 5, 2004 BuiltInExtFunctions.py
    • 2193 Apr. 5, 2004 Context.py
    • 5865 Apr. 5, 2004 Conversions.py
    • 11233 Apr. 5, 2004 CoreFunctions.py
    • 1159 Apr. 5, 2004 ExpandedNameWrapper.py
    • 996 Apr. 5, 2004 MessageSource.py
    • 757 Apr. 5, 2004 NamespaceNode.py
    • 2047 Apr. 5, 2004 ParsedAbbreviatedAbsoluteLocationPath.py
    • 2137 Apr. 5, 2004 ParsedAbbreviatedRelativeLocationPath.py
    • 1228 Apr. 5, 2004 ParsedAbsoluteLocationPath.py
    • 9080 Apr. 5, 2004 ParsedAxisSpecifier.py
    • 21415 Apr. 5, 2004 ParsedExpr.py
    • 5443 Apr. 5, 2004 ParsedNodeTest.py
    • 2483 Apr. 5, 2004 ParsedPredicateList.py
    • 1464 Apr. 5, 2004 ParsedRelativeLocationPath.py
    • 3414 Apr. 5, 2004 ParsedStep.py
    • 951 Apr. 5, 2004 Set.py
    • 6005 Apr. 5, 2004 Util.py
    • 34402 Apr. 5, 2004 XPathGrammar.py
    • 37104 Apr. 5, 2004 XPathParser.py
    • 2924 Apr. 5, 2004 XPathParserBase.py
    • 3192 Apr. 5, 2004 _init_.py
    • 11280 Apr. 5, 2004 pyxpath.py
    • 6236 Apr. 5, 2004 yappsrt.py
      ./cooltunes/macui:
    • 993 Apr. 5, 2004 Building_coolTunes.txt
    • 528 Apr. 5, 2004 Credits.html
    • 2142 May 10, 2004 alertdialogclasstestmanually.py
    • 3022 Jul. 26, 2004 buildapp.py
    • 144 May 10, 2004 buildapp_alertdialgoclasstestscript.py
    • 171 Jul. 21, 2004 buildapp_macpleasewaitdialogclasstestscript.py
    • 143 Jun. 23, 2004 buildapp_opendialogclasstestscript.py
    • 164 Apr. 16, 2004 buildapp_progressdialogclasstestscript.py
    • 4232 Jun. 22, 2004 builddiskimage.sh
    • 310 Apr. 5, 2004 clearuser.sh
    • 134519 Sep. 17, 2004 cooltunescontrollerclass.py
    • 277 Apr. 6, 2004 cooltunescontrollerclasstest.py
    • 763 Jul. 26, 2004 cooltunesmain.py
    • 6491 Apr. 16, 2004 itunesdbreaderclass.py
    • 845 Jul. 26, 2004 itunesdbreaderprogressslavemain.py
    • 10655 Sep. 13, 2004 itunesdbreaderslaveclass.py
    • 859 Jul. 26, 2004 itunesdbreaderslavemain.py
    • 3183 Apr. 5, 2004 itunesscripterclass.py
    • 1134 May 10, 2004 macalertdialogclass.py
    • 1009 Jun. 23, 2004 macopendialogclass.py
    • 3874 Jul. 21, 2004 macpleasewaitdialogclass.py
    • 1644 Aug. 20, 2004 macpleasewaitdialogclasstest.py
    • 5411 May 10, 2004 macprogressdialogclass.py
    • 1110 Apr. 16, 2004 nibutilities.py
    • 1533 Jun. 23, 2004 opendialogclasstestmanually.py
    • 13767 Jul. 26, 2004 preffileclass.py
    • 1189 Jun. 4, 2004 preffileclasstest.py
    • 1595 Apr. 16, 2004 progressdialogclasstest.py
      ./cooltunes/patterns:
    • 1497 Jun. 24, 2004 immutablelistclass.py
    • 6695 Apr. 5, 2004 observennixin.py
    • 8089 Apr. 5, 2004 older
    • 8143 Apr. 5, 2004 persistencemixin.py
    • 4347 Apr. 5, 2004 singletonautopersistence.py
    • 8642 Jun. 10, 2004 singletonmixin.py
    • 4355 Apr. 5, 2004 synchronization.py
      ./cooltunes/pyclient:
    • 850 Jun. 11, 2004 alertdialogclass.py
    • 6829 Jul. 23, 2004 candidatefileclass.py
    • 11120 Aug. 20, 2004 candidatefileclasstest.py
    • 12624 Sep. 17, 2004 candidatefilefetcherclass.py
    • 9823 Sep. 16, 2004 candidatefilefetcherclasstest.py
    • 1869 May 13, 2004 candidatefileneighborretrieverclass.py
    • 3502 May 13, 2004 candidatefileneighborretrieverclasstest.py
    • 397 Jul. 23, 2004 clientemail.py
    • 593 Jul. 23, 2004 clientemailtest.py
    • 42266 Sep. 17, 2004 cooltunesclass.py
    • 15103 Jul. 29, 2004 cooltunesclasstest.py
    • 26 Jun. 22, 2004 cooltunesversion.py
    • 3578 Apr. 6, 2004 currentclientversionclass.py
    • 3899 Apr. 14, 2004 currentclientversionclasstest.py
    • 5476 Aug. 10, 2004 daemonize.py
    • 4235 Aug. 20, 2004 errorloggerclass.py
    • 3000 Apr. 14, 2004 errorloggerclasstest.py
    • 3084 Aug. 2, 2004 filteredreconmmenderclass.py
    • 4745 Aug. 2, 2004 filteredrecommenderclasstest.py
    • 1042 Jun. 9, 2004 genreprofilerclass.py
    • 1207 Jun. 9, 2004 genreprofilerclasstest.py
    • 17125 Aug. 25, 2004 goombahserverclass.py
    • 25439 Aug. 20, 2004 goombahserverclasstest.py
    • 1991 Apr. 6, 2004 heartbeatclass.py
    • 1498 Apr. 14, 2004 heartbeatclasstest.py
    • 776 Apr. 6, 2004 listutilities.py
    • 2015 Apr. 6, 2004 listutilitiestest.py
    • 10666 Jul. 27, 2004 musicurlclass.py
    • 10843 Jul. 27, 2004 musicurlclasstest.py
    • 6362 Jul. 16, 2004 neighborbagclass.py
    • 4886 May 12, 2004 neighborclass.py
    • 15170 Sep. 17, 2004 neighborscannerclass.py
    • 11853 Sep. 17, 2004 neighborscannerclasstest.py
    • 863 Jul. 26, 2004 neighborscannerprogressslavemain.py
    • 6191 Sep. 16, 2004 neighborscannerslaveclass.py
    • 259 Apr. 6, 2004 neighborscannerslaveclasstest.py
    • 875 Jul. 26, 2004 neighborscannerslavemain.py
    • 5326 Apr. 16, 2004 neighborsearcherclass.py
    • 39195 Jul. 26, 2004 neighborsearcherslaveclass.py
    • 4868 Aug. 10, 2004 normalize.py
    • 49 Jul. 15, 2004 normalizefastcompile.sh
    • 278 Jul. 15, 2004 normalizefastsetup.py
    • 5121 Jul. 15, 2004 normalizefasttest.py
    • 7182 Jul. 15, 2004 nonnalizetest.py
    • 4821 Jun. 7, 2004 onewayfileclass.py
    • 1218 Apr. 14, 2004 onewayfileclasstest.py
    • 612 Jun. 23, 2004 opendialogclass.py
    • 15710 Jul. 16, 2004 openexclusive.py
    • 5089 Apr. 6, 2004 openexclusivetest.py
    • 3928 Apr. 8, 2004 picklepipeclass.py
    • 6662 Apr. 14, 2004 picklepipeclasstest.py
    • 706 Apr. 8, 2004 picklepipeclasstestwriter.py
    • 1316 Jul. 21, 2004 pleasewaitdialogclass.py
    • 24019 Jul. 21, 2004 plisthandlerclass.py
    • 5930 Jul. 21, 2004 plisthandlerclasstest.py
    • 3654 Jul. 21, 2004 processprogressclass.py
    • 3248 Jul. 21, 2004 processprogressclasstest.py
    • 4145 May 7, 2004 progressdialogclass.py
    • 39746 Aug. 2, 2004 recommenderclass.py
    • 11977 Aug. 5, 2004 recommenderhandlerclass.py
    • 12262 Jul. 14, 2004 recommenderhandlerclasstest.py
    • 13947 Jul. 26, 2004 slaveprocessclass.py
    • 1744 Jun. 15, 2004 slaveprocessclasstest.py
    • 3539 Jun. 4, 2004 sortedneighborlistclass.py
    • 4951 Jun. 4, 2004 sortedneighborlistclasstest.py
    • 50519 Aug. 5, 2004 tasteprofileclass.py
    • 572 Jul. 23, 2004 tasteprofileclassrefactorings.txt
    • 4460 Aug. 5, 2004 tasteprofileclasstest.py
    • 1269 Apr. 14, 2004 test.py
    • 436 Jun. 15, 2004 testidlerclass.py
    • 5001 Sep. 17, 2004 timeutilities.py
    • 7047 Sep. 17, 2004 timeutilitiestest.py
    • 9366 Apr. 5, 2004 traceclass.py
    • 336 Aug. 4, 2004 transposeexceptions.py
    • 4503 Jul. 29, 2004 userclass.py
    • 208 Jul. 29, 2004 userclasstest.py
    • 7902 Apr. 5, 2004 userdefaultsclass.py
    • 4794 Aug. 13, 2004 userpathsclass.py
    • 3701 Jul. 26, 2004 userpathsclasstest.py
    • 12875 Aug. 20, 2004 utilities.py
    • 13770 Jun. 7, 2004 utilitiestest.py
    • 6607 Jul. 26, 2004 versioncheckerclass.py
    • 3728 Sep. 17, 2004 viewfactoryclass.py
    • 2267 Apr. 5, 2004 build.xml
    • 2392 Jun. 23, 2004 web.xml
      ./cooltunes/webserver/WEB-INF/conf:
    • 37329 Jul. 28, 2004 TurbineResources.properties
      ./cooltunes/webserver/WEB-INF/lib:
    • (empty)
      ./cooltunes/webserver/database:
    • 2802 Aug. 11, 2004 MysqlSchema.sql
    • 309 Apr. 5, 2004 backup-goo.sh
      ./cooltunes/webserver/java/com/transpose/cooltunes:
    • 3912 Apr. 5, 2004 BlogList.java
    • 5501 Aug. 11, 2004 BlogPostList.java
    • 863 Apr. 5, 2004 CTBlog.java
    • 4515 Apr. 5, 2004 CTBlogPost.java
    • 2230 Jun. 2, 2004 ClusteringCandidatesFileWriter.java
    • 1151 Jun. 2, 2004 ClusteringCandidatesSaver.java
    • 983 Apr. 5, 2004 GeneralComment.java
    • 7257 Aug. 11, 2004 GeneralCommentList.java
    • 7811 Apr. 5, 2004 NearestNeighbor.java
    • 6481 Apr. 5, 2004 News.java
    • 3223 Apr. 5, 2004 NewsList.java
    • 8129 Jun. 2, 2004 PublicProfile.java
    • 17063 Aug. 20, 2004 RPC2Handler.java
    • 14403 Jun. 2, 2004 User.java
      ./cooltunes/webserver/java/com/transpose/cooltunes/servlets:
    • 764 Apr. 5, 2004 AppInit.java
    • 7013 Apr. 5, 2004 BlogServlet.java
    • 4432 Apr. 5, 2004 GeneralCommentServlet.java
    • 671 Apr. 5, 2004 HelloWorld.java
    • 6371 Apr. 5, 2004 LoginServlet.java
    • 1277 Apr. 5, 2004 RPC2.java
    • 6611 Aug. 11, 2004 UserServlet.java
      ./cooltunes/webserver/java/com/transpose/libs:
    • (empty)
      ./cooltunes/webserver/java/com/transpose/util:
    • 321 Apr. 5, 2004 KeyNotFoundException.java
    • 1026 Apr. 5, 2004 Mailer.java
    • 1313 Apr. 5, 2004 XmlRpcFault.java
      ./cooltunes/webserver/jsps:
    • 2088 Sep. 16, 2004 about.jsp
    • 1621 Apr. 5, 2004 blogitem.jsp
    • 953 Apr. 5, 2004 blogs.jsp
    • 28831 Apr. 5, 2004 clickwrap.jsp
    • 1345 Sep. 13, 2004 contact.jsp
    • 1550 Apr. 5, 2004 createblog.jsp
    • 2600 Apr. 5, 2004 createuser.jsp
    • 360 Apr. 5, 2004 dbtest.jsp
    • 1551 Sep. 13, 2004 discussion.jsp
    • 3402 Sep. 13, 2004 download.jsp
    • 11304 Apr. 5, 2004 editblog.jsp
    • 7628 Sep. 13, 2004 faq.jsp
    • 308 Sep. 13, 2004 getNumUsers.jsp
    • 2169 Sep. 13, 2004 index.jsp
    • 1899 Sep. 13, 2004 login.jsp
    • 520 Apr. 5, 2004 logout.jsp
    • 1028 Apr. 5, 2004 mailpassword.jsp
    • 1656 Sep. 13, 2004 privacy.jsp
    • 2612 Apr. 5, 2004 releases.jsp
    • 1008 Apr. 5, 2004 send_verification.jsp
    • 2528 Apr. 5, 2004 startdiscussion.jsp
    • 1045 Apr. 5, 2004 style.css
    • 394 Jun. 2, 2004 test.jsp
    • 293 Jun. 2, 2004 testclusteringcandidates.jsp
    • 3139 Sep. 13, 2004 tos.jsp
    • 1078 Apr. 5, 2004 verify.jsp
    • 171 Apr. 5, 2004 verify_mailed.jsp
    • 6687 Apr. 5, 2004 viewblog.jsp
    • 962 Apr. 5, 2004 viewblogbyuser.jsp
    • 3340 Apr. 5, 2004 viewdiscussion.jsp
    • 3371 Apr. 5, 2004 viewforum.jsp
      ./cooltunes/webserver/jsps/images:
    • (empty)
      ./cooltunes/webserver/jsps/includes:
    • 0 Apr. 5, 2004 announcement.jsp
    • 1706 Sep. 13, 2004 beginbody.jsp
    • 731 Sep. 13, 2004 endbody.jsp
    • 0 Apr. 5, 2004 footer.jsp
    • 0 Apr. 5, 2004 header.jsp
    • 455 Apr. 5, 2004 jspheader.jsp
    • 2017 Sep. 17, 2004 build.xml
    • 5524 May 20, 2004 web.xml
      ./songsifter/WEB-INF/conf:
    • 38247 May 20, 2004 TurbineResources.properties
      ./songsifter/WEB-INF/tlds:
    • (empty)
      ./songsifter/database:
    • 13853 May 20, 2004 DemoSchema.sql
    • 5377 May 20, 2004 MusicNewsSchema.sql
    • 13306 May 20, 2004 MysqlSchema.sql
    • 702 May 20, 2004 NewsSchema.sql
    • 1906 May 20, 2004 OracleClearData.sql
    • 185 May 20, 2004 OracleEMCreator.sql
    • 1975 May 20, 2004 OracleFixSequences.sql
    • 3829 May 20, 2004 OracleInitValues.sql
    • 3132 May 20, 2004 OracleJDBCUser.sql
    • 14427 May 20, 2004 OracleSchema.sql
    • 625 May 20, 2004 RepairCTXIndexes.sql
    • 5450 May 20, 2004 SuggestionSchema.sql
    • 214 May 20, 2004 oraclecommands.txt
    • 340 May 20, 2004 savepoints.sql
    • 1082 May 20, 2004 seq.temp.sql
      ./songsifter/java/com/transpose:
    • 780 May 20, 2004 Makefile
    • 1774 May 20, 2004 Makefile.include
      ./songsifter/java/com/transpose/deed:
    • 6160 May 20, 2004 AuctionItem.java
    • 28528 May 20, 2004 BackgroundInfo.java
    • 6881 May 20, 2004 BestDeedList.java
    • 4896 May 20, 2004 Bid.java
    • 2520 May 20, 2004 Blog.java
    • 4856 May 20, 2004 BlogIDFanID.java
    • 10927 Aug. 11, 2004 BlogPost.java
    • 976 May 20, 2004 ChangedBestDeedList.java
    • 575 May 20, 2004 ChangedDeedList.java
    • 5094 May 20, 2004 ClickThru.java
    • 10806 May 20, 2004 DBTableNames.java
    • 383 May 20, 2004 DBTableSelector.java
    • 41674 May 20, 2004 Deed.java
    • 12631 May 20, 2004 DeedAndChildList.java
    • 8487 May 20, 2004 DeedComment.java
    • 922 May 20, 2004 DeedIDAndLevel.java
    • 973 May 20, 2004 DeedList.java
    • 11195 May 20, 2004 DeedListImplementor.java
    • 19138 May 20, 2004 DeedRating.java
    • 3576 May 20, 2004 DeedRatingTable.java
    • 2501 May 20, 2004 DeedTable.java
    • 7493 May 20, 2004 Deed_Fan.java
    • 15610 Aug. 11, 2004 DiscussionComment.java
    • 1419 May 20, 2004 FanDeedList.java
    • 4467 May 20, 2004 Forum.java
    • 3781 May 20, 2004 ForumList.java
    • 3866 May 20, 2004 K2Factory.java
    • 5387 May 24, 2004 K2User.java
    • 3236 May 20, 2004 K2UserList.java
    • 3937 May 20, 2004 K2UserOption.java
    • 4497 May 20, 2004 K2UserPoints.java
    • 26110 May 20, 2004 K2UserValue.java
    • 4248 May 20, 2004 K2UserValueTable.java
    • 3880 May 20, 2004 MailingList.java
    • 249 May 20, 2004 Makefile
    • 4292 May 20, 2004 NeedRatingDeedListlmplementor.java
    • 264 May 20, 2004 NotEnoughPointsException.java
    • 4883 May 20, 2004 NotifyEvent.java
    • 10955 May 20, 2004 PointsChange.java
    • 5100 May 20, 2004 PointsChangeTable.java
    • 249 May 20, 2004 Searchable.java
    • 2627 May 20, 2004 SearchableDeedListImplementor.java
    • 18586 May 20, 2004 Topic.java
    • 8916 May 20, 2004 TopicComment.java
    • 2714 May 20, 2004 TopicTable.java
      ./songsifter/java/com/transpose/deed/servlets:
    • 5009 May 20, 2004 DeedServlet.java
    • 3046 May 20, 2004 EditDeedServlet.java
    • 250 May 20, 2004 Makefile
    • 4993 May 20, 2004 ModeratorCommentServlet.java
    • 1151 May 20, 2004 ServletParameterException.java
    • 3938 May 20, 2004 StoreDeedServlet.java
      ./songsifter/java/com/transpose/deed/test:
    • 580 May 20, 2004 testclickthru.Jsp
    • 817 May 20, 2004 testcounts.jsp
    • 1128 May 20, 2004 testdeednumbers.jsp
    • 1465 May 20, 2004 testdeedsforfan.jsp
    • 1376 May 20, 2004 testhistory.jsp
    • 930 May 20, 2004 testlatest.jsp
    • 1996 May 20, 2004 testneediest.jsp
    • 611 May 20, 2004 testoriginaldeed.jsp
    • 1057 May 20, 2004 testresetbest.jsp
      ./songsifter/java/com/transpose/k2math:
    • 293 May 20, 2004 InconsistentDataException.java
    • 26034 May 20, 2004 K2MathClass.java
    • 243 May 20, 2004 Makefile
    • 345 May 20, 2004 NotEnoughDataException.java
    • 203 May 20, 2004 PleaseStopException.java
    • 22809 May 20, 2004 ProcessBackgroundRatingCutoffs.java
    • 78082 May 20, 2004 ProcessDirtyDeedRatings.java
    • 19116 May 20, 2004 ReinitializeMath.java
      ./songsifter/java/com/transpose/libs:
    • (empty)
      ./songsifter/java/com/transpose/my:
    • 5616 May 20, 2004 Affinity.java
    • 2440 May 20, 2004 EmailAFriendTopic.java
    • 4849 May 20, 2004 Fan_Affinity.java
    • 3725 May 20, 2004 Fan_AffinityList.java
    • 6295 May 20, 2004 K2MYFactory.java
    • 4595 May 20, 2004 Login.java
    • 885 May 20, 2004 MYBackgroundInfo.java
    • 4886 May 20, 2004 MYBestDeedList.java
    • 1313 May 20, 2004 MYChangedBestDeedList.java
    • 1302 May 20, 2004 MYChangedDeedList.java
    • 10778 May 20, 2004 MYDeed.java
    • 493 May 20, 2004 MYDeedList.java
    • 2638 May 20, 2004 MYDeedListImplementor.java
    • 1353 May 20, 2004 MYDeedRating.java
    • 3481 May 20, 2004 MYFan.java
    • 6064 May 20, 2004 MYFanList.java
    • 4092 May 20, 2004 MYFanOption.java
    • 919 May 20, 2004 MYFanValue.java
    • 680 May 20, 2004 MYPointsChange.java
    • 2392 May 20, 2004 MYScheduledTasks.java
    • 9724 May 20, 2004 MYTopic.java
    • 997 May 20, 2004 MYTopicComment.java
    • 1172 May 20, 2004 MYUser.java
    • 245 May 20, 2004 Makefile
    • 537 May 20, 2004 ProcessBackgroundMYRatingCutoffs.java
    • 656 May 20, 2004 ProcessDirtyMYDeedRatings.java
    • 1066 May 20, 2004 ProcessDirtyMYDeedRatingsScheduledTask.java
    • 1055 May 20, 2004 ProcessMYBGlnfoScheduledTask.java
      ./songsifter/java/com/transpose/my/servlets:
    • 797 May 20, 2004 AppInit.java
    • 18270 May 20, 2004 CreateMYDeedServlet.java
    • 8622 May 20, 2004 CreateMYPersonServlet.java
    • 5498 May 20, 2004 DeedRatingServlet.java
    • 4718 May 20, 2004 EditMYDeedServlet.java
    • 28926 May 20, 2004 FanServlet.java
    • 7032 May 20, 2004 LoginServlet.java
    • 3057 May 20, 2004 MYTopicCommentServlet.java
    • 248 May 20, 2004 Makefile
    • 4487 May 20, 2004 StoreMYDeedServlet.java
    • 4226 May 20, 2004 UploadMYPictureServlet.java
      ./songsifter/java/com/transpose/scheduledjobs:
    • 2707 May 20, 2004 JobMinder.java
    • 939 May 20, 2004 JobMinderScheduledTask.java
    • 247 May 20, 2004 Makefile
    • 326 May 20, 2004 PoliteRunnable.java
    • 9403 May 20, 2004 ScheduledTask.java
    • 1746 May 20, 2004 ScheduledTaskList.java
    • 1774 May 20, 2004 TestScheduledTask.java
      ./songsifter/java/com/transpose/songdeed:
    • 12702 May 20, 2004 AlbumAuctionItem.java
    • 7716 May 20, 2004 AlbumAuctionItemList.java
    • 1026 May 20, 2004 AlbumBid.java
    • 4161 May 20, 2004 Announcement.java
    • 3736 May 20, 2004 ArtistList.java
    • 2894 Aug. 11, 2004 ArtistWeeklyEmailMessage.java
    • 4860 May 20, 2004 BlogSongs.java
    • 927 May 20, 2004 BlogSongsScheduledTask.java
    • 4827 May 20, 2004 EMScheduledTasks.java
    • 5051 May 20, 2004 EmaiLAFriend.java
    • 2519 May 20, 2004 EmaiLAFriendTopic.java
    • 25661 Aug. 11, 2004 Fan.java
    • 6681 May 20, 2004 FanList.java
    • 4076 May 20, 2004 FanOption.java
    • 11085 May 20, 2004 FanSongPointsChangesList.java
    • 4705 May 20, 2004 Fan_Genre.java
    • 3905 May 20, 2004 Fan_GenreList.java
    • 996 May 20, 2004 GeneralComment.java
    • 6984 Aug. 11, 2004 GeneralCommnentList.java
    • 4107 May 20, 2004 Genre.java
    • 6712 May 20, 2004 K2SongFactory.java
    • 458 May 20, 2004 LinkEntry.java
    • 4682 May 20, 2004 Login.java
    • 4397 May 20, 2004 LoginList.java
    • 251 May 20, 2004 Makefile
    • 1616 May 20, 2004 NeedRatingDeedList.java
    • 6044 May 20, 2004 News.java
    • 3349 May 20, 2004 NewsList.java
    • 5396 May 20, 2004 ProcessArtistWeeklyPromotionEmail.java
    • 1203 May 20, 2004 ProcessArtistWeeklyPromotionEmaiIScheduledTask.java
    • 1518 May 20, 2004 ProcessAuctionResults.java
    • 1049 May 20, 2004 ProcessAuctionResultsScheduledTask.java
    • 577 May 20, 2004 ProcessBackgroundSongRatingCutoffs.java
    • 4400 May 20, 2004 ProcessBids.java
    • 1254 May 20, 2004 ProcessBidsDollars.java
    • 1025 May 20, 2004 ProcessBidsDollarsScheduledTask.java
    • 1245 May 20, 2004 ProcessBidsPoints.java
    • 993 May 20, 2004 ProcessBidsPointsScheduledTask.java
    • 708 May 20, 2004 ProcessDirtySongDeedRatings.java
    • 1107 May 20, 2004 ProcessDirtySongDeedRatingsScheduledTask.java
    • 1098 May 20, 2004 ProcessSongBGInfoScheduledTask.java
    • 3318 May 20, 2004 ProcessTopScorerContest.java
    • 1103 May 20, 2004 ProcessTopScorerContestScheduledTask.java
    • 5514 May 20, 2004 PromotedTopic.java
    • 764 May 20, 2004 PromotedTopicDollars.java
    • 4121 May 20, 2004 PromotedTopicList.java
    • 678 May 20, 2004 PromotedTopicListDollars.java
    • 672 May 20, 2004 PromotedTopicListPoints.java
    • 759 May 20, 2004 PromotedTopicPoints.java
    • 12168 Aug. 11, 2004 RPC2Handler.java
    • 526 May 20, 2004 ReinitializeSongMath.java
    • 903 May 20, 2004 SongBackgroundInfo.java
    • 1309 May 20, 2004 SongBestDeedList.java
    • 1327 May 20, 2004 SongChangedBestDeedList.java
    • 1316 May 20, 2004 SongChangedDeedList.java
    • 22561 May 20, 2004 SongDeed.java
    • 1005 May 20, 2004 SongDeedComment.java
    • 514 May 20, 2004 SongDeedList.java
    • 2651 May 20, 2004 SongDeedListImplementor.java
    • 602 May 20, 2004 SongDeedListSearcher.java
    • 618 May 20, 2004 SongDeedNotifyEvent.java
    • 1433 May 20, 2004 SongDeedRating.java
    • 3573 May 20, 2004 SongDeedValidator.java
    • 3413 May 20, 2004 SongDeed_Fan.java
    • 821 May 20, 2004 SongFanDeedList.java
    • 933 May 20, 2004 SongFanValue.java
    • 8473 May 20, 2004 SongLink.java
    • 688 May 20, 2004 SongPointsChange.java
    • 4190 May 20, 2004 SongSearchBestDeedList.java
    • 11881 May 20, 2004 SongTopic.java
    • 7714 May 20, 2004 SongTopicBid.java
    • 776 May 20, 2004 SongTopicBidDollars.java
    • 915 May 20, 2004 SongTopicBidDollarsList.java
    • 4802 May 20, 2004 SongTopicBidList.java
    • 774 May 20, 2004 SongTopicBidPoints.java
    • 925 May 20, 2004 SongTopicBidPointsList.java
    • 1015 May 20, 2004 SongTopicComment.java
    • 4888 May 20, 2004 Vendor.java
      ./songsifter/java/com/transpose/songdeed/jobs:
    • 639 May 20, 2004 processbids.jsp
    • 497 May 20, 2004 processsongratings.jsp
      ./songsifter/java/com/transpose/songdeed/servlets:
    • 7637 May 20, 2004 AlbumBidServlet.java
    • 841 May 20, 2004 AppInit.java
    • 4995 May 20, 2004 AuctionServlet.java
    • 5335 May 20, 2004 DeedRatingServlet.java
    • 5598 May 20, 2004 EditSongDeedServlet.java
    • 28595 May 20, 2004 FanServlet.java
    • 3695 May 20, 2004 GeneralCommentServlet.java
    • 7034 May 20, 2004 LoginServlet.java
    • 254 May 20, 2004 Makefile
    • 2334 May 20, 2004 NewsServlet.java
    • 4153 May 20, 2004 PayPalServlet.java
    • 1148 May 20, 2004 RPC2.java
    • 3067 May 20, 2004 SongDeedCommentServlet.java
    • 925 May 20, 2004 SongModeratorCommentServlet.java
    • 629 May 20, 2004 SongTopicBidDollarsServlet.java
    • 626 May 20, 2004 SongTopicBidPointsServlet.java
    • 5988 May 20, 2004 SongTopicBidServlet.java
    • 3100 May 20, 2004 SongTopicCommentServlet.java
    • 778 May 20, 2004 SpendMyPointsServlet.java
    • 1590 May 20, 2004 StoreSongDeedServlet.java
    • 4572 May 20, 2004 StressTestServlet.java
      ./songsifter/java/com/transpose/songdeed/test:
    • 866 May 20, 2004 addToFanGenreList.jsp
    • 1102 May 20, 2004 reloadblog.jsp
    • 832 May 20, 2004 testannouncement.jsp
    • 634 May 20, 2004 testartistwebsite.jsp
    • 469 May 20, 2004 testblog.jsp
    • 847 May 20, 2004 testdeedfanlist.jsp
    • 2043 May 20, 2004 testerror.jsp
    • 2134 May 20, 2004 testfanoption.jsp
    • 979 May 20, 2004 testfanpoints.jsp
    • 562 May 20, 2004 testgenres.jsp
    • 829 May 20, 2004 testgetlink.jsp
    • 3703 May 20, 2004 testpoints.jsp
    • 792 May 20, 2004 testpromotedtopiclist.jsp
    • 1636 May 20, 2004 testsearch.jsp
    • 696 May 20, 2004 testshowsongdeed.jsp
    • 3179 May 20, 2004 testsongdeed.jsp
    • 724 May 20, 2004 testsongdeed_fan.jsp
    • 911 May 20, 2004 testsongdeedhistoryvector.jsp
    • 1534 May 20, 2004 testsongdeedlist.jsp
    • 4594 May 20, 2004 testsongdeedrating.jsp
    • 681 May 20, 2004 testsongdeedvalue.jsp
    • 755 May 20, 2004 testsongfanvalue.jsp
    • 997 May 20, 2004 testsongtopicbidj sp
    • 1105 May 20, 2004 testsongtopicbidlist.jsp
    • 1131 May 20, 2004 testsongtopicbidpointslist.jsp
    • 1827 May 20, 2004 testsongtopiccomment.jsp
    • 902 May 20, 2004 testsongtopiccommentdate.jsp
    • 1366 May 20, 2004 testsongtopiccommentlist.jsp
    • 1063 May 20, 2004 testsongtopicexists.jsp
      ./songsifter/java/com/transpose/tags:
    • 803 Jul. 28, 2004 DisplayAIM.java
    • 7129 Jul. 28, 2004 DisplayDeedHistory.java
    • 1763 Jul. 28, 2004 DisplayGenreCheckboxList.java
    • 1349 Jul. 28, 2004 DisplayGenreCheckboxListLoggedIn.java
    • 994 Jul. 28, 2004 DisplayGenreDropDown.java
    • 806 Jul. 28, 2004 DisplayICQ.java
    • 1633 Jul. 28, 2004 DisplayLatestDetailedNews.java
    • 1179 Jul. 28, 2004 DisplayLatestNews.java
    • 3351 Jul. 28, 2004 DisplayListNavigation.java
    • 3912 Jul. 28, 2004 DisplayPlainMusicLinks.java
    • 1217 Jul. 28, 2004 DisplayPresetGenreDropDown.java
    • 375 Jul. 28, 2004 DisplaySongBestDeedList.java
    • 421 Jul. 28, 2004 DisplaySongChangedBestDeedList.java
    • 413 Jul. 28, 2004 DisplaySongChangedDeedList.java
    • 16634 Jul. 28, 2004 DisplaySongDeedList.java
    • 893 Jul. 28, 2004 DisplaySongFanDeedList.java
    • 3371 Jul. 28, 2004 DisplaySongLinks.java
    • 907 Jul. 28, 2004 DisplaySongNeedyDeedList.java
    • 1385 Jul. 28, 2004 DisplaySongSearchBestDeedList.java
    • 2945 Jul. 28, 2004 DisplayTopScorers.java
    • 2857 Jul. 28, 2004 DisplayTopScorersToday.java
    • 1366 Jul. 28, 2004 DisplayTopScouts.java
    • 1370 Jul. 28, 2004 DisplayTopWriters.java
    • 979 Jul. 28, 2004 FairtunesSearchURL.java
    • 239 Jul. 28, 2004 Makefile
    • 921 Jul. 28, 2004 Picture.java
    • 1319 Jul. 28, 2004 VendorList.java
    • 1601 Jul. 28, 2004 VendorSearchURL.java
      ./songsifter/java/com/transpose/tags/test:
    • 473 Jul. 28, 2004 testtopscorers.jsp
      ./songsifter/java/com/transpose/util:
    • 1531 May 20, 2004 Assertjava
    • 5363 May 20, 2004 BreadCrumbs.java
    • 1302 May 20, 2004 CookieUtils.java
    • 722 May 20, 2004 DBConfig.java
    • 3000 May 20, 2004 DBConnectionHelper.java
    • 1624 May 20, 2004 DBQueryHelper.java
    • 2009 May 20, 2004 DBUpdateHelper.java
    • 2393 May 20, 2004 DateUtils.java
    • 7010 May 20, 2004 DocumentObject.java
    • 2134 May 20, 2004 Dumper.java
    • 1267 May 20, 2004 DynamicPagedList.java
    • 11297 May 20, 2004 ElementObject.java
    • 4450 May 20, 2004 ErrorNotifier.java
    • 4059 May 20, 2004 HashUtilities.java
    • 2465 May 20, 2004 ID.java
    • 321 May 20, 2004 KeyNotFoundException.java
    • 5937 Sep. 8, 2004 KeyedStoreRecord.java
    • 555 May 20, 2004 LoggedException.java
    • 1026 May 20, 2004 Mailer.java
    • 247 May 20, 2004 Makefile
    • 13714 May 20, 2004 Normalize.java
    • 1448 May 20, 2004 PagedList.java
    • 8154 May 20, 2004 PreparedStatementHelper.java
    • 2519 May 20, 2004 RSSDocument.java
    • 1017 May 20, 2004 RSSEnclosure.java
    • 1844 May 20, 2004 RSSItem.java
    • 2237 May 20, 2004 RadioBlogger.java
    • 1069 May 20, 2004 RandomString.java
    • 5422 May 20, 2004 Rating.java
    • 6068 May 20, 2004 ResultSetHelper.java
    • 982 May 20, 2004 SQLFormat.java
    • 458 May 20, 2004 Singleton.java
    • 3166 May 20, 2004 SingletonStoreRecord.java
    • 3672 May 20, 2004 SongHash.java
    • 23556 Sep. 8, 2004 StoreRecord.java
    • 656 May 20, 2004 StringDumper.java
    • 5193 May 20, 2004 StringFormat.java
    • 900 May 20, 2004 TestURL.java
    • 3474 May 20, 2004 TransactionConnection.java
    • 621 May 20, 2004 WaitThread.java
    • 657 May 20, 2004 XMLParsingException.java
    • 1671 May 20, 2004 XercesErrorHandler.java
    • 6628 May 20, 2004 XmlWriter.java
      ./songsifter/java/com/transpose/util/servlets:
    • 248 May 20, 2004 Makefile
      ./songsifter/jsps:
    • 4215 May 20, 2004 about.jsp
    • 4976 May 20, 2004 aboutartists.jsp
    • 2419 May 20, 2004 aboutauctions.jsp
    • 7213 May 20, 2004 aboutcriteria.jsp
    • 2982 May 20, 2004 abouthosting.jsp
    • 5330 May 20, 2004 aboutnewmusic.jsp
    • 3313 May 20, 2004 aboutpoints.jsp
    • 3747 May 20, 2004 aboutpredict.jsp
    • 2874 May 20, 2004 aboutrecommend.jsp
    • 4670 May 20, 2004 aboutreviews.jsp
    • 3798 May 20, 2004 aboutsponsor.jsp
    • 4074 May 20, 2004 aboutthecompetition.jsp
    • 930 May 20, 2004 addtomailinglist.jsp
    • 1082 May 20, 2004 admin.jsp
    • 2407 May 20, 2004 allbuckssponsors.jsp
    • 1515 May 20, 2004 allpointssponsors.jsp
    • 2407 May 20, 2004 allsponsors.jsp
    • 4960 May 20, 2004 artistalreadyloggedin.jsp
    • 2671 May 20, 2004 artistlist.jsp
    • 4073 May 20, 2004 audiohelp.jsp
    • 3893 May 20, 2004 badge.jsp
    • 448 May 20, 2004 badge_bestrecs.jsp
    • 3196 May 20, 2004 badgedata_bestrecs.jsp
    • 4303 May 20, 2004 badges.jsp
    • 895 May 20, 2004 badgestyle.css
    • 8285 May 20, 2004 best.jsp
    • 7323 May 20, 2004 changed.jsp
    • 4193 May 20, 2004 changedbest.jsp
    • 1717 May 20, 2004 changegenres.jsp
    • 9458 May 20, 2004 confirmalbumbid.jsp
    • 1947 Aug. 6, 2004 contact.jsp
    • 1704 May 20, 2004 copyright.jsp
    • 8752 May 20, 2004 create.jsp
    • 6597 May 20, 2004 createaccount.jsp
    • 6632 May 20, 2004 createartistaccount.jsp
    • 10453 May 20, 2004 createartistrec.jsp
    • 3887 May 20, 2004 createartistrecthanks.jsp
    • 2765 May 20, 2004 createbid.jsp
    • 2294 May 20, 2004 deedstats.jsp
    • 8086 May 20, 2004 discussion.jsp
    • 8717 May 20, 2004 edit.jsp
    • 8738 May 20, 2004 editartistrec.jsp
    • 3741 May 20, 2004 emailafriend.jsp
    • 2375 May 20, 2004 error.jsp
    • 1309 May 20, 2004 fanheader.jsp
    • 3402 May 20, 2004 fanlist.jsp
    • 25449 May 20, 2004 faq.jsp
    • 2028 May 20, 2004 friends.jsp
    • 5880 May 20, 2004 gettingstarted.jsp
    • 3311 May 20, 2004 help.jsp
    • 501 May 20, 2004 help_artistweeklyemail.jsp
    • 543 May 20, 2004 help_asterisks.jsp
    • 416 May 20, 2004 help_beta.jsp
    • 416 May 20, 2004 help_mailinglist.jsp
    • 647 May 20, 2004 help_musiclist.jsp
    • 491 May 20, 2004 help_mypoints.jsp
    • 621 May 20, 2004 help_myprivate.jsp
    • 537 May 20, 2004 help_mypublic.jsp
    • 486 May 20, 2004 help_mysite.jsp
    • 576 May 20, 2004 help_sponsoreddollars.jsp
    • 592 May 20, 2004 help_sponsoredpoints.jsp
    • 535 May 20, 2004 help_topscorers.jsp
    • 670 May 20, 2004 help_toratelist.jsp
    • 317 May 20, 2004 helppopupend.jsp
    • 585 May 20, 2004 helppopupheader.jsp
    • 519 May 20, 2004 helppopupstart.jsp
    • 4622 May 20, 2004 index.jsp
    • 1564 May 20, 2004 l.jsp
    • 3116 May 20, 2004 lastloginlist.jsp
    • 2141 May 20, 2004 lastmusiccomments.jsp
    • 2175 May 20, 2004 lastratingnotes.jsp
    • 2186 May 20, 2004 lastrecommendationcomments.jsp
    • 6545 May 20, 2004 login.jsp
    • 304 May 20, 2004 logout.jsp
    • 3190 May 20, 2004 mailpassword.jsp
    • 6127 May 20, 2004 memberprofile.jsp
    • 7522 May 20, 2004 music.jsp
    • 9332 May 20, 2004 musiccomments.jsp
    • 9065 May 20, 2004 musicdiscussion.jsp
    • 5787 May 20, 2004 mypoints.jsp
    • 17942 May 20, 2004 mysettings.jsp
    • 12072 May 20, 2004 needrating.jsp
    • 2103 May 20, 2004 newartistintro.jsp
    • 4002 May 20, 2004 newmusiclinks.jsp
    • 4355 May 20, 2004 newsletter-1-1.jsp
    • 6165 May 20, 2004 newsletter-1-2.jsp
    • 116 May 20, 2004 openLetter.jsp
    • 552 May 20, 2004 paypalfail.jsp
    • 546 May 20, 2004 paypalsuccess.jsp
    • 23982 May 20, 2004 positiverecommendation.jsp
    • 7270 May 20, 2004 preview.jsp
    • 6849 May 20, 2004 previewartistrec.jsp
    • 2031 May 20, 2004 privacy.jsp
    • 3528 May 20, 2004 quickstart.jsp
    • 9052 May 20, 2004 ratingnotes.jsp
    • 8962 May 20, 2004 recommendationcomments.jsp
    • 88 May 20, 2004 robots.txt
    • 3058 May 20, 2004 rssfeed.jsp
    • 2727 May 20, 2004 rssfeedsexplained.jsp
    • 3598 May 20, 2004 rulesforgoodreviews.jsp
    • 7523 May 20, 2004 searchresults.jsp
    • 886 May 20, 2004 showbadge.jsp
    • 428 May 20, 2004 siteoffline.jsp
    • 9737 May 20, 2004 spendmypoints.jsp
    • 4335 May 20, 2004 sponsorasong.jsp
    • 3682 May 20, 2004 sponsoredmusicbucks.jsp
    • 3764 May 20, 2004 sponsoredmusicpoints.jsp
    • 4610 May 20, 2004 sponsorwithbucks.jsp
    • 6706 May 20, 2004 sponsorwithpoints.jsp
    • 2650 May 20, 2004 startdiscussion.jsp
    • 7417 May 20, 2004 stats.jsp
    • 789 May 20, 2004 stresstesting.jsp
    • 5667 May 20, 2004 style.css
    • 3201 May 20, 2004 template.jsp
    • 3280 May 20, 2004 testvalidity.jsp
    • 3537 May 20, 2004 topmonthlyscorerslist.jsp
    • 814 May 20, 2004 topreviewwriters.jsp
    • 3140 May 20, 2004 topscorerslist.jsp
    • 804 May 20, 2004 topscouts.jsp
    • 4260 May 20, 2004 tos.jsp
    • 5865 May 20, 2004 updateemailsettings.jsp
    • 8251 May 20, 2004 updatememberprofile.jsp
    • 5404 May 20, 2004 updatepublicprofile.jsp
    • 5836 May 20, 2004 updatesitesettings.jsp
    • 906 May 20, 2004 values.jsp
    • 2259 May 20, 2004 verify.jsp
    • 1408 May 20, 2004 verify_failed.jsp
    • 738 May 20, 2004 verif_mailed.jsp
    • 27188 May 20, 2004 view.jsp
    • 7399 May 20, 2004 viewalbumauctionitem.jsp
    • 3393 May 20, 2004 viewdiscussion.jsp
    • 3562 May 20, 2004 viewforum.jsp
    • 254 May 20, 2004 viewreview.jsp
    • 858 May 20, 2004 waitforverify.jsp
    • 65 May 20, 2004 weblog.jsp
    • 2255 May 20, 2004 whyrate.jsp
      ./songsifter/jsps/includes:
    • 1107 May 20, 2004 announcement.jsp
    • 640 May 20, 2004 autologin.jsp
    • 440 May 20, 2004 beginbody.jsp
    • 229 May 20, 2004 endbody.jsp
    • 2523 May 20, 2004 footer.jsp
    • 9388 May 20, 2004 header.jsp
    • 3646 May 20, 2004 jspheader.jsp
    • 494 Sep. 8, 2004 notice.jsp
    • 785 May 20, 2004 retrievepoints.jsp
    • 670 May 20, 2004 setuppaging.jsp
    • 2151 May 20, 2004 sidebarauctions.jsp
    • 442 May 20, 2004 sidebarbadge.jsp
    • 974 May 20, 2004 sidebardiscuss.jsp
    • 2228 May 20, 2004 sidebarmailinglist.jsp
    • 1945 May 20, 2004 sidebarmypoints.jsp
    • 3424 May 20, 2004 sidebarsponsoredmusic.jsp
    • 2458 May 20, 2004 sidebartopdailyscorers.jsp
    • 926 May 20, 2004 sidebartopscorers.jsp
    • 845 May 20, 2004 songdeedlistheader.jsp
    TECHNICAL FIELD
  • The present invention is in the fields of collaborative filtering and online community, typically as implemented on networks of communicating computers.
  • BACKGROUND ART
  • Collaborative filtering systems are well known, as are online community systems. Examples of the former include Amazon.com's recommendation technology and other similar systems such as eMusic.com's. Examples of the latter include Google Groups.
  • However, none of the existing solutions effectively leverages the fact that users of online recommendations systems and online community systems typically own their own computers, and have the opportunity to make the central processing units of those computers available for making such systems more useful and enjoyable.
  • In particular, the task of matching people with extremely similar tastes and interests becomes very computationally difficult as the number of people increases and as the complexity of the similarity measure increases. With hundreds of thousands or even millions of people such as are typically enrolled in major online services, limitations of server hardware resources constrain the system's ability to find the best matches between people based on taste and interest.
  • To the degree that such matches are made with real accuracy, “neighborhoods” of individuals with extremely similar interests may be formed that can be used for purposes of recommendation and community.
  • What is needed, then, is an effective way of leveraging the computers owned by end-users of a community and recommendation system for the purpose massively-distributed similarity searching.
  • SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
  • The present invention puts the computer used by a particular end-user (the ‘client computer’ or ‘client machine’) to work in finding his or her best matches, thus offloading that computational load from the server. (In some variants, some users' computers may do that work for a manageable number of other users; for purposes of example this summary will not discuss those details.)
  • To enable the computations to occur in the client machines, the necessary data needs to be transported there. This data consists, at least in part, of ‘profiles’ of various users. Various embodiments do this in different ways, the common denominator being that profiles that are relatively likely to be matches to the user for whom neighbors are being sought arrive first.
  • Then the client computer conducts a substantially (or completely) exhaustive search of that available data for the very best matches.
  • Typically at least part of the profile data performs a dual purpose. First it is used for similarity calculations. Second, it is used for display purposes, so that a user can view taste information pertaining to his neighbors. For instance, in a typical music application, this will include song title and artist information for songs in the neighbors' collections.
  • This disclosure will make use of a detailed listing of key aspects, followed by a glossary containing definitions for terms used therein.
  • ASPECT 1. A networked computer system for supplying recommendations and taste-based community to a target user, comprising:
  • networked means for providing representations of nearest neighbor candidate taste profiles and associated user identifiers in an order such that said nearest neighbor candidate taste profiles tend to be at least as similar to a taste profile of the target user according to a predetermined similarity metric as are subsequently retrieved ones of said nearest neighbor candidate taste profiles,
  • means to receive said representations of nearest neighbor candidate taste profiles and associated user identifiers on at least one neighbor-finding user node,
  • said neighbor-finding user nodes each having at least one similarity metric calculator calculating said predetermined similarity metric,
  • at least one selector residing on at least one of said neighbor-finding user nodes using the output of said at least one similarity metric calculator for building a list representing the nearest-neighbor users,
  • said list representing said nearest-neighbor users providing access to associated ones of said candidate profiles,
  • a nearest-neighbor based recommender which uses said associated ones of said candidate profiles to recommend items,
  • a display for viewing identifiers of recommended items,
  • a display for viewing identifiers of a plurality of nearest neighbor users,
  • means to select at least one of said nearest neighbor users from said display of identifiers of a plurality of nearest neighbor users,
  • a display of information relating to at least one of the items in said nearest neighbor user's collection,
  • whereby massively distributed processing is harnessed in a bandwidth-conserving way for finding the best neighbors out of the entire population of users, and the same neighborhood is leveraged to provide recommendations as well as highly focused taste-based community for sharing the enjoyment of items including recommended items
  • ASPECT 2: The networked computer system of ASPECT 1, further including means to facilitate communication with at least said nearest neighbor users where the type of communication comprises at least one selected from the group consisting of online chat, email, online discussion boards, voice, and video.
  • ASPECT 3: A networked computer system for supplying recommendations and taste-based community to a target user, comprising
  • an ordered plurality of nearest neighbor candidate taste profiles and associated user identifiers such that said nearest neighbor candidate taste profiles tend to be at least as similar to a taste profile of the target user according to a predetermined similarity metric as are subsequently positioned ones of said nearest neighbor candidate taste profiles,
  • networked means to receive said nearest neighbor candidate taste profiles and associated user identifiers on at least one neighbor-finding user node,
  • said neighbor-finding user nodes each having at least one similarity metric calculator calculating said predetermined similarity metric,
  • at least one selector residing on at least one of said neighbor-finding user nodes using the output of said at least one similarity metric calculator for building a list representing the nearest-neighbor users,
  • said list representing said nearest-neighbor users providing access to associated ones of said candidate profiles,
  • a nearest-neighbor based recommender which uses said associated ones of said a nearest-neighbor based recommender which uses said associated ones of said candidate profiles to recommend items,
  • a display for viewing identifiers of recommended items,
  • a display for viewing identifiers of a plurality of nearest neighbor users,
  • means to select at least one of said nearest neighbor users from said display of identifiers of a plurality of nearest neighbor users,
  • a display of information relating to at least one of the items in said nearest neighbor user's collection,
  • whereby massively distributed processing is harnessed in a bandwidth-conserving way for finding the best neighbors out of the entire population of users, and the same neighborhood is leveraged to provide recommendations as well as highly focused taste-based community for sharing the enjoyment of items including recommended items
  • ASPECT 4: The networked computer system ASPECT 1, further including a single downloadable file that contains software that executes all necessary non-server computer instructions.
  • GLOSSARY
  • REPRESENTATION: In the above discussion of “aspects,” representations may be the user profiles themselves (including the taste profiles), or just the taste profiles (which should include an identifier of the user)—or they may be user ID's of the users, or URL's enabling the data to be located on the network, or any other data that allows taste profiles and associated user ID's to be accessed. These are all functionally equivalent from the standpoint of the invention.
  • TASTE PROFILE: This term refers to data representing an individual's tastes or interests. It can take many forms. It may be the XML file generated by Apple's iTunes application which contains a list of music files in the user's collection as well as how many times he has played each one, and other related information. This is a fairly complete profile, having the disadvantage that it tends to consume a fairly large number of bytes that thus take significant bandwidth to download.
  • Other profile types include simple lists of song identifiers or album or artist identifiers, or various combinations thereof. In non-music domains, other examples include book ISBN's, or author names, or combinations thereof; or weblog URL's, or weblog posting identifiers, or combinations thereof; of any of a multitude of other represenations of a user's tastes and/or interests.
  • Just as different profile types may contain various different types of data, there are many formats that can be used for representing such data to be processed by a computer. XML is one, but such specifications as CORBA and many others provide ways that data objects can be represented and transported across a network, and in general such formats as vectors or other binary or text-based formats can be used.
  • A taste profile is data that represents a user's tastes and/or interests. The format and contents are particular to particular embodiments, and it must not be construed that the present invention is limited in scope to particular contents or formats as long as the data comprises a user's tastes and/or interests or some useful summary thereof.
  • Further, it should be noted that a user may have a plurality of taste profiles. For instance, a user may have one type of music he likes to listen to while studying, and another type he likes to listen to while dancing. Preferred embodiments of the invention allow the user to choose different taste profiles—and correspondingly different nearest neighbors and recommendations—according to mood.
  • Still further, note that taste profiles may be either manually or passively generated. For instance the iTunes application captures user activity in the course of playing music, and stores it to its associated XML file. The user does not have to make any separate effort to cause a taste profile to be generated based upon that data. On the other hand, taste profiles can be manually generated by manually supplying ratings to items such as songs, movies, or artists. A playlist—a list of songs a user likes to play together, and which has usually been generated manually—can be considered in some embodiments to be a taste profile. Some embodiments use taste profiles that incorporate a combination of passively and actively collected data. For instance, a profile may include manually-generated ratings of songs, as well as the number of times each song has been played.
  • Finally, note that taste profiles do not necessarily include data directly entered by the user; they can instead be a computer-derived representation. For instance, in embodiments which associate information such as genre or tempo for songs, software developers of ordinary skills will be able to see how to summarize data for songs the user has in has his collection to create a profile showing which genres or tempos the user likes most; that information may then comprise the user's taste profile. Or, in certain embodiments with numeric values for attributes, the log of the values may be used.
  • TARGET USER: The aspect discussion describes the invention in a way that focuses on serving a particular user, who we call the “target user.” There are a plurality of users who could be considered to be target users, but for descriptive purposes we focus on one such user.
  • USER PROFILE: A user profile contains information related to the individual such as his name, contact information, and biographical text. It also contains his taste profile. An embodiment may make all, some, or none of this information publicly available.
  • SIMILARITY METRIC: Degrees of similarity are computed according to a similarity metric, which is not necessarily a “metric” in the formal sense of a “metric space” as that term is used in mathematical literature (for instance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric.space). A very great variety of similarity metrics are available. There is necessarily a correspondence between the nature of the similarity metric and the taste profile, because similarity metrics often require particular types of data.
  • For instance, if ratings data is present where numerical values are given such as on a scale from 1 to 7 where 1 is poor and 7 is excellent, such simple methods can be used as computing average difference between the ratings of the items which have ratings in both taste profiles. Other techniques include computing a Euclidean distance, Mahalanobis distance, cosine similarity, or Pearson's r correlation using that data [13, 15]. Another approach is given in [16], beginning column 20, line 59. Any other computation that results in a metric that tends to be indicative of similarities of taste between the two users can be used.
  • In many embodiments data is massaged to make it more appropriate use with certain popular similarity metrics. For instance, in a music application when song play counts are included in the taste profile, the songs may be ranked in order of frequency of play; songs in the top seventh have an “implied rating” of 7, songs in the next seventh have an implied rating of 6, etc. This data can then be used with similarity metrics such as those mentioned above.
  • Note that some similarity metrics, such as Pearson's r, enable the computation of levels of probabilistic certainty, or p-values, with respect to a null hypothesis. In many cases, such as r, it is possible to state a null hypothesis that roughly corresponds to the concept “the two users have no particular tendency to agree.” This enables the system to take into account the fact that some pairs of users have more data to base the metric on then others, and thus more reason to have confidence. This is a significant advantage over many of the simpler techniques. However, this approach nevertheless has a drawback. As an example consider two users with a very large number of items in common which they have each rated, where a p-value derived from r is used as the metric. Suppose further that on average, there is a slight tendency to agree rather than disagree. Then, simply due to the large number of items with ratings in common, the p-value may be extremely indicative of rejection of the null hypothesis, even though on average, there isn't a very unusual amount of agreement between ratings. In practical use with a large number of users, where not too many nearest neighbors need to be found, this effect is normally not a major problem, because there will also be users who do have a lot of agreement and who also have a high number of rated items in common, and such pairings will result in even greater extremities of p-values. In such cases, there can be a lot of confidence that the similarity metric is finding users who are actually very similar in taste—even though their may be other pairings, with even more similarity, that are left behind due to not having as much data for comparison.
  • The immediately preceding paragraphs focus on situations where degrees of agreement can be discerned for each item. Another type of profile involves presence/absence data—where all that is known about each item is whether a user is associated with it or not—for instance whether a user has a particular song in his collection or not. In such cases, such calculations as the well-known Jaccard's Index, Sorensen's Quotient of Similarity, or Mountford's Index of Similarity can be useful.
  • Some embodiments combine different similarity metrics. For instance r can be used to compute a degree of similarity in ratings of items that are in common between two users, and Jaccard's Index to compute the degree of similarity implied by the numbers of items that are and are not in common between the users. An average or geometric mean (weighted or not) may be used to combine the metrics into one that incorporates both kinds of information; other techniques such as p-value combining with respect to a null hopothesis ([16]) can be sued as well, by converting the metrics into p-values.
  • Source code described in the file tasteprofileclass.py in Appendix 4 and included in the computer program listingappendix submitted on CD pursuant to 37 C.F.R. 1.96 takes a different approach for computing similarity based on iTunes' XML file. Consider a “shared song” to be a song that is in the collection of both users. This method calculates an approximate probability that the next shared song to come into existence will be the next song played. That is, if user A takes a recommendation from B's collection, it will be a song that A doesn't have yet. When he has it, it will be another shared song. What is the probability that it will be the next song played, once it is in A's collection? This is a particularly appropriate similarity measure, because it measures similarity of tastes in a way that directly relates to a key purpose of finding nearest neighbors: making recommendations that the user will want to play frequently. Details of the algorithm appear in the source code. That algorithm is the currently preferred similarity metric.
  • The only requirement of the similarity metric is that, for a significant portion of pairs users which includes those who tend to be the most similar in taste, the following applies: if the calculated similarity of two taste profiles A and B is greater than the calculated similarity of two taste profiles A and C, then it is likelier than not that users A and B are actually more similar in relevant tastes than are users A and C. This likelihood will be greater for similarity metrics that will be associated with the highest-performing embodiments of the invention. For instance, simply using the average distance between ratings may be acceptable for some applications, but using Euclidean distance is better than a simple average.
  • There are many ways to calculate similarity. Other than the requirement above, the invention has no dependence on the particular similarity metric that may be chosen by a particular embodiment. The invention must not be construed to be limited to a particular similarity metric or type of similarity metric; the ones listed here are for reasons of example only. Similarity metrics are interchangeable for purposes of the invention.
  • MEANS FOR FACILITATING RETRIEVAL OF REPRESENTATIONS: There are a variety of ways to provide the functionality needed. It must be stressed that all provide identical or equivalent functionality for the purposes of the invention. While there are several basic structures available, there are many variants for each that are only insubstantially different and should not be construed as different in a way that would make them fall outside the scope of the invention.
  • What is needed is a means for facilitating retrieval of representations of nearest neighbor candidate taste profiles and associated user identifiers in an order such that said nearest neighbor candidate taste profiles tend to be at least as similar to a taste profile of the target user according to a predetermined similarity metric as are subsequently retrieved ones of said nearest neighbor candidate taste profiles.
  • The representations mentioned in the previous paragraph may be the user profiles themselves (including the taste profiles), or just the taste profiles (which should include an identifier of the user)—or they may be user ID's of the users, or URL's enabling the data to be located on the network, or any other data that allows taste profiles and associated user ID's to be accessed. These are all functionally equivalent from the standpoint of the invention.
  • It is important to note that the means for facilitating this retrieval does not need to make use of the predetermined similarity metric or a calculator that can calculate it. In particular, it isn't required that the retrieval of representations is exactly in the same order that would be given by the similarity metric.
  • One implication of this is that even if the similarity metric is not a metric in the sense of a metric space, a metric space-based metric can be used in the means for facilitating this retrieval. This makes available a large number of algorithms in the literature for facilitating the retrieval.
  • In preferred embodiments the data used in facilitating this retrieval is a subset of the data used in the similarity metric, or a summary derived from that data, or a combination of the two, in order to lower computational costs.
  • 1) Pre-Existing Data Structures
  • Data structures may be created that provide the foundation for retrieval in the necessary order or sequence. For instance, clustering may be done using a variety of methods. See, for example, [1] and [2] which apply to “metric spaces,” that is, a structure involving a distance function where the function used to compute the distance between any two objects satisfies the positivity, symmetry, and triangle inequality postulates. Such a distance function can be a similarity metric; examples include Euclidean distance.
  • See also [3] which works on large binary data sets where data points have high dimensionality and most of their coordinates are zero. For instance this can be used to cluster based upon attributes consisting of indicators of whether or not a user has a particular song in his collection. See also [4].
  • Appendix 4 describes source code (genrerankhandler.py), which appears on the computer program listing appendix, and which contains an algorithm which uses genre data (genrerankhandler.py), but a practitioner of ordinary skill in the art will see how to modify it for use with other kinds of data which is of limited dimensionality.
  • For a given clustering scheme, practitioners of ordinary skill in the art will know how to compare a particular taste profile to a particular cluster of taste profiles, and thus determine an affinity between each cluster and the taste profile.
  • Then, the cluster with the most computed affinity to the given taste profile is first in the retrieval order, the cluster with the next most computed affinity is the returned next, etc. Of course, there can be some degree of difference from this strict order without violating the spirit of the invention or moving outside its scope. When we discuss retrieving a cluster, we mean either a set of representations of nearest neighbor candidate user profiles, or a representation of such representations. For instance such a representation can be the name or Internet address of a file containing the representations of candidates.
  • Another approach which uses clustering is given in [5].
  • Clusters are not the only kind of structure that can be used. See, for example, [6] and [4]. Practitioners of ordinary skill will see how to use such structures for retrieving in an order consistent with the needs of the invention. Many such structures with different details of implementation, but these details are not substantial differences for the purposes of the invention. It is not possible to list all possible combinations of such details, and it must not be construed that one can move outside of the scope of the invention merely by finding such variations on the structures listed here, which it cannot be stressed enough are listed for reasons of example only.
  • The source code in Appendix A provides the exemplary key aspects of one particular method for causing the representations to be retrieved an order consistent with the needs of the invention. See the explanatory text in the section for clusterfitterclass.py.
  • Of course preferred embodiments update or replace these structures over time as taste profiles associated with users change, and users are added to or removed from the database associated with the embodiment.
  • Note further that the data structure may be built and stored on a central server, on machines owned by end-users of the invention which communicate their results directly to a server and/or to other end-user machines via peer-to-peer means, or on a combination. It must not be construed that a system falls outside of the scope of the invention merely because the necessary computational and storage resources for the foundation for retrieval are provided at one location or set of locations rather than another, or one type of network node rather than another.
  • As one example of a combined approach, consider [7]. That paper provides an algorithm to do clustering based on nearest neighbors. It can be leveraged to produce a combined approach as follows.
  • Use a peer-to-peer system such as the Gnutella protocol or any other protocol that enables one to search for a file. Each end-user machine is a node in such a network, also known as a “cloud.”
  • Each end-user machine then conducts a search for each file, or a substantial subset, of files that are already in that machine's collection, using the words in the name of each fie (or a substantial subset of them). A “hit” occurs when the protocol returns an identifier of a node that has a file with matching words in its name.
  • Some searches will get more “hits” than others.
  • For purposes of the algorithm in [7], “nearest neighbors” will have a different definition than the one involving the predetermined similarity metric of the present invention. It involves a couple of components.
  • The first component is “hit-nearness.” Suppose a query returns only 1 hit. That means that the node identified by that hit is considered to be in the first tier of hit-nearness. If it returns 2 hits, each of the nodes are considered to be in the second tier of hit-nearness. And so on. The tiers are ranked, and the ranks are divided by the number of tiers. If T is the number of tiers, the best hit-nearness is 1/T, the next best is 2/T, and the worst is T/T (1).
  • The next component is “quantity-nearness”. We count the number of times a particular node's identifier is retrieved in the process of seaching for files. We create tiers based on those numbers using the same tiered approach as for hit-nearness, and again resulting in a number between 0 and 1 where the worst node—the node with the smallest number of hits—has a quantity-nearness, Q, of 1.
  • Then the distance of a node to the node doing the search is the square root of T * Q. So the ordering of each node's the neighbors for the algorithm in [7] is laid out that way.
  • The work of finding neighbors for [7] is thus carried out on the end-user machines. Then, that nearest neighbor information is uploaded to the server from each node, and the algorithm in [7] is carried out there.
  • For instance, the algorithm could include Gnutella protocol code, and use the procedure described above to cluster similar taste profiles together, where similarity is determined by having more neighbors in common (rather than by our predetermined similarity metric).
  • Then to determine the order in which clusters should be downloaded to a particular user's node, the one that contains the greatest number of his neighbors should be downloaded first, then the one that has the next greatest number of his neighbors, etc.
  • 2) Dynamic Searches for Neighbor Candidates
  • Instead of, or in combination with, pre-existing data structures such as described above, many embodiments use dynamic searches.
  • Probably the simplest example of this is a server-based system with a table of attributes culled from the taste profiles, one row per user. In one embodiment these attributes are bits representing the presence or absence of particular genres. So, if there are 100 defined genres, each row has 100 bits.
  • Then to determine the order in which taste profiles should be downloaded, the server simply checks each row and counts the proportion of matching genres to total genres in the other user's taste profile. The representations of taste profiles with the highest proportions are retrieved first. The table could be a RAM-based bitmap, a database such as based upon SQL, or any other convenient configuration. Of course they data used wouldn't have to be genres. It could be a selection of artists or songs or ablums, or in non-music domains, book titles, web logs, paintings, news articles, school subjects, course numbers, etc.
  • In another set of embodiments, there is virtually no server-based processing at all; the only server processing is to supply network addresses for a set of seed nodes that may be online at the time, which may in fact be included with the download of the software that executes the computer steps involved in the invention.
  • In these embodiments, a peer-to-peer protocol such as Gnutella's is used to conduct searches for files, as described above in this text. Note that if a pre-existing, popular protocol such as Gnutella's is used it should be modified so that a node can respond to a request for a complete taste profile; if that does not include a list of all (or a substantial subset of) items on the node's machine, then nodes should also be able to respond to a request for such items.
  • As described elsewhere in this specification, a node (we will refer to it as the “target node”) initiates searches for files it has in its collection. Nodes that are the subject of hits are candidate nearest neighbors. Nodes that have more files matching the target nodes files than others are statistically more likely to be hit before nodes with a smaller number of files. The representation that comes along with the hit is then used the taste profile and if necessary the list of files. So, that satisfies the requirement of the means for facilitating retrieval in the desired order. No other server activity is required.
  • Note that to increase the performance over protocols such as Gnutella that are popular at the current time, currently preferred embodiments use the peer-to-peer method described in [12]. Also, at the time that user machines connect for a new session in the peer to peer network, they should connect to randomly chosen seed nodes in order to increase the randomness of results obtained from searches.
  • It must not be construed that the scope of the present invention is limited to the particular techniques listed here.
  • 3) Note on Retrieval Techniques
  • Whether the means for facilitating retrieval is based upon a pre-existing data structure or whether dynamic computations are done, there is still the question of actually delivering the representations of nearest neighbor candidate profiles, and if separate, the profiles themselves.
  • In some embodiments these come directly from the server. In others such as peer-to-peer techniques like those described above, they may be the result of direct communication with the machine owned by the user whose profile is required.
  • In some embodiments caching solutions such as BitTorrent [8], FreeNet [9], FreeCache [10] and Coral [11] are used to distribute the represenations and/or the profiles. It is preferred to use BitTorrent to distribute cluster files, where the clusters contain the profiles.
  • 4) Further note on scope. It must not be construed that the scope of the invention is limited to the specific examples which are listed here for explanatory purposes. The requirement is that profile representation are retrieved s in an order such that the nearest neighbor candidate taste profiles tend to be at least as similar to a taste profile of the target user according to a predetermined similarity metric as are subsequently retrieved ones of said nearest neighbor candidate taste profiles. The intent is not to carry out the impossible task of listing every possible way to achieve that. The intent is to teach a number of ways to achieve that end; other techniques that achieve that end are equivalent for our purposes. That is, such techniques are interchangeable in the sense that they will result in an embodiment of the invention that falls within the scope.
  • NEAREST-NEIGHBOR: A target user profile's nearest neighbors are the other user profiles whose taste profiles are closest to the target user profiles according to the predetermined similarity metric. However in preferred embodiments there are exceptions: users can cause entries to be added to the nearest neighbor list that may not be ones that have the most computed similarity, and they may delete entries from the list, and they may cause an entry to become permanent (though manually deleteable). They can do these actions manually or through automatic means such as a program that runs through ones email address book and makes the user profiles associated with email address found there permanenty. Such features may detract from recommendation accuracy while adding to the user's pleasure in the nearest neighbor community.
  • NEAREST-NEIGHBOR BASED RECOMMENDER: Nearest-neighbor-based recommendation algorithms are well-known in the literature. See for example, [13] and [14]. The source code file recommenderclass.py described Appendix 4 and included the the computer program listing appendix also includes a technique.
  • The scope of the present invention should not be construed as limited to any particular nearest-neighbor-based recommendation algorithm. They are fundamentally interchangeable for the intents and purposes of the invention, although some will have better accuracy than others. The currently preferred technique is given in recommenderclass.py.
  • SERVER: The term “server” as used in this specification means one or more networked computers, incorporating a central processing unit and temporary storage such a RAM and also persistent storage such as hard disks. They perform central functions such as storing a central list of users. While there may be more than one server, they usually do not have to be separately accessed by user-associated computers; rather they present a unified interface. One such example of multiple servers working together is the case of a server computer running software that interacts with client software running on user-associated computers, which uses other computers for database storage and to provide database redundancy.
  • USER NODE: The computer (also referred to as the “machine”) associated with a human user of the computer, providing one or more input devices such as a keyboard and one or more output devices such as LCD screen. It is networked, preferably through the Internet, to other user nodes. A common protocol such as TCP/IP is used for communication with other user nodes.
  • NEIGHBOR-FINDING USER NODE: In currently preferred embodiments all nodes are essentially the same, and play the role of ” neighbor-finding user nodes; but in some embodiments, certain tasks are relegated to certain of the user nodes. For instance, it may be that certain users are willing to make their computational and bandwidth resources available to others, and that others are less willing; for instance those who are willing may get a price break.
  • In such embodiments, neighbor-finding user nodes take it upon themselves to do work for multiple users. For purposes of neighbor-finding, they work either independently of the user nodes they are helping or in concert with them. For instance, they may receive the candidate nearest neighbors for other users, and use their taste profiles to compute the similarity according to the similarity metric, and then pass on only the most similar nearest neighbors to the user nodes across the network.
  • IDENTIFIERS FOR DISPLAY: Identifiers of items and nearest neighbors are displayed in such visual constructs on a visual computer display as tables in a window or menus such as pop-up menus. Some embodiments may use audio means as a kind of display when visual display is not possible. The identifiers may be identifiers used internally to keep track of the items and users, or they may be special public identifiers supplied by the users or item producers, or any other identifier that is thought would be convenient for the users.
  • NOTES
  • While this specification focuses on the example of music recommendation and communities, that is for purposes of example and ease of explanation only. It applies just as completely to other domains, such as books, web logs, web sites, movies, news, educational items, discussion groups, and others. Embodiments in all of these domains and other domains which could benefit from taste-based recommendations and communities. Occasionally in this specification the word “item” is used inclusively to represent the various types of objects of taste or interest.
  • The word “taste” as used in this specification should not be construed to imply that the invention's scope is limited to artistic works. It applies equally well to information such as news sources. The word “interest” should be considered a synonym for “taste” for purposes of this specification.
  • Other information besides the taste profiles may be used in finding nearest neighbors. As one example, some embodiments allow the list of nearest neighbors to be restricted to individuals who live in particular physical localities.
  • The specification sometimes uses the word “machine” as an equivalent for “computer.”
  • BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE DRAWINGS
  • FIG. 1 is an overall flowchart illustrating an embodiment in which each client node is responsible for determining its own user's nearest neighbors.
  • FIG. 2 is a chart showing how the nearest neighbor list 110 is put to use
  • MODES FOR CARRYING OUT THE INVENTION
  • FIG. 1 illustrates an embodiment in which each client node is responsible for determining its own user's nearest neighbors. Representations of user profiles and associated user identifiers 5 are provided in order of likely similarity to the user. See, for example, the descriptive text for clusterfitter.py in Appendix 4, which describes a way a client node can determine the order in which to download each one of a set of clusters. (The source code itself appears the computer program listing appendix.) In the preferred embodiment, these clusters are downloaded with the help of other client nodes using BitTorrent. In the preferred embodiment there are a limited number of clusters, retrieved by each client node in its own appropriate order. Not every cluster is retrieved by every client, because only a certain amount of time is available to do the downloads. But on the whole, each can generally, in time, be found on a number of client nodes. This enables a BitTorrent tracker running on the server, together with BitTorrent client software running on the clients, to work together to share the community bandwideth to download a cluster to a client that requests it. A programmer of ordinary skill in the art will readily see how to use BitTorrent client software, publicly available in open-source form (http://bittorrent.com/) to accomplish these tasks. Note that there is also an existing BitTorrent “trackerless” option that does not require a tracker on the server, but rather distributes the tracker functionality to the nodes, further diminishing the bandwidth load on the server.
  • This disclosure contains several additional sections, each designated as an Appendix, and together with the rest of the text and computer code presented herein, forming a unified disclosure of the present invention. As one alternative way of achieving the desired ordering of profiles see the distributed profile climbing technique described in Appendix 3.
  • The profiles are received at the user nodes 20 a-c. The similarity of each one to the local user is calculated 30 a-c. The ones that are similar enough 40 a-c to the current user (for instance, by being more similar than the least-similar current member of the nearest neighbor list) are put into the appropriate position 50 a-c in the nearest neighbor list. In preferred embodiments that position is consistent with an ordering by similarity.
  • In FIG. 2 the nearest neighbor list 110 is put to use. Combined with the local user profile 120, recommendations are generated 130 for the user (see, for example, recommenderclass.py, described in Appendix 4 and included on the computer program listing appendix for an example of how to accomplish that).
  • Interactive communications are also enabled 140. For instance, preferred embodiments display the user identifiers of nearest neighbors in a list on a computer display. An interaction means such as clicking on a particular icon enables an email to be automatically generated addressed to the neighbor and indicating that the sender is the current user; the user then fills in the message text and sends it.
  • BIBLIOGRAPHY—References listed below in this section are hereby incorporated by reference in their entireties to the fullest extent allowed by law.
    • [1] V. Ganti, R. Ramakrishnan, J. Gehrke, A. Powell, and J. French. Clustering large datasets in arbitrary metric spaces. Technical report, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1998. http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/ganti99clustering.html
    • [2] M. Ester, H.-P. Kriegel, J. Sander, M. Wimmer, and X. Xu. Incremental clustering for mining in a data warehousing environment. Proc. 24th Intl. Conf. on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB), 1998.
    • [3] C. Ordonez, E. Omiecinski, and Norberto Ezquerra. A fast algorithm to cluster high dimensional basket data. In IEEE ICDM Conference, 2001. http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/ordonez01fast.html More
    • [4] Peter Yianilos, Data structures and algorithms for nearest neighbor search in general metric spaces. In Proceedings of the fourth annual ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete algorithm, Pages 311-321, Austin, Tex., United States, 1993.
    • [5] C. Li, E. Chang, H. Garcia-Molina, and G. Wiederhold. Clustering for approximate similarity search in high-dimensional spaces. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, 14(4):792-808, July-August 2002
    • [6] P. Ciaccia, M. Patella, F. Rabitti, and P. Zezula. Indexing metric spaces with mtree. In Quinto Convegno Nazionale Sistemi Evoluti per Basi di Dati, pages 67-86, Verona, Italy, 25-27 Jun. 1997.
    • [7] R. A. Jarvis and E. A. Patrick. Clustering using a similarity measure based on shared near neighbors. IEEE Transactions on Computers, C-22(11), pages 1025-1034, November 1973
    • [8] http://bittorrent.com/
    • [9] http://freenet.sourceforge.net/
    • [10] http://www.archive.org/web/freecache.php
    • [11] http://www.scs.cs.nyu.edu/coral/
    • [12] N. Sarshar, P. Boykin, V. Roychowdhury. Percolation Search in Power Law Networks: Making Unstructured Peer-to-Peer Networks Scalable. Fourth International Conference on Peer-to-Peer Computing, pages 2-9, August 2004
    • [13] U. Shardanand, Social Information Filtering for Music Recommendation. MIT Master's Degree Thesis, 1994.
    • [14] B Sarwar, F. Karypis, J. Konstan, J. Riedl. Recommender Systems for Large-scale E-Commerce: Scalable Neighborhood Formation Using Clustering. Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Computer and Information Technology (ICCIT 2002), 2002.
    • [15] U. Shardanand, and P. Maes. Social Information Filtering: Algorithms for Automating “Word of Mouth” in Proceedings of CHI'95 (Denver Colo., May 1995), ACM Press, 210-217.
    • [16] U.S. Pat. No. 5,884,282
    APPENDIX 1
  • This appendix describes a number of variations which we consider to be part of the invention.
  • Some embodiments of the invention use “playlist sites” or “mp3 blogs” or “music blogs” to supply profile information, rather than, or in addition to, profile information stored on a local disk such as the XML database generated by Apple's iTunes product. In typical embodiments this information is collected by a “screen scraping” procedure, either by a process or processes running on the server system, or on user nodes. In some cases, such sites publish song information using OPML or other XML formats such as RSS, which reduces or eliminates the need for screen scraping. For embodiments making use of this capability, profile information will be provided to users of the system that may represent the tastes of other individuals who are not users of the system. To a large degree, the data associated with these individuals is treated identically to the data associated with users. In some aspects it will normally not be possible to treat them identically because less data will be available for them. The adjustments that need to be made in such cases will be readily apparent to the software developers. Note that since this specification focuses primarily on users of the system, there will be cases where the term “user” should be considered to also include “ghost users” derived from external data representing non-users.
  • Another source of ghost user data is services such as audioscrobbler that make identifiers of songs currently being played by a given user available on the Web. One of ordinary skill in the art will immediately see how to monitor such a service to build up a profile, over time, of users whose currently-played-song is displayed.
  • Some embodiments provide a facility whereby simply loading a web page (and optionally giving permission for security reasons) will cause software to be automatically loaded into the user's machine that provides the necessary functionality; this avoids the separate step of downloading and installing application software. This can be accomplished, for instance, by means of Java-language code called by a Web browser.
  • Preferred embodiments have a “permanent neighbors” feature, as well as a “machine-generated neighbors list” feature. The machine-generated neighbors list displays identifiers for those users that have been determined to be very close matches in taste or interest to the current user. The permanent neighbors list displays identifiers for users that have been selected by the current user.
  • In preferred embodiments, user-interface techniques are provided for turning machine-generated neighbors into permanent neighbors. Typically this is done by a drag features where a member of the displayed list of machine-generated users is dragged to the displayed list of permanent neighbors. Other techniques include allowing the user to select member of the displayed list of machine-generated users and call a menu option to cause it to be listed as a permanent neighbor; this can be a pop-up menu, a contextual menu, or a standard menu.
  • Permanent neighbors may be manually removed from the permanent neighbors list by the user; for instance, by means of a menu choice or drag operation. Another option is a checkbox where multiple permanent neighbors can be marked for removal, accompanied by a separate button to cause the removals to happen.
  • In preferred embodiments, UI elements are provided to enter an email or IM address for an individual, and cause him to be emailed such that the said email includes a link (or other technique) for enabling easy download of client software implementing the invention. In further embodiments, the other user is automatically added to the permanent neighbors list when the other individual becomes a registered user of the system. This may be accomplished in many ways, readily discernable to one skilled in the art; the scope of the invention should not be construed as being limited to the examples listed in this paragraph; they are listed for reasons of example only. For instance, as the user profiles arrive on the client machines for determining which are nearest neighbors, they can be checked to determine whether an emailed individual is among them. (The addresses of emailed users would be stored on the local user's machine for this purpose.) Alternatively, the client can periodically query a database table residing on the server, to check whether the emailed user has become a registered user.
  • In preferred embodiments, permanent neighbors can include ghost users, where the ghost users are identified by the local user by appropriate network identifiers. For instance in the case of online playlists, a URL that identifies the playlist of the particular individual would be one appropriate type of identifier. In further embodiments, the data for such neighbors is retrieved directly (across the network) by the client node without interaction with the server that implements the server portion of the invention.
  • In preferred embodiments, users may click on the identifier for a permanent neighbor and cause information to be displayed that represents the user's musical tastes; such as a list of artists and/or songs in the user's collection, possibly including such elements as the number of times each song has been played, the date added to the collection, and others; this list is for example only and not intended to be inclusive. Further embodiments display this data for permanent users in the same onscreen list area that is also used for displaying the analogous data associated with machine generated neighbors.
  • In preferred embodiments where neighbors are used as the basis for generating recommendations, it is recognized that permanent neighbors may or may not be the ideal individuals to generate recommendations from. For instance, an individual may be made into a permanent neighbor because he is a friend, rather than because his tastes are remarkably similar to those of the local user. Accordingly, in such preferred embodiments the option is provided to leave permanent neighbors out of the recommendation process. In some such embodiments, this is done as a single binary choice for all permanent neighbors, for instance, using a checkbox that appears in a Preferences dialog. In others, it is done on a one-by-one basis, for instance, with checkboxes accompanying each listed, displayed identifier for permanent neighbors in the user interface. In some embodiments, it is possible to make a single binary choice to indicate that only permanent neighbors are used for recommendations; in others there is a screen widget such as a collection of 3 radio buttons or a standard menu which “sticky” indicators of a previously made selection, where the user can choose between not using permanent neighbors in the recommendations processing, only using permanent neighbors, or using both.
  • Preferred embodiments display the most recent date and/or time that each permanent or machine-generated neighbor last used the system, to the extent that the client may be easily aware of that information. For instance, it may be included in profile information that arrives at the local user's node for processing of candidate neighbors; in which case it may not be the most recent data available to the system as a whole. Alternatively it is retrieved directly from the server when it is to be displayed, and is thus up to date.
  • Preferred embodiments contain on-screen lists of neighbors (which may include permanent neighbors or where permanent neighbors may be in separate, similar lists); in further preferred embodiments these lists contain screen elements of the presence or absence of email addresses for the users (needed because, in preferred embodiments, it is optional to supply an email address and/or to allow other people, preferably including other users, to be made aware of them). In further embodiments, clicking on such an element causes an email application opened and an automatically-addressed email to be generated, to be populated with content by the user. Similarly, elements indicating an IM address, or other communications handles, may be displayed, and UI functionality provided to facilitate such communications. In some such embodiments one element is provided for each neighbor to indicate one or more than one modes of communication as available, and clicking it causes a menu to appear that lists them; choosing one facilitates communication by the chosen mode. In other embodiments, the user selects the list row containing the user identifier, and brings up a standard menu to choose a mode to communicate with the selected user; when communication handles are not provided for a particular mode, that one is greyed-out. A software developer of ordinary skill will readily see other variations of how to facilitate user interaction regarding what modes are available and how to facilitate engaging each one. Such variants which contain some on-screen indicator of the availability of communications with a given user are within the scope of the invention. Software developers of ordinary skill in the art will immediately see how to implement this.
  • In preferred embodiments certain individuals are registered as being artists. When an item such as a song by such an individual is displayed on screen, and if the artist has indicated that he wishes communications with him to be enabled, an indicator of that is provided, and UI techniques for facilitating such communications are provided; these techniques will generally be similar to those already discussed for user-to-user communication. Software developers of ordinary skill in the art will immediately see how to implement this.
  • When artists communicate with users, preferred embodiments monitor the uniqueness of the communications, in an attempt to determine whether artists are really communicating one-to-one with users. One way to determine this would be to randomly sample a number of pairs of communications from artists, and use “diff” text comparison techniques to compare them. Artists with low average number of differences are considered by the system to not be truly engaging in one-to-one communications. Other techniques that enable some measure of general uniqueness to be determined also fall with in the scope; the invention is not dependent on any particular technique for that functionality. In various further embodiments, there are ramifications of being considered to not engage in true one-to-one communications; for instance, in some embodiments, such artists are banned from being presented to users as potential targets of communication; in others there is a displayed list of artists who appear to tend to use “canned” responses; in others that individual is not enabled to initiate communications with non-artist users. In preferred versions of such embodiments an artist can denote a particular communication as being an announcement, and it would then be excluded from the described uniqueness checking.
  • Some embodiments provide UI functionality that allow the user to specify a genre or artist or other criteria for determining a subset of items, and then causing item recommendations to be selected from that subset.
  • Some embodiments enable recommendations to have their order at least partly determined by the similarity of the item to the items associated with some specified artist(s), item(s), or other grouping of items (such as an album of songs).
  • Some embodiments provide professional-interest-matching or dating services by examining files on the user's local computer, for instance words in documents, and possibly words in linked URL's where the links themselves are stored on the user's computer, to build interest profiles; neighbors and, in preferred such embodiments, item recommendations, are based on this data.
  • Some embodiments use a bar-code reader or other automatic means for identifying physical objects in order to generate, or as a contribution to, the data in the user's taste profile. For instance, music CD cases typically have bar codes that can be used for that purpose. (Note that a software product for the Mac OS X operating system, called Delicious Library, has the ability to take data supplied by a bar code reader to build a digital library of physical CD's and other items; however it has none of the other features described in this invention.)
  • Some embodiments add a gift suggestion feature. The individual for whom gift recommendations are to be made available makes his relevant data available to the machine associated with the user who wants to give a gift. For instance, an once such embodiment, an iTunes user might email his iTunes Music Library.xml file to the user who wants to give him a gift. Other techniques for getting the relevant information to the local user are equivalent from the standpoint of the invention. Then local processing occurs for that other user's data that is basically the same as for the local user's own data. For instance, in embodiments involving recommendations by means of neighbors, a collection of machine-generated neighbors is found relative to the gift recipient's data, and recommendations are generated from that and displayed on the screen. The value of this is that the local user already has the code necessary for such functionality, for his own recommendations; and in this case much of that same code is re-used for purposes of gift suggestions.
  • Some embodiments interact with an online music store in such a way that highly recommended music is automatically purchased at regular intervals of time. For example, on a monthly basis, an embodiment that works with the iTunes music store could cause the most recommended n songs where n is 1 or some greater number to be automatically purchased and downloaded to the user's machine. In preferred embodiments, the user is alerted before this occurs and given the choice to modify the list of songs to be purchased; for instance, the application software might display an alert dialog, the day before the purchase is to be made, which indicates that the top 10 songs will be purchased; input means such as checkboxes next to the listed songs may be used to indicate that certain songs should excluded from the automatic purchasing. Preferred embodiments allow the user to choose the periodicity and number of songs to be automatically purchased. In some embodiments, this process is used to cause the creation of a physical CD by a store, containing recommended music (or, in other embodiments, videos, books, etc,), which is subsequently shipped to the user.
  • Preferred embodiments give the user control over which artists are considered to be part of the user's effective taste profile. For instance, in one embodiment the local user can view a list of the artists in his music collection; there is a checkbox next to each one, defaulting to checked; if it's unchecked, that artist is effectively ignored in other processing based on the taste profile. In the embodiment in question, this is accomplished by means of a tuned taste profile and untuned taste profile; the only real use of the untuned one is to present that list to the user for tuning by unchecking checkboxes. So, in embodiments providing control over the artists that are considered to be effectively part of the taste profile, where the user's local taste profile is used for finding nearest neigbhors, only the desired artists are used; and where taste profiles are part of the data broadcast by the system to be viewed by other users and/or for other users to choose neighbors, only the desired artists are used. In some embodiments differerent sets of artists may be chosen for finding neighbors of the local user and for broadcasting, but preferred embodiments combine those features. A software developer of ordinary skill in the art will immediately see other ways of handling the user interface and technical issues for achieving the same purposes; these are equivalent from the standpoint of the invention.
  • One embodiment involves online chat. An interest profile is built based upon a) the words the local user types into his chat client and/or b) the words that appear in messages types by other people into the same chat room. In the case of (b) a subset may be used where the only messages that are at least somewhat likely to be responses to messages from the local user are used—for instance by distance in time from the time of a message sent by the current user to the chat room where the potential response appeared. By collecting these words over time (and in some embodiments, giving words posted by other individuals less weight), a profile of chat interests can be built for each user. Then, when the system builds neighborhoods of similar users, those neighborhoods can be viewed as potential chat partners. In preferred embodiments a user clicks on a user identifier to start a chat session with them. In some embodiments chat rooms are automatically initiated for groups of similar users. In chat embodiments, no other recommendations are necessary. Note that variants of this set of embodiments use different techniques to match people together according to the words they type. The simplest way is to simply treat the words used by a user as a document; then techniques for document similarity which take word frequency into account can be used. (A search on Google for “document similarity” will bring up numerous techniques.) But any technique that calculates useful similarities based on the word content is equivalent for purposes of the invention.
  • Some embodiments provide means to restrict candidate neighbors by certain criteria such as physical locality. One way to do this is to simply assign the lowest possible similarity to people who don't meet the restriction requirements; another is to exclude them at the outset from the neighbor-searching process. Techniques to do this will be immediately apparent to a software developer of ordinary skill.
  • One advantage of having software running in user nodes is that certain parameters for recommendation quality can be tuned on the user node, for the given user, by computationally expensive techniques such as genetic algorithms. Some embodiments take advantage of this fact by using iterative testing, genetic algorithms, simulated annealing, or other optimization techniques to tune parameters such as the following: the number of neighbors to use in recommendation calculations (assuming only the must similar neighbors are chosen), the optimal adventurousness (see elsewhere in the specification for discussion of adventurousness), a cutoff release date for recommended items (for instance, the user may not be interested in old music), and others. One such other is a number representing the lowest weight to be associated with any user's information; the least similar of the nearest neighbors is assigned this weight and interpolation, with a max of 1 for the single nearest neighbor, is used to assign weights to the other neighbors according their rank or another measure. The optimization may be based on tuning the parameters to get the best match between recommended music and the music actually already in the user's collection. (Obviously under normal processing, preferred embodiments do not recommend music that the user already has, and this screening is disabled for optimization purposes.) Preferred embodiments in the music domain try to optimize the match between ranks based on song plays per day and order of recommendation. For instance, Spearman's Rank Correlation can be used to do this. Some tuning operations may change the number of recommended songs; to find the optimal setting it may be useful to compute the p-value associated with each pair of rankings; the more statistically significant the p-value, the better. When rank correlation is used, preferred embodiments only consider the ranks of the top recommendations, because we are less interested in the exact rank of songs that are not particularly recommended. At an extreme of this general approach, some embodiments uses Koza's Genetic Programming technique to generate at least part of the algorithm used in the recommendation process, using similar fitness criteria to the optimization measures mentioned already in this paragraph.
  • In embodiments which carry out evolutionary computation like genetic programming, the invention has useful ramifications for multiprocessing. For instance a each user node evolves chromosomes (such as hierarchical programs in a genetic programming environment) which best suit the needs of the local user. It is likely that those same chromosomes will be relatively high-performing for other users who have the local user among their neighbors. So in preferred evolutionary computation embodiments, one or more of the highest-performing genomes that has resulted from the evolutionary process on a user node becomes part of the profile, which also includes the taste profile. Then other user nodes that select a particular user as a neighbor will also have his highest-performing genome(s) available. These can be used directly; combined with those supplied by other neighbors by (for example) averaging the recommendation strength for each song across all genomes, or seeded into the evolving population of genomes on that node; this is a form of multiprocessing evolutionary computation. It should not be construed that the invention is limited to the example of multiprocessing evolutionary processing described here; it is an example only. For instance literature on genetic programming is rich with research on ways to do genetic processing in a multiprocessor environment. Those skilled in the art of genetic programming will see numerous ways to leverage the fact that each user has a neighborhood of users who will tend to be well-served by many of the same genomes, and have user nodes that are available for multiprocessing to better serve the needs of all such users. For instance, without restricting genomes that are fed from other users into a local user's genome population to just the set of nearest neighbors, some embodiments give more or less probability to a foreign genome being added commensurate with the other user's similarity to the local user. Many variants of taking advantage of the similarity information and the overall structure of the invention will occur to those of ordinary skill in the art of genetic programming, and it must not be construed that such variants are not within the scope of the invention; that is, variants are within the scope if they result in better performance due to the following attributes of the invention: a) the fact that the mechanism that transports taste profiles from user node to user node (which may involve using the server as an intermediate step) can also be used to transport genomes, either as a separate data package or as part of the same data package, and b) that mechanism is set up so that profiles with a higher similarity to the local user have a higher probability of arriving sooner (and, in some embodiments, at all), and those genomes are more likely than randomly-chosen ones to have higher fitness for the local user.
  • In preferred embodiments, direct peer-to-peer communication of individual taste profile information occurs between neighbors. This can enable faster updating of neighbor taste profile data than would occur through the usual mechanism described in this specification. Further embodiments provide an output mechanism for showing identifiers of the digital item currently being experienced by other neighbors; in some such embodiments that information is also used to update the neighbors'taste profiles stored on the local node while waiting for full updated taste profiles to arrive through the usual mechanisms. In preferred embodiments which make use of peer-to-peer techniques as described in this paragraph, the fact that some nodes may be behind firewalls that prohibit incoming connections from being made are handled by sending the necessary data through other nodes that do have the necessary ports open. Any software developer of ordinary skill in the art of peer-to-peer network programming will immediately see how to create the necessary peer-to-peer mechanisms for the functionality described in this paragraph; it should not be construed that only particular implementation mechanism are within the scope of the invention.
  • In preferred embodiments, users can create different taste profiles for themselves which fit different moods or interests. Most or all of the overall mechanism described in this specification then applies to each separate taste profile. Neighbors are found and recommendations are generated for each one. For instance, playlists generated in Apple's iTunes program can comprise music taste profiles.
  • In some embodiments at least some users run a special version of software that implements the invention, in which not all the usual user interface features are necessarily present. In these embodiments, certain musical tracks are indicated as being free of charge—for instance, in the names of the files, or in a database. The user is recommended a collection of free songs. Identifiers for the songs are then uploaded to server system (not necessarily the same one as for other functions). Then the free songs are copied into a portable music player from a computer that is networked to the that server. Then the portable music player is packed and shipped to the user. Facilities are provided where there is a web site where the user orders and pays for the the player, and is informed about how to get the software that will make the recommendations. In preferred embodiments a list of recommended free songs is presented to the user and the user can choose which ones he wants; identifiers of the chosen songs are sent to the server. Networking software and online store developers of orderinary skill will immediately see numerous ways to implement the required functionality; various implementations are equivalent from the standpoint of the invention; the scope of the invention is therefore not limited to certain implementation techniques. Note that this functionality may be removed from other aspects of the present invention; recommendations may be wholly made on the server based on data that is input, via the Web, to the server, using any recommendation methodology; the recommended songs are then loaded onto a portable players and shipped as described.
  • Some embodiments which involve artists having special accounts enable chat rooms for each artist, and provided indicators in the UI associated with artist names (such as next to the artist names in a list of artists) that show whether they are in the chat room or not, and means are provided for the user to click or otherwise interact with an onscreen control to cause them to “enter” the artist's chat room and chat with the artist. Practitioners of ordinary skill in the relevant programming techniques will immediately see numerous ways to implement this and these are equivalent from the standpoint of the invention.
  • In some embodiments special taste profiles are created that are structured like user taste profiles, but actually are taste profiles for an item. For instance in an emodiment which calculates user similarity based on the musical artists they have in common in their libraries, taste profiles are manually created for certain songs (such as songs that are sponsored by commercial interests) that mimic user taste profiles in the sense that each one contains a list of artist. Then the same similarity-calculating code can be used to find the songs that are most similar to the current user, and these may appear in a special recommendation list or mixed in with other recommendations
  • GLOSSARY FOR APPENDIX 1
  • User Nodes—machines that are on the network that also directly interact with users; typically these are machines owned by users or associated with them at their work locations.
  • Screen scraping—a software process that reads an HTML (or other) page on the World Wide Web (or other network system) that is intended for human use, and extracts useful data from it for machine use.
  • Ghost user—data representing an individual that is derived from an external source such as a music blog. In many ways, ghost users may be treated identically to regular users of the system.
  • Current user, Target user, Local user—these terms represent the user who is running software which implements a client portion of the invention; typically he or she is the one that is recommendations and one or more lists of neighbors are associated with in the course of examples in this specification.
  • IM—instant message, typically asociated with chat software.
  • Neighbor—may be used to indicate machine-generated neighbors and/or permanent neighbors. Note that different embodiments may use different terminology for these.
  • Nearest neighbors—the set of neighbors who are most similar in taste to the local user; normally the same as machine-generated neighbors; though it is not impossible that a user will manually find a neighbor that is actually more similar in taste than the machine-generated ones, and add him to permanent neighbors.
  • Artist—a creator of items of interest to the subject domain or one of the subject domains of an embodiment of the invention. We use the term for shorthand, and, for example, in some domains such as academic papers, it could refer to an academic who wrote or co-wrote such a paper.
  • UI—user interface. In most cases, the user interface will involve a computer with a CRT or flat-panel screen and a keyboard, displaying a windowing system such as Microsoft Windows or Mac OS X. Such systems normally provide standard means to create menus, lists (or tables), checkboxes, etc. In other cases the UI may be audio with input by means of telephone touch-tones. The requirement is that it provides functionality that facilitates human-computer interaction.
  • Item—an item is the basic unit of content, such as a song
  • Interest profile or taste profile—data which is indicative of the interests or tastes of a user. Often used interchangeably in this specification. For instance, digital music user will normally have identifiers of the songs he likes (or that are in his collection) in his taste profile.
  • Server—a server is a central computer, or networked group of central computers that handle certain tasks for the benefit of the client nodes, such as storing a database containing login ID's, passwords, and profiles.
  • APPENDIX 2
  • This appendix describes another description of key functionality of the invention, including but not limited to facilitating retrieval of representations of nearest neighbor candidate taste profiles and associated user identifiers in an order such that said nearest neighbor candidate taste profiles tend to be at least as similar to a taste profile of the target user according to a predetermined similarity metric as are subsequently retrieved ones of said nearest neighbor candidate taste profiles.
  • This description is from U.S. provisional patent application 60/540,041, filed Jan. 27, 2004.
  • The specification describes a product named Goombah. However, the focus on Goombah is for clarity and descriptive purposes only and it must not be construed that the scope of the invention is limited to that particular embodiment or to the field that Goombah operates on (music).
  • Goombah's first purpose is to build a list of “nearest neighbors” for each user. They then form a community of like-minded people for communication purposes, and they also form a source for recommendations of items—if you have extremely similar tastes to me and you have an album I don't have and you play it all the time, I should probably give it a try. So that's the basis of the recommendations.
  • To find nearest neighbors exactly correctly is an O(Nˆ2) problem if simple technology is used, and we hope to have hundreds of thousands or millions of users whose profiles are constantly being updated, so we wanted to do better than O(Nˆ2).
  • There are probabilistic nearest neighbor algorithms that reduce this complexity hugely, but at a loss in reliability in finding the true nearest neighbors. We wanted to do better.
  • The key idea behind Goombah, whose purpose is to solve the above problem, is that the computations for finding the local user's nearest neighbors are carried out on that user's machine. So, if we have a million users, we have a million CPU's doing the work of finding nearest neighbors.
  • There are three reasons why such an approach is within now the realm of feasibility, where it wasn't a few years ago:
  • 1) Most people who are heavy users of digital music have high-speed Internet connections, otherwise it would be unpleasant to do downloads from the likes of Apple's iTunes Music Store.
  • 2) New technologies such as BitTorrent has emerged recently which offload bandwidth concerns for sending large files from a central server to the user nodes. In particular, the following is true for BitTorrent: The central server has a copy of the file that people need, but once one user has it on his machine, he is automatically set up as a server as well, and so on for every other user. Transfers are carried out from other users invisibly. (This is different from something like napster where you have to choose another user and request a download. Instead, the central server knows where all the copies of the files are, and tells a node that needs a copy the addresses of several machines to simultaneously get different chunks of the file from until the whole file is build. If a sending node drops out, other nodes automatically take its place, and so the file is eventually downloaded from multiple changing sources in a completely automated way.) This means it is possible for a company like Transpose to make very large files available to very large numbers of users without having hugely expensive server and bandwidth needs. Furthermore, it happens that BitTorrent is open source with a very friendly license and written in the same language (Python) that Goombah is written in.
  • 3) Any serious digital music user already has a hard drive with gigabytes of space devoted to music, so spending a 100 megs or more on the data associated with an application like Goombah is no big deal. In the future, videos will commonly be stored on user hard drives, so that is another application for Goombah as it evolves.
  • So, essentially the idea, when a local user wants to find his nearest neighbors, is to download the profiles of all other users who could reasonably be considered to be candidates to be nearest neighbors of that local user. Then, the local user's Goombah application does a search of all those profiles to find the best matches.
  • Instead of downloading individual profiles, Goombah will download a single very large file—10's or even 100's of megs—that contain the candidate profiles. This will happen by means of BitTorrent.
  • These large files will be formed by a clustering algorithm.
  • We will find clusters of similar users which are large enough to contain most reasonable nearest-neighbor candidates for each general type of musical taste. They will be large enough to fill that need, and small enough to download in a reasonable time on a high-speed connection and not take a problematic amount of space on the user's hard drive.
  • So, the local user will download a large BitTorrent file containing all nearest neighbor candidates and do an exhaustive search on his machine for nearest neighbors.
  • Then he can communicate with his taste-mates and get automated music recommendations from them.
  • The large file will be updated on a regular basis with further BitTorrent downloads.
  • The clustering algorithm can be any clustering algorithm that is capable of clustering a large number of users according to their degree of interest in a large number of subject items. (Where the degree of interest may be indicated by real-valued, binary, integer or any other that can represent a degree of interest.)
  • As one example, the commonly-used C4.5 algorithm can do this. For example, the open-source Java software WEKA has a module, weka.classifiers.treesj48, which implements C4.5. In the context of using this module in a music setting, each user is an “Instance” and the song identifiers, such as strings containing the artist name, album name (if any), and song title, are used as the values of a “nominal attribute” representing the songs.
  • MISCELANEOUS NOTES FOR APPENDIX 2
  • The step of using the local CPU to find nearest neighbors can be conducted in various ways. Any sub-algorithm which accomplishes the function “find nearest neighbors out of the downloaded large file” is considered equivalent for the purposes of the present invention. Possible ways to do it include an exhaustive search for the other users that are most similar to the local user according to some similarity metric. (The attached Python scripts, recommenderclass.py and tasteprofileclass.py contain code for generating a similarity metric. However it must be stressed that there are innumerable ways of generating a similarity metric for nearest-neighbor purposes, and they are all functionally equivalent from the standpoint of the present invention and all fall within the scope of the present invention. We can use any metric that results in reasonable likelihood that two users that are considered more “similar” than another pair of users actually have more shared interests in the targeted interest-domain [such as music] than another pair of users with lesser similarity. Note further that we aren't using the word “metric” in its most rigorous sense, but in its general sense as a quantity used for measurement and comparisons.)
  • Another way to find the nearest neighbors from the downloaded large file is to use the vp-tree technique introduced by Peter N. Yianilos in his paper “Data Structures and Algorithms for Nearest Neighbor Search in General Metric Spaces”. The large file to be downloaded would be formatted as a vp-tree and thus very fast nearest-neighbor searches would be facilitated on the local machine. Again, any technique used to find the nearest neighbors is functionally equivalent from the standpoint of the invention and falls within the scope of the invention.
  • The step of using peer-to-peer techniques for downloading the large files can also occur in various ways which are functionally equivalent from the point of view if the current invention. In fact, the invention does not depend on any particular technique for getting files from peers and all such techniques should therefore be considered functionally equivalent from the point of view of the invention. For instance, while BitTorrent provides a particularly compelling model for how this may be accomplished, the Gnutella provides an alternative model.
  • A difference between the BitTorrent and Gnutella approaches is that with BitTorrent, each file has a distinct URL which is understandable by a server machine which runs BitTorrent “tracker” software. By means of this URL, client software is told by the tracker which peers store the file (or parts of the file) so that the client can cause downloads to be started from a subset (or all) of those peers. With the Gnutella approach, there is no central server, and the local computer sends queries into the “cloud” of known peers and machines known to those peers, looking for files with particular filenames. Then, normally, one of those peers is chosen to be the source of the download.
  • The commonality between all these various techniques is that the large files each represent a group of similar profiles (or, alternatively, all available profiles), there are a fixed set of such files at any point in time, and the user causes one (or more) to be downloaded that is (are) particularly likely to contain worthy nearest neighbor candidates; these files are usually downloaded from one or more peers rather than from a central server. All techniques which satisfy these requirements are functionally equivalent from the perspective of the present invention and thus fall within the scope.
  • One key step is determining which large file a particular client should download in order to meet the needs of its user. Of course, in embodiments where all the profiles are in one large cluster, there is no issue. When they are divided into clusters, and each cluster is represented by a particular large file, however, this step needs to be carried out.
  • One way to accomplish this step is as follows:
  • When a system is first set up to embody this invention, it will usually only have a relatively small number of users on Day 1. Thus, there is no need to divide the population into separate clusters for downloading. As the user population grows in size, a single file is used for download purposes.
  • Finally a point may arrive at which it is deemed, due to the relative of expense of bandwidth and diskspace, that the user population should be divided into two clusters. At that time, a clustering algorithm is run and the user population is divided into two clusters. Each of the two clusters is given a name: for instance, “U0” and U1”.
  • Now, as time goes on, we do not regenerate those clusters from scratch. Rather, as new users are added to the system, they are added to the most appropriate cluster. This may be done in any number of ways. A centroid for the cluster may be calculated, and the new user added to the cluster whose centroid it is most similar to. Or the average similarity between the user and each cluster member may be calculated for each candidate cluster, and the most appropriate cluster chosen on that basis. Or, the change in entropy that would arise in the system as a whole due to each possible choice of cluster can be calculated, and the choice taken that minimizes the change in entropy. Any of these techniques, and all other techniques that cause the user to be placed in one of the existing clusters, are functionally equivalent from the point of view of this patent as long as they have put the user in a cluster that is highly likely to result in a good degree of similarity between the new user and other members of the cluster.
  • In this way, clusters have consistent meaning over time, and the user can stay in the same cluster, until a further split is deemed necessary. In preferred embodiments, this is handled by the expected large file simply not existing at a particular point in time, and this is detected by the client, which thus assumes it needs a new cluster assignment. It then queries the server system for a new assignment. For a pre-existing user this is easily determined because the new assignment was made during the split process, so the server returns another cluster identifier consistent with that split. For example, if a user was in cluster U0, he may now be in cluster U01 (where the leading 0 represents the lineage). (Of course any cluster naming convention can be used, but preferred ones encode the lineage in the name).
  • Other embodiments which use a fast enough clustering approach regenerate the clusters from scratch on a regular basis. In such embodiments the client either requests a new identifier for the cluster file, or one is sent automatically by the server when the client and server are in communication. (Note that this communication can actually take a number of forms. Rather than sending text strings, numeric or other identifiers can be sent which are in turn used by the client to build the necessary handle to access the file. Two examples: In a Gnutella-style system, this handle would probably be a search term. In a BitTorrent-style system, the handle might be the URL for the torrent.)
  • Still other embodiments have relatively stable clusters but continuously work to refine them by moving users from one cluster to another if such a movement provides superior clustering. For instance, periodically each user may be considered again as if it were a new user, and a decision made about what cluster it should go into. If it changes then that will be reflected in future communications between the client and the server (although the change does not need to be reflected immediately).
  • In some embodiments, the client has no persistent “knowledge” about what cluster the user is in, and when it's time to get a new cluster, queries the server for the information required to start a download of the appropriate one.
  • In some embodiments, users may be assigned to more than one cluster. As one example of how that might be done, a number of standard clustering approaches such as C4.5, assign probabilies for cluster assignments; thus a user might with a higher probability reside in one cluster than another. It would be possible to take the two clusters with the highest probability for a given user, and say that he resides in both of them. The invention is not limited to any particular approach to putting users in more than 1 cluster. The functionality is simply that the user would go in the clusters that provide a high match to his interests, and any technique that accomplishes that is functionally equivalent from the perspective of the present invention and is therefore within the scope.
  • In some embodiments, different clustering arrangements exist for different genres. For example a user who has both classical music and jazz in his collection might benefit from different nearest-neighbor communities generating different recommendations in each area. So, the entire clustering and downloading structure and steps, in some embodiments, are carried out more than once. In other (preferred) embodiments, each user still is in only one (or a small group of) cluster(s), but his client software finds different nearest neighbor sets, depending on genre, from within those clusters. Of course, in non-music applications, this concept is extended by means of the analogous principle to “genre” that exists in that other subject area. For instance, if the items are weblogs, then an individual might be interested in weblogs about Perl scripting and also weblots about Republican politics. These different subject areas are handled analogously to genres in the music world.
  • In order for the system to respond to the needs of users who are continually buying new music (viewing new weblogs, etc), in preferred embodiments it is possible for neighborhoods to be updated according accordingly. This means that the large files representing clusters need to be either re-downloaded or updated periodically. We will discuss below some of the ways this is accomplished in various embodiments. The scope should not be construed to be limited to these particular techniques. Rather, any technique that “enables the potential neighbor files to be updated or replaced often enough to increase the accuracy and pleasure in using the system” equally fulfils the required function and is thus considered to be in the scope.
  • In some embodiments, download file identifiers (which may be URL's, terms, etc.) are constructed based on two pieces of data: the cluster identifier plus the date. For instance a user might be in cluster U011. If the date is Jan. 27, 2004, the download file identifier might be U01120040127. The client can then get an update by, for instance, downloading the file containing that string in its name or by constructing a BitTorrent URL based on that string.
  • The client machine can then download the file upon whatever schedule is most consitent with the user's needs and desires. Bandwidth will be a constraint, so there is reason not to download the files too frequently. In preferred embodiments, there is a choice in the “preferences” section of the program whereby the user can specify how often he wants to update the file. He will probably do so less frequently if he has a dialup modem connection than if he has a cable modem. Some embodiments use information available in the computer (for instance, provided by the operating system) to determine the connection speed, and automatically choose a download schedule accordingly. Some ask the user to specify the download speed and automatically choose a download schedule accordingly. Other ways of determining a download schedule, including the user's manually starting each download, are all functionally equivalent and within the scope.
  • Some embodiments automatically cause files of different sizes to be downloaded according to connection speed (or at the choice of the user). One way this is done is for the server to store a tree of cluster arrangements. For instance, suppose clusters are arrived at by splitting bigger clusters in half, and the lineage of the cluster is represented in the file name. Then, for example, U0 might be the parent of U01, and U01 might be the parent of U011. Then a client with less bandwidth available to it might retrieve cluster U011 and one with a great amount of bandwidth but with a user with a very similar taste profile to the first client, might retrieve cluster U0. The difference is that the larger the downloaded cluster, the more likely it is that the true most similar neighbors, out of the whole universe of neighbors, will be found by the client.
  • In some (preferred) embodiments it is possible to either download a cluster as a whole, or download updates. For instance, using the naming convention we have used above, U01120040127-20040126 might be the identifier of the file that contains the difference data between an up-to-date representation of cluster U011 as it appeared on Jan. 26, 2004 and the version that was current on Jan. 27, 2004. Then a preferred embodiment will automatically choose whatever method will result in getting current more quickly. For instance, if no update has occurred in a number of days, it may be more efficient to download the complete file. But if the last update was recent, it may be more efficient to download a series of daily updates.
  • In a preferred embodiment making use of BitTorrent, the server stores, for each cluster, files representing the current complete cluster, individual updates for the last 6 days, and the last 4 weekly update files (files that update for a whole week). BitTorrent requests for any of these files cause them to be loaded to client machines, where they are henceforth made available in a peer-to-peer manner. Any such manner of scheduling updates is functionally equivalent.
  • Those skilled in the art will know how to create such update files. There are general “patching” software technologies, but more particularly it is easy to create custom approaches. For instance, if the cluster file contains a list of user ID's with each user ID followed by a list of the songs found on his or her computer, an update file may consist of a list of user ID's of users who downloaded new songs in the corresponding time interval, with each user ID followed by a list of the new songs and a list of songs that used to be on the user's disk and no longer are. All such representations are functionally equivalent and fall within the scope of the invention.
  • Another aspect is the fact that changes on the user's machine need to be uploaded to the server. In some embodiments this is done on a regular schedule when there are changes to upload. Preferred embodiments only send changes since the last upload rather than uploading the entire interest profile. Preferred embodiments don't send changes until sufficient changes have accrued that it is “worthwhile” to do an update. For instance, in embodiments where taste profiles include information about the number of times a song has been played, it makes a big difference when that count goes from 0 to 10, but very little difference when it goes from 1000 to 1001. A simple way to determine significance is to have a cutoff for the percentages involved. For instance, if play counts are used, the if overall they have changed by 1%, that might be considered significant. If simple presence/absence data is used, than a 1% difference in that data might be considered significant. Alternatively, the entropy of the data may be used. For instance, entropy can be calculated based on the exercise of choosing a “play” at random, and computing the probability that such a randomly chosen play instance would arrive at a particular song. So there is one probability for each song. Based on those probabilities the song entropy may be calculated. Then significance may be determined by a particular amount of change in entropy occurring, either on a percentage basis or based on a fixed minimum change in value. Any technique that determines that a desirable amount of change has occurred is considered functionally equivalent from the standpoint of the invention and thus falls within the scope.
  • In some embodiments the user can determine how much significance is required before an update occurs; in others it is automatically determined based on bandwidth; in others it is determined on a global basis by the server; in others some combination is used such as a maximum upload frequency being determined by the server with the user having the ability to set the frequency or significance required as long as it is below the global value; any number of other techniques are possible and considered functionally equivalent within the scope of the invention.
  • Note: Music is discussed in this specification for reasons of example only. The invention applies to other areas just as well, including text documents, videos, weblogs, and indeed any type of item where user interest can be determined by means of his association, and/or degree of association, with a number items of potential interest. Software developers will readily see how to create these alternative embodiments. It must not be construed that the invention is limited to the specific examples described in this specification.
  • The overall invention, in broadest form, consists of a server (or networked group of servers) that stores the cluster files containing interest profiles and distributes them to client machines, and client machines that then distribute those files to other client machines; the nearest neighbors are then chosen on client machines and used for purposes of recommendation and community.
  • Clusters should be large enough to include most users whose profiles are reasonably likely to be global “nearest neighbors” for any given local user.
  • It would be worth while to discuss one further sample application of the technology. That is one where users are purchasers of DVD's for viewing videos. The interest profile would consist of the list of DVD's owned by the user (perhaps with additional entries that are liked or particularly disliked by the user), optionally associated with the ratings. Numerous technologies are available for finding nearest neighbors based on such data, such as those used by Firefly or the movie recommendation patents of John Hey, or the present inventor's U.S. Pat. No. 05,884,282. (All such algorithms are functionally equivalent from the standpoint of the present invention.) This profile data is usually manually entered by the user.
  • In addition to forming communities and recommendations as already described, this embodiment adds functionality for making it visible to other users that one has DVD's one is willing to lend out, and for keeping track of DVD's that have been lent. Additionally, preferred embodiments have functionality for rating lenders of DVD's according to their reliability (much as is done on eBay or various action sites with respect to sellers). Skilled practicioners of the art of Web programming will immediately see how to create appropriate user interfaces.
  • In some embodiments this lending data is stored on the server for easy access by various clients and in others it is made available by peer-to-peer means.
  • The idea is that when the system finds people who have similar tastes, they will be able to help each other by lending DVD's to each other. Because they have similar tastes, they will be able to lend multiple DVD's. They may also email each other or chat with each other about DVD's of interest through addresses made available through the interface or through automatic means. These factors lead to a relationship of trust, which minimizes the risk in sharing DVD's. So such a service has the potential to do what netflix does, but since there is no central repository of DVD's, at much lower cost.
  • Of course other physical objects of interest than DVD's are the subject of other embodiments; CD's is one applicable subject area.
  • APPENDIX 3 Introduction (Appendix 3)
  • This appendix describes another way of implementing key functionality of the invention, including but not limited to facilitating retrieval of representations of nearest neighbor candidate taste profiles and associated user identifiers in an order such that said nearest neighbor candidate taste profiles tend to be at least as similar to a taste profile of the target user according to a predetermined similarity metric as are subsequently retrieved ones of said nearest neighbor candidate taste profiles.
  • The representations mentioned in the previous paragraph may be the user profiles themselves (including the taste profiles), or just the taste profiles (which should include an identifier of the user)—or they may be user ID's of the users, or URL's enabling the data to be located on the network, or any other data that allows taste profiles and associated user ID's to be accessed. These are all functionally equivalent from the standpoint of the invention.
  • So that it may be taken separately, this Appendix describes the invention anew.
  • The present invention is a new approach to dynamically creating online groups of similarly-minded people for both community-building and generating recommendations of items of interest to the communities.
  • The invention is a form of distributed computing for searching which we will refer to as “distributed profile climbing” or “DPC”. In preferred embodiments it is a kind of middle ground between a server-based Internet service and a peer-to-peer one.
  • The invention consists of a networked computer system running special software. The network is typically the Internet (but can be any network which interconnects computers) and the computer can be a broad range of computer hardware that a user might own, a typical personal computer running with 256 megabytes of RAM a Pentium processor being one example. The connection to the network may be a direct connection, or may be wireless, based on radio, light, Ethernet cabling, etc.
  • Distributed Profile Climbing
  • Peer-to-peer networks are a popular way to handle such challenges as sharing files between many users. The main problem is that not everyone who wants to participate in such a network can do so fully. This is for a number of reasons—computers may not be on all the time, or they may be portable, or they may have firewall and/or network address translation issues.
  • Pseudo-peer-to-peer networks handle that problem by creating proxies for the machines of each user who wants to participate. These proxies exist on server systems, but typically the technical requirements for those servers are light because the proxies merely store and transmit data related to the machine they are proxying.
  • An example of this is Radio UserLand's “upstreaming”. Radio UserLand is a software package that runs on end-user computers and lets users create weblog entries. Those entries may then be sent (“upstreamed”) to UserLand's servers. Web users who wish to view a Radio UserLand customer's weblog can then look at the proxy data on UserLand's servers. Note that, in a world where everyone had computers always able to allow access to other users, there would be no need for this upstreaming to take place. Each weblog writer's machine could serve their weblogs to the rest of the world. But we are not in such a world, so the practical solution is to send the weblog data somewhere where can be always available to other people, in the form of a data object which is located at a particular URL on a reliable server. This data object is the proxy for the user's machine.
  • DPC networks share a common foundation with pseudo-peer-to-peer networks like UserLand Radio in the sense that each user's data is represented by a proxy data object located on a remote server. However, in DPC networks, this data contains a profile of the user in order to compare similarity of interests. In preferred embodiments, the proxy object for a user further contains key information for other users who have already been found to be similar in interests to that user. This key information is sufficient to enable the proxies of those other users to be accessed (typically, this would be by means of constructing a URL that accesses the proxies).
  • One very important aspect of searching for similar profiles is intelligently handling users that have already been compared at least once. In some cases, it may be desired to never compare them again; in others it may be desired to compare them again after a certain amount of time or a certain number of updates have occurred. Most approaches for taking care of this involve storing representations of which pairs of profiles have already been compared.
  • For instance some solutions store a table with a concatenated key containing the logon ID's of the two users that have been compared. But this is a problem. If we assume that over time every user will be compared to every other (ignoring the expense of those comparisons for now) and there are 10,000,000 users in the database, the result is a table with 100,000,000,000,000 records. That is not within the realm of reasonable possibility for affordable server installations.
  • However, now assume there are 10,000,000 users each with their own machine, and each machine stores the logon ID's approximately the approximately 10,000,000 users it may have been compared to over time. This is entirely within reason given the most computers being sold today are equipped with 10's of gigabytes of storage. This is the way DPC handles the problem, in embodiments which involve such lists. Preferred such embodiments contain the calculated similarity metric for each comparison as well as the date and time of the comparison, and other pertinent information may be included as well.
  • Moreover for embodiments that handle previously-checked lists, there is no need for the kind of very sophisticated, highly scalable database software that would be required to store that data on a central server.
  • Furthermore, in most DPC systems, the similarity metrics are computed on the user's machines rather than on the server. This is not a requirement, but it does help to distribute the workload and simplify the scalability issues for the server.
  • As a matter of practical implementation, preferred embodiments where there are large numbers of users divide the proxies for various users among separate servers residing in one or more physical hosting sites. Usually the proxies are divided up in such a way that a hash function based on the user's ID can be used to determine which server (or subgroup of servers) hosts that user's proxy. The benefit of dividing the server side up this way is one of simplicity and cost—there is no need for a high-performance central database system. Instead the servers can operate in relative isolation to each other, even storing all data in local RAM for speed, using communicating with other server hardware for control and backup purposes.
  • An algorithm for one embodiment of the invention is shown below. Steps are carried out in the order shown. Deeper indentation is used in the representation of repeated groups of operations, or operations that are dependent on the result of an “if” test. An “else” relates to the previous “if” at the same indentation level. A “break” causes the process to immediately terminate the currently innermost loop, while allowing outer loops to continue undisturbed. The operations depicted carried by the software operating on end-user machines, except that the server is invoked to provide data on occasion.
  • First we will introduce some terms. THISUSER is the user whose machine the algorithm is running on. Each user has an associated NEIGHBORBAG which is his current list of ID's of similar users. In this example embodiment, the NEIGHBORBAG has a fixed maximum size. PREVIOUSLYCHECKEDBAG is collection of users that have already been checked as potential neighbors (members of NEIGHBORBAG).
  • In the example which will follow, all similarities are between 0 and 1, and higher similarities are better. When similarities between THISUSER and another are considered, it is implied that one of the following happens: a) the user's machine requests that the server send the other's user's taste profile, such as an encoded version of the relevant data from his iTunes Music Library database, and the taste profiles of the two users are compared on THISUSER's machine, or b) the server compares the two users using that same data and returns the result to THISUSER's machine. The former has the overhead that the profiles need to be sent to the user's machine, which consumes network bandwidth. The latter adds more work that must be done on the server side, increasing the complexity of the server. Different embodiments need to trade off these factors.
  • repeat as long as THISUSER is online:
      • ask the server for the ID of a random, already-existing user; set N to be this returned ID
      • set PREVCLIMBER to null; set PREVSIMILARITY to 0
      • repeat:
        • if N is a member of THISUSER's PREVIOUSLYCHECKEDBAG, and was added to it <6 months ago:
          • break
        • ask the server for N's NEIGHBORBAG; save it in CLIMBERBAG
        • set C to be the member of CLIMBERBAG that is most similar to THISUSER
        • add all members of CLIMBERBAG that are not already there to THISUSER's PREVIOUSLYCHECKEDBAG
        • set CSIMILARITY TO C's similarity to THISUSER
        • if CSIMILARITY>PREVSIMILARITY:
          • set PREVSIMILARITY to CSIMILARITY
          • set PREVCLIMBER to C
          • set N to C
        • else:
          • if there are any members of THISUSER's NEIGHBORBAG that have a similarity to THISUSER that is <PREVSIMILARITY:
            • If the maximum size for NEIGHBORBAG has been reached:
            •  remove the member of THISUSER's NEIGHBORBAG which has the least similarity to THISUSER
            • add PREVCLIMBER to THISUSER's NEIGHBORBAG
          • break
  • Note that this invention must not be construed as being limited to the algorithm above, which is presented merely as one of the more simple ways of implementing the invention.
  • However, all approaches that fall within the scope of the invention have in common that profiles arrive at the client node in an order that tends to receive the profiles most similar to the current user first. Accordingly processing is included above whereby, a profile isn't retrieved again until a sufficient time period has passed for the profile to have appreciably changed. In the short term, the most similar matches will exhaust themselves and less similar matches will follow.
  • At the beginning the retrieved profiles are essentially random, but the process quickly “climbs” to strong matches. The process therefore will not retrieve profiles in exactly the ideal order; however it the techniques used do not generally retrieve the profiles in exactly the ideal order. This method will retrieve proviles in a good enough order that once climbing has reached a high level of similarity and profiles are not being retrieved because they already have been, we have the required general decreasing similarity.
  • The climbing is accomplished by means of calculating the similarity metric with respect to the nearest neighbors of a user for which the similarity has previously been calculated, where the latter was found to be at a level high enough that it is worth the expense of going on to retrieve the interest profiles for that user's neighbors to determine whether one or more of them will have an even greater similarity to the target user.
  • Some peer-to-peer networks, such as the Morpheus file-sharing network, have an architecture which causes data which would traditionally be stored on a server to instead be stored on a subset of user computers. We will refer to such servers, in the context of this invention (not necessarily in the Morpheus context) as user-associated servers. In the conduct of the illegal file trading of copyrighted files, the main “advantage” of this technique is arguably that there is no company which controls the master index and which can therefore be prosecuted or sued.
  • However, from the point of view of the present invention, there is another reason, and that is to completely (or almost completely) eliminate the expense associated with a central server. If there is a central server (or server network separate from user-associated servers), then some entity has to pay for maintaining it, providing the bandwidth, etc. Without one, that necessity disappears. Eliminating that necessity enables this invention to be embodied, in a sense, in “pure software” such as an open-source software project, instead of needing to embody it in a project run as a business in order to pay for the servers. Based on the experience of the file-sharing networks, there are enough users who do not have severe firewall or connectivity issues and who are willing to help others by making their resources available that this is a feasible solution. Moreover, unlike file sharing networks, there is little real problem if a user-associated server becomes temporarily or permanently unavailable, because the searching is normally done in the background rather than in real-time.
  • Note that this specification has already described how a hash of the user's ID can be used to determine which server to access for his data. In order to extend that to using user-associated servers, more is required (and the already-described hash may or may not be part of that).
  • In one set of embodiments there is still a central server but rather than serving the taste profiles, it contains a list of identifiers which can be used to construct the URL's where the taste profile for each user may be found. So the actual amount of data that needs to be stored on, and sent from, the server is far less than in the earlier description. For many implementations, the load will be light enough that a single desktop computer with cable modem or DSL (or similar) connection to the Internet will be enough.
  • The Gnutella network, for example, provides a “cloud” of user-associated servers, many or all of which store the URL's (or data that can be used to construct the URL's) of many or all of the other user-associated servers. When a user obtains Gnutella-compliant software (whether by download or by other means) it normally is distributed with a list of user-associated servers that are frequently available. The software then contacts those servers, and can get lists from them of other such servers. The local node is then updated with this information, and it is available to other nodes that might eventually contact this node. Thus, no single central server is required.
  • This specification will not describe the construction of such networks in detail; rather the technical descriptions for Gnutella and other such networks, readily found online using such search tools as Google, should be used. Use such existing networks as a model for constructing a “cloud” of nodes which point to each other and obviate the need for a central server.
  • Preferred embodiments of the invention where the profile data is stored on user-associated servers generally use the same computers for storing that data as are used by their associated users as their day-to-day computers, with the exception that they must be accessible to inbound connections (i.e., few if any Firewall or NAT issues should apply and they should be connected to the Internet, and turned on, a substantial amount of the time).
  • Each user-associated server stores the profiles and neighbor lists of a number of other users. For preferred such embodiments, the step of retrieving a random user ID is modified so that instead of asking a central server, first a random user-associated server in the cloud (or semi-random, influenced by the fact that only a subset of the cloud may be known to the node at the time) is chosen, and then that server is asked to provide a random user ID of those whose profiles and neighbor lists are stored on that computer. Then the algorithm proceeds as before, with the exception that instead of retrieving just the ID of other users, enough data is retrieved to construct a URL where that user's information is available. Then it is accessed at that location. Further, if an access fails because the URL doesn't respond or the data that is supposed to be there isn't, a “break” is executed and the innermost loop explicitly spelled out in the pseudocode is exited.
  • Further embodiments lower the percentage of times non-response or not-found errors occur by providing multiple URL's where the same data can be found on different user-associated servers. Then if one fails, one or more fallback machines can be tried.
  • In preferred embodiments, user-associated servers take responsibility for serving the nearest neighbors of that particular user to the broader community. This causes data for similar users to be gravitate toward being stored on the same machines. One advantage of this technique is that if user-associated server A is being accessed and provides a NEIGHBORBAG for similarity testing, it is likely that when the accessing node wants to get the taste profiles for the users in the bag, seconds or minutes later, that machine will still be available on the network.
  • A further improvement is that, instead of sending the taste profiles for the accessing user for the similarities to be calculated, they can be calculated on the user-associated server in cases where it is judged that it would be more efficient when data transmission expenses are calculated, to send the data there. In such a case, the querying node would upload its taste profile to the user-associated server so that multiple comparisons can be carried out there without further need for network data transmission.
  • In further embodiments, such user-associated servers not only store the neighbors of their associated users, but also other neighbors with relatively high similarity to other users that are stored on that user-associated server. For instance in some embodiments a centroid may be calculated that represents an average of the taste profiles of the users stored on that server. One type of taste profile contains identifiers for every song a user has played on a particular target platform (such as Apple's iTunes), together with the date it was first added to the user's collection and the number of times he has played it. A centroid averaging a number of such user profiles might contain the identifiers for all the songs played by any of the associated users, together with, for each song, the average of the dates it was added to the system and the average number of plays of that song per user.
  • The algorithm described above to find the most similar neighbors for a user may be carried out but with respect to this centroid rather than with respect to the user. The ID's of the users most similar to this centroid are stored in a neighbor list for the centroid, and their profiles and neighbor lists (together, their proxies) are the ones that that particular user-associated server takes responsibility for serving to the community. But it should not be construed that the invention is limited in scope to the concept or “centroid” or “averaging.” Any summary of multiple user's profile information that is comparable via a similarity metric to an individual user's profile is equivalent for the purposes of the invention.
  • For example, in some embodiments that involve user's interests with respect to text documents, a user's interests may be captured in a list of the most unusual keywords that regularly turn up in text they read. For instance a paleontologist might read text containing the word “archaeopteryx” fairly frequently. The exact frequency isn't as important as the fact that the population at large very rarely reads text with that word whereas the paleontologist frequently does. So, the paleontologist's interest profile can be realistically represented by a list of such words that meet certain predetermined thresholds for “unusualness” with respect to the general population, and “frequency” with respect to the user himself. Extending that concept to a group of users rather than a single user, it is clear that the interests of a group of similarly-minded individuals can be represented by a list that contains all the words that are in any of the individuals' personal word-lists (or that are in some predetermined proportion of such lists). This is a completely different approach from using averaging to create a centroid, but it falls equally within the scope of the invention, as do all other approaches which serve the purpose of representing an individual's interest where individuals are concerned, and summarizing such interests for a group where groups are concerned, as long as it is possible to compare the interest profiles of individuals to each other or individual interest profiles to summary interest profiles or summary interest profiles to summary interest profiles and calculate appropriate similarity metrics. (With respect to the word list, a simple similarity metric is to calculate the percentage of words out of the total pool of words formed when the lists are combined are held in common. A more sophisticated approach is to consider every word in the combined list to be a “trial”, with success being that the word is held in common; the similarity metric is then the posterior mean based on a binomial distribution and a beta prior.) Note that this process may frequently result in more than one user-associated server hosting the proxy of a given user. That is good, because that allows for redundancy in the system for times when a user-associated server is not available. Moreover, there is more redundancy for users who are similar to a lot of users then for users who are similar to only a few others. This allows for providing the most reliable and efficient service to the most people.
  • As a further example, in some embodiments the summary is simply the taste profile of the user associated with the user-associated server that is directing the search. By finding nearest neighbors to that such a user is also finding neighbors who are relatively similar in taste to other users whose profile is stored on that user-associated server, as long as the question of whose profile shall be stored is also resolved by virtue of having a high similarity metric with respect to the user associated with the user-associated server.
  • In further embodiments, each user-associated server carries out searches using an algorithm almost identical to one of those described above, with the exception that the search is done with respect to similarity to the collection of users whose proxies (whether the proxy contains the taste profile or the user's neighbor list or both and/or contains other items) are already being served from that particular user-associated server. (This is as opposed to doing such searches with respect to each individual user whose proxy is stored on the server or facilitating, by serving data, such searches carried out by the individual user-associated nodes.) This may be done, as described above, by comparing other users to a centroid of the collection or it may be done by other summary means (all of which fall within the scope of the invention). The standard literature on the subject of data clustering will reveal a number of methods that are equivalent for the purposes of this specification. In preferred such embodiments, the user who is associated with the user-associated server is always among the users whose proxy would be added to that collection if the user wasn't already there. For instance, in the method which involves a centroid produced by averaging the profiles of the users, the algorithm would never remove the user associated with the user-associated server from the list of users whose profiles are averaged to produce the centroid.
  • NOTES FOR APPENDIX 3
  • A central server may be not only a single server computer, but a set of such computers, the distinguishing characteristic not being the number of computers in the central server, but rather the fact that they are not associated with a particular user but rather made available on the network to serve data to a substantial number of user-associated computers.
  • When this specification uses the term “associated with” for the relationship between a user and a computer, the computer is the computer that the user normally accesses to get the benefits of the system, for instance, viewing a list of the users that are more similar to him than any others that have been examined.
  • The term “target user” is used occasionally in this specification to refer to a particular user who is using the invention and for whom the invention has found, and/or is finding, other users with similar interests and/or tastes.
  • Preferred embodiments make a display of the individual users who have been found to be most similar to the target user available through a computer user interface. In some embodiments this takes the form of a list; in others there are other displays such as images representing the users in 2D or N-Dimensional space. In some embodiments the positions such images take with respect to each other in the visual plane represent how similar they are to each other.
  • Preferred embodiments make recommendations to the target user of specific items based on a list of nearest neighbors, that is, a list of neighbors who are relatively similar to the target user in taste when with respect to other users of the system. They do this by processing the preferences of the nearest neighbors in ways that are similar to how this is done in other nearest-neighbor-based collaborative filtering systems such as, for example, in the GroupLens Usenet filtering system, http://www.si.umich.edu/˜presnick/papers/cscw94/GroupLens.htm, incorporated herein by reference, or the system described in Upendra Shardanand's 1995 thesis, Social Information Filtering: Algorithms for Automating “Word of Mouth,” http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/rd/61053528%2C323706%2C1%2C0.25%2CDownload/http://citeseer.nj.nec. com/cache/papers/cs/15862/http:zSzzSzmas.cs.umass.eduzSz%7EaseltinezSz791SzSzshardanand.social_informationfiltering.pdf/shardanand95social.pdf,incorporated herein by reference. Note that those two papers, and others, describe how recommendations may be made once a list of nearest neighbors has been determined, and those and other approaches exemplified by those may be used once such a list has been determined, regardless of the particular calculation originally done to determine the degree of similarity another user has and thus how the decision was made about how to add him to the list of nearest neighbors.
  • However, it is important to note that while the papers mentioned above make recommendations based on ratings manually entered by the users, the present invention may be used in situations where no such ratings are available. Instead other information may be available, such as the fact that the user has purchased particular items, or has chosen to experience them a certain number of times (for instance, has played a musical track a certain number of times). When only purchase data is available, a purchase can be considered to be equivalent to a rating of “good” and no purchase can be considered equivalent to a rating of “poor”. When the number of times a user has chosen to experience an item is available, an easy way to approximate the effect of having ratings is to rank the items by the number of experiences. Then divide the rank by the number of items. This results in a number between 0 and 1 that can be used as a rating-equivalent, normalized to that interval so that the “ratings” of all users are on the same scale. So the techniques mentioned in the afore-mentioned papers, and others, are still usable even where there are no explicit ratings.
  • However, for purposes of example, a particular technique of making recommendations for situations where nearest neighbors have been found and “number of experiences” data is available for each item will be presented here.
  • This technique is to simply add up the number of experiences for each item for all nearest neighbors. For example, assume that out of a universe of 1,000,000 music fans, the system has found 100 nearest neighbors for the target user. For each item associated with each fan, there is a count of how many times each song has been played. If the system simply adds up these counts for each item, the item with the highest total count may be considered to be the most popular item in that community, and should be recommended to the target user if he hasn't already experienced it. Equivalently, one can compute the arithmetic mean of the number of plays, where the number of plays is 0 for users that haven't experienced the item at all.
  • A variant of the approach described in the previous paragraph that is arguably more reliable is to compute log(1+K) for each neighbor/item combination, where K is the number of times the user has experienced the item in question, and then calculate the sum of these values for the population of nearest neighbors. The higher that sum is, the more highly the item should be recommended. The advantage of using the log is that for an item to be recommended highly, it is more important for the item to be experienced often by a large number of nearest neighbors than it is for a few nearest neighbors to experienced the item a huge number of times.
  • The same two papers as mentioned above that discuss collaborative filtering, and others such as the specification of my own U.S. Pat. No. 5,884,282, herein incorporated by reference, describe different ways of creating metrics to capture degrees of similar between two users. All such metrics fall within the scope of the invention. The invention isn't limited to particular metrics; rather the focus of the invention is on the structure of the search and where the relevant data is stored.
  • A similarity metric that is used in preferred embodiments where explicit user-entered ratings are not available is the following. Assume user A is the target user, and we want to know how similar user B is to user A. We calculate an approximation, subject to certain assumptions which are useful to us but may not be true in the real world, of a certain probability. This can be loosely summarized as being probability that, if a randomly chosen item X not in A's collection but in B's collection is put into A's collection, that if we pick a random time in the future when A is experiencing an item from his collection, it will be X. An implementation of this concept that teaches the technique is included in the tasteprofile.py module included the computer program listing appendix and described in Appendix 4.
  • Embodiments of this invention serve the useful purpose of determining which other participating users are most similar to a user who is a participant in the system, and storing that information in the computer for purposes of displaying that community and/or making recommendations of desirable items. Further embodiments not only store that information, but display the community members and/or recommendations through the system's user interface.
  • Some embodiments store each user's profile on their associated computers. Due to issues mentioned above, many user-associated computers may not be accessible to other users from the internet. So a technique must be provided by which users can serve their profiles when they are stored on user machines. Gnutella-style networks provide an example for this. Nodes which are accessible from the Internet allow incoming connections to be made from nodes which are not necessarily connected. Then, data on those not-otherwise-accessible nodes is made available to other nodes on the network, through the network-accessible nodes which the not-otherwise-accessible nodes are connected to. In the case of Gnutella, this data includes lists of available files and the files themselves. (See http://www9.limewire.com/developer/gnutella_protocol0.4.pdf, hereby incorporated by reference, for more information on the details of the Gnutella approach.) In the present invention, the network-accessible servers usually store lists of the user ID's associated with the nodes they are connected to, and when a request arrives for data asociated one of those ID's, the request is routed to the appropriate connected node, the data is retrieved by the network-accessible node, and then sent by the networkdd-accessible node to the requesting node. Most embodiments that use the search algorithm described earlier in this specification modify it when it is used in the configuration described in this paragraph so that if the data for an ID is not available a “continue” is called in the innermost loop so that control goes to the top of the loop, and processing continues as if that information had not been requested. Note that to facilitate “hits” occurring as frequently as possible, nodes normally try to connect to network-accessible computers who are on their nearest-neighbors list. This makes it likely that network-addressable nodes will be connected to some of their associated users's nearest neighbors, so that when the interest profiles of neighbors are needed by the algorithm, they can more often be retrieved. In general, the presented algorithm is modified so that where, originally, ID's of similar users are requested, information is provided that can be used to constract a one or more URL's where the information can be found. If the information is not found on a directly network-accessible computer, the URL of a network-accessible one (such as the one providing the URL!) can be given, which includes parameters such as the ID of the user whose information is desired, to tell that node which possibly-connected node to get the information from. An individual of ordinary skill in the art of peer-to-peer software development will understand how to create the necessary software in accordance with this description. It should be stressed that this paragraph is for example only, and that there are many equivalent variants that involve, for instance, caching data on intermediate user-associated nodes, transporting profiles to other nodes for comparison, etc. This invention's scope must not be construed as being dependent on specific techniques for making the data and computations available in a peer-to-peer setting.
  • In some embodiments two forms of interest profiles are created and stored. One is a very small (in terms of the amount of data) representation. For example, if the main interest profile contains the song names, and artist names for songs in the user's collection and the number of times he has played each one, which could have thousands of entries, this miniature profile may contain only the user's most frequently-played 10 songs identified by a hash such as that generated by Python's built-in hash( ) function. Preliminary screening, including climbing, happens as described elsewhere in this specification using the miniature rather than the full profile. Then as a last step, before adding another user to the target user's nearest neighbor list, the fall profiles are checked to be sure the similarity metric is really high enough that the user should be a nearest neighbor (for instance, that it's higher than the metric associated with the least similar neighbor). If it doesn't meet this final test, it doesn't go on the list.
  • When a miniature profile is used, any technique that serves to produce a relatively small (from the perspective of number-of-bytes), not necessarily complete, representation of the data in the interest profile may be used. The scope of the invention is not limited to particular miniaturizing technologies. For instance, in addition to the simple approach described above, applicable approaches include using all of the item hashes without any counts, using a random selection of items and including the song name itself rather than a hash and optionally further using standard compression algorithms such as are in the standard Python zlib library.
  • “Neighbors,” “users,” and similar terms are often used in this specification to represent their interest profiles, ID's etc.; the meaning is clear in the context.
  • APPENDIX 4: SOURCE CODE
  • The source code is contained on the computer program listing appendix. Notes about several specific modules follow:
  • MODULE: tasteprofileclass.py
  • The pair of classes appearing in this module, CalcData and TasteProfile, are tightly connected. Each TasteProfile object may have a number of associated CalcData objects. The CalcData objects represent one song in the collection of the user whose TasteProfile it is.
  • Methods are provided for loading the object from various sources; a programmer of ordinary skill will readily infer the formats from the input code.
  • It is worth noting that for convenience and to save memory, songs are frequently identified by an MD5 hash based on combining and normalizing their artist, album, and song names.
  • The most important method is probably TasteProfile.calculateSimilarity( ), which compares the current called TasteProfile object with another one passed to it as a parameter. Usually this is used for the local user to sequentially compare his profile to those of other users, in order to find the best ones—the nearest neighbors.
  • In such usage, a nearest neighbor list is maintained of a predetermined length is maintained, and when a profile of greater similarity to the local user comes along, compared to the least similar of the current nearest neighbors, the least similar one is removed from the list and the new one added.
  • MODULE: recommenderclass.py
  • This module handles the task of using the list of nearest neighbors, and their associated profiles for recommendation purposes.
  • It makes recommendations, subject to an “adventurousness control.” When the control is at one extreme, it looks for consensus among neighbors; as it moves toward the other extreme, it is more and more sensitive to opinions of individual users. (In the current embodiment, these opinions are expressed passively simply by recording how many times each song is played.)
  • MODULE: genrerankhandlerclass.py
  • The code in this module represents one way of clustering cluster data containing songs where the songs (or most of the songs) have associated genre information. Of course, it can be used analogously for other subject areas; for instance in the area of academic research, it could make use of the papers in the users' collections (rather than songs), and their associated keywords (rather than genres).
  • This algorithm has the advantage that it is much faster than most general clustering algorithms, due to making use of the effort that originally went into creating the genre information. Furthermore, programmers of ordinary skill in the art will readily see various ways of improving the speed of the code further (at the cost of more code complexity).
  • MODULE: clusterfitterclass.py
  • On a server, this is a helper class for genrerankhandlerclass.py. However, it has another use as well. On the client, it serves to tell the clients which identifier is associated with the cluster a client should download first. That is, it outputs a sorted list of clusters with the ones most likely to yield high similarity to the local user.
  • It does that by means of summary data (the xInitData parameter on the_init_method ) that is sent to the client from the server which contains data that summarizes the differences between the clusters.
  • In the current embodiment (from which this code is derived), this enables clients to request the clusters that are most likely to have good similarity matches first; this downloading is accomplished via BitTorrent. We do not include the BitTorrent-related code here because techniques for accomplishing a BitTorrent download are readily apparent to a programmer of ordinary skill.
  • APPENDIX 5
  • This Appendix describes a class of embodiments wherein some of the user nodes run software that has only a one-way connection to the other nodes and server (if one exists). These embodiments include cases where the connections to the other nodes and server (if one exists) involve more than one medium. We will focus on a specific example where some of the user nodes, which may be full personal computers or may be hand-held devices such as Apple Computer's ipod, have radio circuitry incorporated into them which allow them to receive transmissions from terrestrial or satellite radio broadcasters. (In the case of satellite transmitters, these may include the specific hardware associated with the Sirius or XM satellite radio services.)
  • In the prior art the time of this writing, Sirius Satellite Radio has announced a handheld device, to be called the S50, which will work with its satellite network and save songs on its internal data storage. It does not have the ability to receive satellite signals on its own. Rather it can only receive songs when attached to a docking device. Samsung has announced its neXus XM Satellite Radio/MP3 Players. Users will be able to “tag” songs they hear on the radio for purchase through the XM+Napster online service. The neXus unit will not have a built-in antenna; rather it will connect to a dock which has an antenna, and will record songs from the satellite service for later play without the dock attached.
  • XM Satellite Radio sells a Delphi XM SKYFi2 units which includes internal storage for pause and 30-minute replay, although the antenna is separate. It has announced a Delphi XM MyFi unit which is handled and includes an internal antenna.
  • What is missing from the prior art is a way to enable the user to receive personalized recommendations or a “virtual channel” constructed automatically for the benefit of that user to enable him to have the experience of a radio channel specifically geared towards his or her individual tastes.
  • The present invention provides a solution to this need.
  • In this set of embodiments, the nodes with two-way connections work as described elsewhere in this specification. On the local node, reference data is collected, nearest neighbors found, recommendations are generated, and the taste profile of the local user is distributed to other user nodes to be used by them in a similar way if they are deemed by the software to be similar enough in represented taste and interests to those local users. Not all embodidiments of this variant that fall within the scope have the nodes with two-way connections receiving the taste profiles in an order related to likely similarity to the local user's tastes. Typically these nodes are connected by a network such as the Internet which readily handles two-way communication.
  • The nodes with one-way connections, in preferred embodiments, receive taste profiles via satellite radio. Satellite radio uses digital signals that can easily send taste profile data on one or more channels while sending audio and/or video content such as podcasts on others, and/or it can send a subset of those types of data on a single channel by transmitting one type at one time and other types at other times.
  • In preferred such embodiments the one-way nodes, which in further embodiments may be one-way at some times and two-way at other times, are hand-held devices like the Apple ipod which include a CPU and memory to store content data such as audio and video data, where such memory will include RAM and may include hard drives, flash memory, or other kinds of persistent storage storage. Hand-held devices are meant to be carried from place to place by an individual, and many such devices do not have ongoing two-way communication abilities due to the difficulties and expense of maintaining network connections from remote locations. For such devices, satellite radio provices an excellent transmission medium for the taste profile and digital content information used by the present invention.
  • The one-way devices (which may, in some embodiments, have two way connections at other times), receive taste profile and content information. They also have at least one way of inferring the user's tastes and interests. In various embodiments these may include buttons to rate content he is hearing and/or viewing, or they may include monitoring which content the user stops prematurely or skips over using a mechanism such as a fast-forward button, and which content the user repeats. Some embodiments monitor whether a user uses a rewind-like button to experience portions of content more than once; for instance in a listening to spoken word content, the user may want to hear some of it more than once to aid his understanding. Preferred embodiments have an input mechanism such as a button that indicates that a user likes a unit of content (such as a song) and would like to hear it again.
  • By using such mechanisms, input is provided to the software whereby the software creates a profile indicating certain likes and/or dislikes of the user.
  • Taste profile data received via the one-way medium is then processed as described elsewhere in this specification. Taste profiles that are similar to those of the local user are stored and used for recommendation purposes. User profile information may also be used for community purposes; for instance, in a cell phone embodiment, a telephone number or address may be provided whereby the local user can call the other user whose taste profile matched. In some such embodiments, additionally, a contact recipient will receive bio and/or taste profile information from the local user and hear or view it before deciding whether to take the call; in further such embodiments the receiver has criteria set in his software that automatically screen for certain biographical characteristics or a certain degree of similarity before the user is alerted to the incoming call. In further such embodiments location data such as GPS information is used, so that the local user is made aware of the location (which may not be current) of the remote user, or the software screens on location data so that the local user is only alerted to profiles associated with nearby locations, and/or, alternatively, the remote user's software screens attempted contacts based on the location of the local user.
  • Note that preferred such devices have both satellite radio-receiving and cell phone capabilities. Satellite radio reception may be maintained with typically lower consumption of bandwidth and energy resources than cell phone connections, and typically have higher data transfer rates, so it is helpful to receive a stream of data from the satellite, while also having the hardware required to allow the user to make a cell phone call.
  • A key to this class of embodiments is the fact that the overall network contains both one-way and two-way nodes at a given instant in time (again, some of these nodes may change roles at other times). This enables taste profile and (in preferred embodiments) biographical information or other data such as location to be sent on the network to be received and used by the one-way, receive-only nodes. Because of this mix of node types, it is practical to collect the taste profile data on the two-way nodes which is used to make recommendations on the one-way nodes.
  • In preferred embodiments of two-way nodes containing a broadcast (for instance, satellite) radio receiver as well as wi-fi, ethernet, or other connection to a typical Internet service such as a dial-up service, cable modem, or DSL, data derived from other users is substantially or wholly received via the broadcast radio receiving circuitry, while data is uploaded via the Internet. This minimizes the use of limited Internet “bandwidth” for receiving large amounts of data.
  • A detailed description of a particular embodiment:
  • Software incorporating all or much of the software contained in this specification runs on a large number of desktop personal computers, connected to the Internet. We will refer to it as the Goombah software, since there is presently software of that name that incorporates much of that code. The users of those computers use Apple Computer's iTunes software to play music. iTunes writes an XML file XXX on disk containing the identifiers for each track in the user's collection. The Goombah software XXX reads this XML file and uses it as the user's taste profile data. This data is sent to a server XXX, under the control of which the data is communicated, not only to other personal computers, but to a terrestrial radio transmitter XXX that sends the data to the satellite XXX or satellites being used to facilitate a satellite radio service such as XM or Sirius. From the satellites it is broadcast to portable units XXX which could be, for instance, Sirius or XM-enabled versions of Apple Computers ipod device.
  • On the other personal computers, the taste profiles contained in the data play the role of candidate nearest neighbors; the nearest neighbors are selected and used to provide content recommendations, as described elsewhere in this specification.
  • On the portable devices, an analogous process of neighbor selection and recommendation occurs. However in the embodiment currently being described, the recommended music takes the form of at least one virtual channel. That is, from the user's point of view, it behaves much like a standard satellite radio channel, but at least much of the time, the content is selected, scheduled, and played on the user's local portable device.
  • In this emboddiment, there is an easily accessible Save button. When the user first starts using the device, he tunes into one of the standard satellite channels which he thinks is likely to be a good approximation to his tastes. When he hears content (for instance, a song), that he particularly likes, he presses Save. (In some other embodiments, there is a button for the explicit purpose of enabling the user to indicate that he likes a song; there may be another one to indicate dislike; or there may be an input mechanism such as physical “radio buttons,” which allow only one to be pressed at a time, allowing a degree of liking a song to be expressed; other variants are also applicable. In further embodiments there is not a dedicated physical button for this purpose, but instead controls are provide whereby the user can navigate through a menuing system to choose a “Save” option. Samsung's neXus player will have a mechanism through which the user can “tag” a song for purchase; since available photographs do not show a dedicated button for this purpose but rather an input machanism that appears similar to the ipod's for navigating a menu system. The tagging function is undoubtedly activited through that menu system. In the context of the neXus device, tagging a song implies the user probably likes it becuase most people will tend to buy songs that they like [although some will buy songs for others such as their children; still the statistical likelihood that tagging implies liking a song makes it appropriate for our purposes]. So embodiments built into an improved neXus device may use the tag function for this purpose. Alternatively or in addition, a separate “I like this” option may be available through the same menu structure which would serve the purpose here attributed to the Save button. Ideally, such a future device will have a built-in antenna akin to the Delphi XM Myfi's antenna. All such variants fall within the scope of the present invention.)
  • The song has been stored in RAM even after the earlier parts of the song were played. So it is in RAM and available to be moved to persistent storage such as flash memory or a hard drive when the Save button is pressed. Typically there is a pause between songs, and pressing Save during that pause causes the previously played song to be saved. When a song is Saved it can be played again later with greater frequency than would be the case if the user simply waited for the satellite channel to broadcast it again. The portable device automatically schedules the song to be played again later, and does the same for other Saved songs. For instance Saved songs may be played daily for the first week, then every other day for the next week, then every third day for the first week, etc. An unlimited number scheduling variants are possible. The embodiment described here additionally mixes songs from the user's favorite satellite channels with stored songs; this is one way the user hears new songs that he can decide to Save or not.
  • Also, since the device described in this embodiment has ipod-like functionality, the Saved song may be found and played again at the user's will by means of the ipod's standard navigation features, including being played automatically in the device's Shuffle mode.
  • So the Save button has easily-understood use and value for the user. However, it also serves the purpose of being an input for taste profile data. When the user Saves a song, it goes into his taste profile. Unsaved songs may not go there, although in some variations of this embodiment, satellite songs that the user has heard in their entirety (i.e. he didn't turn the device off, select a song to play from the device's internal library, switch to another satellite channel, or perform some other action that cuts the song off), it is stored in the profile with diminished mathematical weight. And in some variants, songs that were cutoff are stored as songs that are disliked.
  • If the device is permanently one-way, that is, it never has a direct or indirect (through a PC) ability to send data onto the Internet or another network, the taste profile built by the Save button (and/or other techniques) is never made available to other users. However, for the local user's benefit, it enables him to discern which candidate neighbors are received from the satellite are nearest neighbors, and the device can therefore generate recommmendations in the usual way.
  • As the taste profile for the user of the portable device grows because of the use of the Save button, the recommendations that can be generated in the usual manner become more and more accurate.
  • The embodiment currently being discussed involves a unique identifier for each song, which is an md5 hash of a concatenation of the song artist, name, album defined by the makeSongHash functioned in the accompanying code. (Other variants use other techniques such as fingerprints of the audio data, an md5 hash of a text representation of the audio data, etc.) This identifier is contained in the taste profiles for the user and is used as the representation of the song in that data (or as one such representation).
  • When a song is recommended, it goes into a list in the device's storage, and is checked against a broadcast schedule transmitted periodically by the satellites and received by the device. The device then knows to record certain songs sent on certain channels in the future, and does so when the timee comes, saving the song data into persistent storage and adding the song to the device's music library. In this way the device builds a library of music that the user is likely to enjoy. This music is added to the user's virtual channel, and also available to play at his will through the device's song navigation mechanisms.
  • With regard to the virtual channel, the result is as if there a radio channel dedicated exclusively to that individual user's tastes, which gets more and more finely tuned over time.
  • When the portable device is connected to a personal computer, for instance via FireWire, USB, BlueTooth, Ethernet or wi-fi, songs downloaded from the satellite may be transferred to the computer, either for long-term storage in that computer or played using the computer's hardware using data only persistently stored on the device.
  • The embodiment currently under discussion can be used in two modes: subscription and purchase modes.
  • In subscription mode, the user pays a set fee per month, and can store as much music downloaded from the satellites (and/or from other sources) as well fit in the device's storage and they may be played as frequently as the user desires. (In some variants there is a tiered subscription service, where for a particular monthly fee, a particular number of songs or artists's music may be stored persistently or a particular amount of storage may be allocated; or songs from the satellites may be played only a particular number of times.)
  • In purchase mode, Saving a song causes the song to be purchased. (In some variants the Save button is labelled “Purchase”.) When the device is eventually connected to a two-way network or to a wireless-enabled financial “smart card” with debit capabilities, or to analogous financial technologies, the cost is deducted.
  • Further variants of the embodiment described above:
  • Rather than receiving a schedule from the satellites the schedule may be received over the Internet or other network for devices that sometimes have connections to such networks. In further embodiments no schedule is available and instead, a directory is provided of channels together with taste-descriptive data such as a list of genres that each channel focuses on or a list of representative artists, which is used to determine which channels are likely to contain songs the user will want to hear and/or are or will be recommended.
  • In typical embodiments, taste profile data contains genre info for songs in the taste profile, or the service provides a look-up table mapping song identifiers to genres. When the channels have associated genre information, they can use that information for recommended songs to choose likely channels to listen to to receive the songs. When information such as representive artists is used to describe channels, the artists that most frequently appear in taste profiles having the recommended song can be matched against the lists of artists describing different channels, and the channels that best match the currently recommended-but-not-yet-downloaded songs are the ones that the device focuses on in waiting for the song to arrive.
  • Some embodiments use sonic descriptors of each channel to describe it. For instance, the companies Savage Beast and SoundFlavor describe each song by a set of attributes including such factors as tempo, instrumentantation, sex of the singer, and hundreds of others. Some them are human-generated, and some are software-generated (the software examines the audio data) or generated with the aid of software. It is obvious that with such a collection of attributes, average values or other kinds of summarizations may be generated for each channel that tends to describe the music played on that channel. And a vector or other structure may be provided that enables the attributes associated with recommended songs to be determined.
  • Such structures may be downloaded via the Internet or from the satellites. On a special channel or interspersed with other data, the satellites can send the attribibutes associated with each song, either at the same time as a song's audio data is transmitted, or separately; this occurs in preferred embodiments.
  • In some embodiments the attributes associated with songs the user likes, for instance as signified by pressing the Saved button, are summarized by software within the handheld device. For example average values of the attributes can be calculated using arithmetic or geometric averaging, or only the attributes most frequently associated with liked songs may be counted, or other summarization techniques may be used; these comprise a taste profile of the user instead of, or in addition to, the taste profile built from identifiers of liked songs (where “liked” songs may also be signified by being already-owned by the user). In some embodiments there is an additional input device such as a button that signifies that the user does not like a song; then the averages and/or presence/absence counts used to generate the taste profile may be adjusted negatively by that control in association with a particular song.
  • In some embodiments, each user is associated with a song attribute, and the value of the attribute depends on whether the associated user has the song or not, and/or on how often the user plays the song. So each song has an associated list of attributes corresponding to users, either instead of or in addition to other attributes such as ones derived from the sonic content.
  • In embodiments where there are too many song attributes to be downloaded without using too much bandwidth, and where the attributes are statisitically correlated, factor analysis may be used to reduce the number of attributes into principle components. Based on a calculations generated on a server or using distributed systems, the local device can use these calculations to generate the principal components from locally produced data (such as the identifiers of the other users who have each song, as determined by their incoming profiles); these can be summarized to produce a taste profile for the user. Thus it is possible to arrive at a manageable number of attributes for individual songs and local taste profiles. Those of ordinary skill in the art of statistical factor analysis will see how to do this.
  • In many embodiments having attributes associated with each song (comprising a song taste profile), which correspond well enough to the attributes of a summarized taste profile for the local user that similarity can be measured between the two types of taste profiles, recommendations are generated by using the songs whose taste profiles most closely match the local user's taste profile. Thus instead of the process of finding nearest neighbor users and deriving recommendations from their likes and interests, the nearest neighbors are themselves recommendable items and the nearest ones are therefore recommended.
  • Some embodiments need no two-way nodes. The portable devices calculate which incoming songs are nearest-neighbors without any data from other user nodes. Note that while human input may be used to decide on the appropriate attribute values for each song, this input need not be done on “user nodes” as we use the term elsewhere in this specification. Rather that data may be input through software specially designed for the manual entry of such data by a someone whose job it is to do that analysis work.
  • To envision a more concrete example of the invention described in the previous paragraph satellites broadcast taste profile information for each song. These may be broadcast at the same time as the songs by interleaving the music data with the song data or by using another channel, or they may be broadcast at other times. In a system where a broadcast schedule is broadcast in advance of broadcasting the songs, it is preferable that the song taste profiles are broadcast a substantial amount of time before the songs themselves so that software may automatically schedule the future recording of very similar songs. As described earlier the user's local tasteprofile is refined over time due to input from a Save button or other passive or active indications of taste, and the portable device may never have any two-way connectivity. So using the portable device's CPU to find nearest neighbor songs based on user taste profiles built up on the local machine and compatible taste profile broadcast from the satellites produces a situation where analysis of each song, using human and/or software input, empowers portable devices to adaptively provide ever more appropriate listening material for users.
  • It should be noted that the above example if for example only and must not be construed to limit the scope of the invention. The role of “portable device” in the example may be played by any CPU-enabled device, including a desktop PC, or a unit built into an automobile or airplane.
  • When the term “satellite” or “satellites” is used in this specification, it should be noted that whether there is one or more than one satellite makes no difference from the standpoint of this invention. Although of course a collection of satellites will provide a broader range of coverage than a single satellite. One advantage of the techniques described here is that, especially in embodiments where the song taste profiles are transmitted in close temporal proximity to the song data, a portable device is enabled to acquire a library of satellite-downloaded music that the user may continue to enjoy even if the device goes out of range of the satellite(s) for some time.
  • In another set of variations, no taste profiles are sent from the satellites. Instead, a software analysis of each song is done in the portable device itself, determining values for attributes such as tempo. Software to do this sort of thing exists today in, for example, the Polyphonic HMI's Hit Song Science technology. Any engineer of ordinary skill and access to such software will see how to use integrate it into the present invention. Thus song taste profiles generated by such software play the same role as downloaded song taste profiles do in other embodiments described above. However, there is a substantial advantage to downloading the song taste profiles: present software does not have the ability to examine song data for such attributes as sense of humor in the lyric. There are many such qualities that pertain to recorded music that software is not currently capable of analyzing. So embodiments based wholly on software analysis of the music can be expected not to produce as much user benefit as embodiments involving at least some human analysis of the songs. For spoken-word content, speech-to-text software can determine many of the words spoken, and those can be mapped to content vectors as is often done for document analysis; that can comprise the item taste profiles.
  • While the above specification focuses on songs for reasons of example, the same approach will also accrue to spoken-word recordings, “podcasts” involving music played at intervals with spoken-word in between, and video and even purely visual content.
  • For example, one set of embodiments is based upon an LCD, plasma, or nanotube display hanging on a wall. It displays different images, which may be moving or still, which it receives from a satellite. Taste profiles are downloaded which contain attributes pertaining to each visual item; in some embodiments the taste profiles contain identifiers of other users who like the visual item supplied by users with two-way network connections; in other cases or in combination with such human identifiers, taste profiles containing attributes such as indications of the presence of various colors, hard or soft edges, and whether the image is realistic or abstract, landscape or portrait, etc.; in some embodiments software analysis within the local device produces a taste profile; for instance such information as color is simple to extract from digital image data, there is existing software, used to block pornographic sites, which can discern such characteristics as the presence of bare human skin.
  • There is a Save button that protrudes slightly from a flame that surrounds the “picture”. When the user sees an image he particularly likes, he presses Save, and then that image is stored into persistent storage by a CPU which is embedded into the device and displayed later. The CPU also makes use of that information to improve a local taste profile representing the user's tastes. This enables the device to acquire more visual items that the user will enjoy, as described above for music.
  • Another set of variations of the invention here as it relates to one-way devices but also as it relates to purely two-way node embodiments described elsewhere in this specification is similarity matching by means of pattern-matching technologies. For example, a song would be represented, instead of (or in addition to) a taste profile containing a list of attributes, by a pattern-matching software. For instance, it could be represented by a neural net, with the number of layers and nodes and the numberical values that are intrinsic to the net being defined in a way that takes a local user's taste profile information and outputs a high value if the song is likely to match the user's tastes and a low value if it is not. As one way of finding the necessary values, the neural net can be trained using taste profile data of users who had two-way connections enabling the profiles to be communicated to a central server. The neural net is trained so that it takes the taste profiles as input, and outputs high or low values depending on whether the user that is currently trained on liked the song or not (for instance based on whether he pressed a Save button or did nothing or “fast forwarded” past a song and never listened to it in its enirety; in such a case the net would preferably be trained to output a numerical value with a high value in the first case, a middle value in the second, and a low value in the third). In order that there are input values to train the neural nets, taste profiles based on song attributes are also provided, and a user taste profile to be input into the artificial intelligence unit is generated based on the ones associated with the songs the user likes (and/or does not like).
  • In some embodiments content items such as songs are accompanied by lists of identifiers of other songs that are considered to be likely to be enjoyed by the same people as the current song, as determined, for example, either by having similar sonic and/or lyrical attributes, or tending to be liked (or purchased by), the same people. These identifiers may be used as attributes for nearest-neighbor matching, but they may also be used as simple indicators that the listed song identifiers may be used to schedule the acquision of those other songs if the user likes the current one (as indicated, for example, by pressing a Save button while listening to it).
  • In some embodiments incorporating the virtual channel concept described above, when the user first starts the player, and selects a virtual channel, if there aren't many songs (or are no songs) stored in the device yet, it may start playing the currently-being-broadcast song from one of the user's favorite channels, and follow that up with a song from storage if one is available, or play a song from one of the user's favorite channels.
  • When playing songs from the user's favorite channels, it may receive broadcasts from more than one channel at a time, and play one song while simultaneously caching another song from another channel into RAM of persistent storage; after the first song is complete it may play a song from another channel.
  • APPENDIX 6
  • This Appendix describes a class of embodiments wherein there is two way communication between nodes, but it is limited to a particular geographical area, being enabled by such wireless technologies as Wi-Fi or Bluetooth or the like.
  • When two wireless-enabled portable devices are in close enough proximity that communications may be automatically established, a link is set up between the two devices. (Communications may occur between more than two devices simultaneously, but for simplicity of example we are focusing the interactions between one pair at a time.) For instance, a link may be established between two devices in different automobiles or between two handheld devices such as cellular phones.
  • All or a substantial portion of the music library identifiers in each device comprises the taste profile of that devices. It is communicated to the other device by wireless means. The similarity of the other user to the local user is calculated by means of the taste profiles (by local user we mean the person whose information is in onee of the two devices). If the other user's taste profile makes it one of the N most similar ones seen by the local user's device, where N is a predetermined number, the taste profile is stored and used for recommendation purposes as described elsewhere in this specification.
  • Note that very similar, but older, taste profiles may be deleted, and thus there may be more N chosen for storage over the course of time.
  • In preferred embodiments, for a subscription fee, the devices are allowed to copy music from one device to another. If a track residing on a device to which the local user is currently connected has a highly recommended song on it, it is transferred to the local device either automatically or after suggesting the transfer and waiting for the user to OK it (for instance, by pressing a button on the device in respone to an onscreen notification). In other embodiments, the device keeps track of how many times the user has played a song, and to play it more than (for instance) three times, the user must buy the track. This transaction occurs at the time it is connected to the wired Internet (either through a wireless base station, a direct Ethernet connection, or a connection via USB, FireWire, or the like to a desktop PC which is connected to the Internet).
  • In further preferred embodiments, the data corresponding to each song may contain an indicator (such as a bit or particular byte value) indicating that certain songs are free—in other words they can be legally transferred between devices without legal or copyright hindrance. In that case transfers occur as described above but, in the absence of a paid subscription, only the free songs may be transferred.
  • Practicioners of the art of creating wireless networking hardware and software, such as Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, will readily see how to handle the connectivity aspects described in this Appendix.
  • INDUSTRIAL APPLICABILITY
  • The present invention is desirably implemented at least in part via a public network or internet, although some embodiments make use of satellite transmissions and/or wireless transmissions directly from device to device. It may, for example, be coupled to a private network or intranet through a firewall server or router. As used herein, the term “internet” generally refers to any collection of distinct networks working together to appear as a single network to a user. The term “Internet”, on the other hand, refers to a specific implementation of internet, the so-called world wide “network of networks” that are connected to each other using the Internet protocol (IP) and other similar protocols. The Internet provides file transfer, remote log in, electronic mail, news and other services. The system and techniques described herein can be used on any internet including the so-called Internet.
  • One of the unique aspects of the Internet system is that messages and data are transmitted through the use of data packets referred to as “datagrams.” In a datagram-based network, messages are sent from a source to a destination in a manner similar to a government mail system. For example, a source computer may send a datagram packet to a destination computer regardless of whether or not the destination computer is currently powered on and coupled to the network. The Internet protocol (IP) is completely sessionless, such that IP data gram packets are not associated with one another.
  • The firewall server or router is a computer or item of equipment which couples the computers of a private network to the Internet. It may thus act as a gatekeeper for messages and datagrams going to and from the Internet 1.
  • An Internet service provider (ISP) is also coupled to the Internet. A service provider is an entity that provides connections to a part of the Internet, for a plurality of users. Also coupled to the Internet are a plurality of web sites or nodes. When a user wishes to conduct a transaction at one of the nodes, the user accesses the node through the Internet.
  • For Internet-enabled embodiments, each node is configured to understand which firewall and node to send data packets to given a destination IP address. This may be implemented by providing the firewalls and nodes with a map of all valid IP addresses disposed on its particular private network or another location on the Internet. The map may be in the form of prefix matches up to and including the full IP address.
  • Also coupled to the Internet is a server, containing an information database with representations of user profiles and associated user identifiers 5. The information may be stored, for example, as a record or as a file. The information associated with each particular user is stored in a particular data structure in a database. One exemplary database structure is as follows. The database may be stored, for example, as an object-oriented database management system (ODBMS), a relational database management system (e.g. DB2, SQL, etc.), a hierarchical database, a network database, a distributed database (i.e. a collection of multiple, logically interrelated databases distributed over a computer network) or any other type of database package. Thus, the database and the system can be implemented using object-oriented technology or via text files.
  • A computer system on which the system of the present invention may be implemented may be, for example, a personal computer running Microsoft Windows, Linux, Apple Macintosh or an equivalent operating system. Such a computer system typically includes a central processing unit (CPU), e.g., a conventional microprocessor, a random access memory (RAM) for temporary storage of information, and a read only memory (ROM) for permanent storage of information. Each of the aforementioned components is coupled to a bus. The operating system controls allocation of system resources and performs tasks such as processing, scheduling, memory management, networking, and I/O services. Also coupled to the bus is typically a non-volatile mass storage device which may be provided as a fixed disk drive which is coupled to the bus by a disk controller.
  • Data and software may be provided to and extracted from computer system via removable storage media such as hard disk, diskette, and CD ROM. For example, data values generated using techniques described herein may be stored on storage media. The data values may then be retrieved from the media by the CPU and utilized to recommend one of a plurality of items in response to a user's query.
  • Alternatively, computer software useful for performing computations related to enabling recommendatons and community by massively-distributed nearest-neighbor searching may be stored on storage media. Such computer software may be retrieved from the media for immediate execution by the CPU or by processors included in one or more peripherals. The CPU may retrieve the computer software and subsequently store the software in RAM or ROM for later execution.
  • User input to the computer system may be provided by a number of devices. For example, a keyboard and a mouse are typically coupled to the bus by a controller. The computer system typically also includes a communications adapter which allows the system to be interconnected to a local area network (LAN) or a wide area network (WAN). Connections may be wireless or wired, Thus, data and computer program software can be transferred to and from the computer system via the adapter, bus and network; although it should be noted that in embodiments without two-way connectivity, the device manufactur may load the software onto the device.

Claims (4)

1. A networked computer system for supplying recommendations and taste-based community to a target user, comprising:
networked means for providing representations of nearest neighbor candidate taste profiles and associated user identifiers in an order such that said nearest neighbor candidate taste profiles tend to be at least as similar to a taste profile of the target user according to a predetermined similarity metric as are subsequently retrieved ones of said nearest neighbor candidate taste profiles,
means to receive said representations of nearest neighbor candidate taste profiles and associated user identifiers on at least one neighbor-finding user node,
said neighbor-finding user nodes each having at least one similarity metric calculator calculating said predetermined similarity metric based upon said representations of nearest neighbor candidate taste,
at least one selector residing on at least one of said neighbor-finding user nodes using the output of said at least one similarity metric calculator for building a list representing the nearest-neighbor users,
said list representing said nearest-neighbor users providing access to associated ones of said candidate profiles,
a nearest-neighbor based recommender which uses said associated ones of said candidate profiles to recommend items,
a display for viewing identifiers of recommended items,
a display for viewing identifiers of a plurality of nearest neighbor users,
means to select at least one of said nearest neighbor users from said display of identifiers of a plurality of nearest neighbor users,
a display of information relating to at least one of the items in said nearest neighbor user's collection,
whereby massively distributed processing is harnessed in a bandwidth-conserving way for finding the best neighbors out of the entire population of users, and the same neighborhood is leveraged to provide recommendations as well as highly focused taste-based community for sharing the enjoyment of items including recommended items
2. The networked computer system of claim 1, further including means to facilitate communication with at least said nearest neighbor users where the type of communication comprises at least one selected from the group consisting of online chat, email, online discussion boards, voice, and video.
3. A networked computer system for supplying recommendations and taste-based community to a target user, comprising
an ordered plurality of nearest neighbor candidate taste profiles and associated user identifiers such that said nearest neighbor candidate taste profiles tend to be at least as similar to a taste profile of the target user according to a predetermined similarity metric as are subsequently positioned ones of said nearest neighbor candidate taste profiles,
networked means to receive said nearest neighbor candidate taste profiles and associated user identifiers on at least one neighbor-finding user node,
said neighbor-finding user nodes each having at least one similarity metric calculator calculating said predetermined similarity metric,
at least one selector residing on at least one of said neighbor-finding user nodes using the output of said at least one similarity metric calculator for building a list representing the nearest-neighbor users,
said list representing said nearest-neighbor users providing access to associated ones of said candidate profiles,
a nearest-neighbor based recommender which uses said associated ones of said a nearest-neighbor based recommender which uses said associated ones of said candidate profiles to recommend items,
a display for viewing identifiers of recommended items,
a display for viewing identifiers of a plurality of nearest neighbor users,
means to select at least one of said nearest neighbor users from said display of identifiers of a plurality of nearest neighbor users,
a display of information relating to at least one of the items in said nearest neighbor user's collection,
whereby massively distributed processing is harnessed in a bandwidth-conserving way for finding the best neighbors out of the entire population of users, and the same neighborhood is leveraged to provide recommendations as well as highly focused taste-based community for sharing the enjoyment of items including recommended items
4. The networked computer system claim 1, further including a single downloadable file that contains software that executes all necessary non-server computer instructions.
US11/230,274 2004-01-27 2005-09-19 Enabling recommendations and community by massively-distributed nearest-neighbor searching Abandoned US20060020662A1 (en)

Priority Applications (4)

Application Number Priority Date Filing Date Title
US11/230,274 US20060020662A1 (en) 2004-01-27 2005-09-19 Enabling recommendations and community by massively-distributed nearest-neighbor searching
US11/974,634 US7783249B2 (en) 2004-01-27 2007-10-15 Playing digital content from satellite radio media based on taste profiles
US12/806,856 US8190082B2 (en) 2004-01-27 2010-08-23 Playing digital content from satellite radio media based on taste profiles
US13/479,546 US20130040556A1 (en) 2004-01-27 2012-05-24 Playing digital content from radio-transmitted media based on taste profiles

Applications Claiming Priority (5)

Application Number Priority Date Filing Date Title
US54004104P 2004-01-27 2004-01-27
US61122204P 2004-09-18 2004-09-18
US63519704P 2004-12-09 2004-12-09
PCT/US2005/002731 WO2005072405A2 (en) 2004-01-27 2005-01-27 Enabling recommendations and community by massively-distributed nearest-neighbor searching
US11/230,274 US20060020662A1 (en) 2004-01-27 2005-09-19 Enabling recommendations and community by massively-distributed nearest-neighbor searching

Related Parent Applications (1)

Application Number Title Priority Date Filing Date
PCT/US2005/002731 Continuation-In-Part WO2005072405A2 (en) 2004-01-27 2005-01-27 Enabling recommendations and community by massively-distributed nearest-neighbor searching

Related Child Applications (1)

Application Number Title Priority Date Filing Date
US11/974,634 Division US7783249B2 (en) 2004-01-27 2007-10-15 Playing digital content from satellite radio media based on taste profiles

Publications (1)

Publication Number Publication Date
US20060020662A1 true US20060020662A1 (en) 2006-01-26

Family

ID=34831205

Family Applications (4)

Application Number Title Priority Date Filing Date
US11/230,274 Abandoned US20060020662A1 (en) 2004-01-27 2005-09-19 Enabling recommendations and community by massively-distributed nearest-neighbor searching
US11/974,634 Expired - Fee Related US7783249B2 (en) 2004-01-27 2007-10-15 Playing digital content from satellite radio media based on taste profiles
US12/806,856 Expired - Fee Related US8190082B2 (en) 2004-01-27 2010-08-23 Playing digital content from satellite radio media based on taste profiles
US13/479,546 Abandoned US20130040556A1 (en) 2004-01-27 2012-05-24 Playing digital content from radio-transmitted media based on taste profiles

Family Applications After (3)

Application Number Title Priority Date Filing Date
US11/974,634 Expired - Fee Related US7783249B2 (en) 2004-01-27 2007-10-15 Playing digital content from satellite radio media based on taste profiles
US12/806,856 Expired - Fee Related US8190082B2 (en) 2004-01-27 2010-08-23 Playing digital content from satellite radio media based on taste profiles
US13/479,546 Abandoned US20130040556A1 (en) 2004-01-27 2012-05-24 Playing digital content from radio-transmitted media based on taste profiles

Country Status (2)

Country Link
US (4) US20060020662A1 (en)
WO (1) WO2005072405A2 (en)

Cited By (235)

* Cited by examiner, † Cited by third party
Publication number Priority date Publication date Assignee Title
US20050251565A1 (en) * 2004-05-05 2005-11-10 Martin Weel Hybrid set-top box for digital entertainment network
US20050251576A1 (en) * 2004-05-05 2005-11-10 Martin Weel Device discovery for digital entertainment network
US20060195462A1 (en) * 2005-02-28 2006-08-31 Yahoo! Inc. System and method for enhanced media distribution
US20060267995A1 (en) * 2005-03-02 2006-11-30 Radloff Jon P Playlists and bookmarks in an interactive media guidance application system
US20070011104A1 (en) * 2003-03-21 2007-01-11 Ebay Inc. Payment transactions via substantially instant communication system
US20070106660A1 (en) * 2005-11-09 2007-05-10 Bbnt Solutions Llc Method and apparatus for using confidence scores of enhanced metadata in search-driven media applications
US20070106693A1 (en) * 2005-11-09 2007-05-10 Bbnt Solutions Llc Methods and apparatus for providing virtual media channels based on media search
US20070106685A1 (en) * 2005-11-09 2007-05-10 Podzinger Corp. Method and apparatus for updating speech recognition databases and reindexing audio and video content using the same
US20070103296A1 (en) * 2005-10-11 2007-05-10 Snif Labs, Inc. Tag system
US20070112837A1 (en) * 2005-11-09 2007-05-17 Bbnt Solutions Llc Method and apparatus for timed tagging of media content
US20070118873A1 (en) * 2005-11-09 2007-05-24 Bbnt Solutions Llc Methods and apparatus for merging media content
US20070157797A1 (en) * 2005-12-14 2007-07-12 Sony Corporation Taste profile production apparatus, taste profile production method and profile production program
US20070192683A1 (en) * 2006-02-13 2007-08-16 Bodin William K Synthesizing the content of disparate data types
US20070214259A1 (en) * 2006-03-13 2007-09-13 Ebay Inc. Peer-to-peer trading platform with relative reputation-based item search and buddy rating
US20070214250A1 (en) * 2006-03-13 2007-09-13 Ebay Inc. Peer-to-peer trading platform with search caching
US20070214149A1 (en) * 2006-03-09 2007-09-13 International Business Machines Corporation Associating user selected content management directives with user selected ratings
US20070214249A1 (en) * 2006-03-13 2007-09-13 Ebay Inc. Peer-to-peer trading platform
WO2007103597A2 (en) * 2006-03-02 2007-09-13 Yahoo! Inc. Providing syndicated media to authorized users
US20070214148A1 (en) * 2006-03-09 2007-09-13 Bodin William K Invoking content management directives
US20070211651A1 (en) * 2006-03-13 2007-09-13 Ebay Inc. Peer-to-peer trading platform with roles-based transactions
US20070213857A1 (en) * 2006-03-09 2007-09-13 Bodin William K RSS content administration for rendering RSS content on a digital audio player
US20070213986A1 (en) * 2006-03-09 2007-09-13 Bodin William K Email administration for rendering email on a digital audio player
US20070220025A1 (en) * 2006-03-15 2007-09-20 Mog, Inc Automatic meta-data sharing of existing media
US20070220580A1 (en) * 2002-03-14 2007-09-20 Daniel Putterman User interface for a media convergence platform
US20070220081A1 (en) * 2006-03-15 2007-09-20 Mog, Inc Override of automatically shared meta-data of media
WO2007108986A2 (en) * 2006-03-13 2007-09-27 Ebay Inc. Peer-to-peer trading platform
US20070237139A1 (en) * 2006-04-11 2007-10-11 Nokia Corporation Node
US20070244768A1 (en) * 2006-03-06 2007-10-18 La La Media, Inc. Article trading process
US20070276866A1 (en) * 2006-05-24 2007-11-29 Bodin William K Providing disparate content as a playlist of media files
US20070277233A1 (en) * 2006-05-24 2007-11-29 Bodin William K Token-based content subscription
US20070277088A1 (en) * 2006-05-24 2007-11-29 Bodin William K Enhancing an existing web page
US20080005179A1 (en) * 2006-05-22 2008-01-03 Sonicswap, Inc. Systems and methods for sharing digital media content
WO2007134193A3 (en) * 2006-05-12 2008-02-14 Mystrands Inc User programmed media delivery service
US20080052371A1 (en) * 2006-08-28 2008-02-28 Evolution Artists, Inc. System, apparatus and method for discovery of music within a social network
US20080082576A1 (en) * 2006-09-29 2008-04-03 Bodin William K Audio Menus Describing Media Contents of Media Players
US20080082633A1 (en) * 2006-08-24 2008-04-03 Kabushiki Kaisha Toshiba Recommending system, recommending server, content recommending method, and recommending program product
US20080082635A1 (en) * 2006-09-29 2008-04-03 Bodin William K Asynchronous Communications Using Messages Recorded On Handheld Devices
WO2008041173A2 (en) * 2006-10-02 2008-04-10 Nokia Corporation Method system and devices for network sharing or searching of resources
US20080091763A1 (en) * 2006-10-13 2008-04-17 Quipa Holdings Limited method for sharing functionality and/or data between two or more linked entities
US20080109364A1 (en) * 2006-11-03 2008-05-08 Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. Method for enhancing DRM authority, enhanced DRM authority content, and portable terminal using the same
US20080115173A1 (en) * 2006-11-10 2008-05-15 Guideworks Llc Systems and methods for using playlists
US20080114794A1 (en) * 2006-11-10 2008-05-15 Guideworks Llc Systems and methods for using playlists
US20080120288A1 (en) * 2006-11-17 2008-05-22 Wei Guan Collaborative-filtering content model for recommending items
US20080133601A1 (en) * 2005-01-05 2008-06-05 Musicstrands, S.A.U. System And Method For Recommending Multimedia Elements
US20080141134A1 (en) * 2006-12-08 2008-06-12 Mitsuhiro Miyazaki Information Processing Apparatus, Display Control Processing Method and Display Control Processing Program
US20080147500A1 (en) * 2006-12-15 2008-06-19 Malcolm Slaney Serving advertisements using entertainment ratings in a collaborative-filtering system
WO2008073594A1 (en) * 2006-12-09 2008-06-19 Motorola, Inc. A content recommendation system and a method of operation therefor
US20080162130A1 (en) * 2007-01-03 2008-07-03 Bodin William K Asynchronous receipt of information from a user
US20080162131A1 (en) * 2007-01-03 2008-07-03 Bodin William K Blogcasting using speech recorded on a handheld recording device
US20080161948A1 (en) * 2007-01-03 2008-07-03 Bodin William K Supplementing audio recorded in a media file
US20080209013A1 (en) * 2004-05-05 2008-08-28 Conpact, Inc. System and method for sharing playlists
US20080215709A1 (en) * 2006-02-22 2008-09-04 Sony Deutschland Gmbh Method For Updating a User Profile
US20080222188A1 (en) * 2007-03-05 2008-09-11 Kaleidescape, Inc. Playlists responsive to coincidence distances
US20080243997A1 (en) * 2007-03-29 2008-10-02 Motorola, Inc. Distributed content item recommendation system and method of operation therefor
WO2008122021A2 (en) * 2007-04-02 2008-10-09 Concert Technology Corporation Rating media item recommendations using recommendation paths and/or media item usage
US20080263046A1 (en) * 2007-04-23 2008-10-23 Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications Ab Media portion selection system and method
US20080270426A1 (en) * 2007-04-30 2008-10-30 Flake Gary W Collecting influence information
US20080270242A1 (en) * 2007-04-24 2008-10-30 Cvon Innovations Ltd. Method and arrangement for providing content to multimedia devices
US20080270552A1 (en) * 2007-04-30 2008-10-30 Searete Llc, A Limited Liability Corporation Of The State Of Delaware Determining influencers
US20080270476A1 (en) * 2007-04-30 2008-10-30 Searete Llc, A Limited Liability Corporation Of The State Of Delaware Rewarding independent influencers
US20080270551A1 (en) * 2007-04-30 2008-10-30 Searete Llc, A Limited Liability Corporation Of The State Of Delaware Rewarding influencers
US20080270473A1 (en) * 2007-04-30 2008-10-30 Searete Llc, A Limited Liability Corporation Of The State Of Delaware Determining an influence on a person by web pages
US20080270474A1 (en) * 2007-04-30 2008-10-30 Searete Llc Collecting influence information
US20080275893A1 (en) * 2006-02-13 2008-11-06 International Business Machines Corporation Aggregating Content Of Disparate Data Types From Disparate Data Sources For Single Point Access
US20080288982A1 (en) * 2005-11-30 2008-11-20 Koninklijke Philips Electronics, N.V. Method and Apparatus for Generating a Recommendation for at Least One Content Item
US20080301187A1 (en) * 2007-06-01 2008-12-04 Concert Technology Corporation Enhanced media item playlist comprising presence information
US20090030772A1 (en) * 2007-07-27 2009-01-29 Searete Llc, A Limited Liability Corporation Of The State Of Delaware Rewarding independent influencers
US20090037456A1 (en) * 2007-07-31 2009-02-05 Kirshenbaum Evan R Providing an index for a data store
US20090037500A1 (en) * 2007-07-31 2009-02-05 Kirshenbaum Evan R Storing nodes representing respective chunks of files in a data store
US20090070437A1 (en) * 2007-09-11 2009-03-12 Perri Ruckart Methods and systems to manage the viral transfer of rental media
US20090070185A1 (en) * 2007-01-17 2009-03-12 Concert Technology Corporation System and method for recommending a digital media subscription service
US20090077081A1 (en) * 2007-09-19 2009-03-19 Joydeep Sen Sarma Attribute-Based Item Similarity Using Collaborative Filtering Techniques
US20090077093A1 (en) * 2007-09-19 2009-03-19 Joydeep Sen Sarma Feature Discretization and Cardinality Reduction Using Collaborative Filtering Techniques
US20090077160A1 (en) * 2006-10-06 2009-03-19 Concert Technology Corporation System and method for providing media content selections
US20090077220A1 (en) * 2006-07-11 2009-03-19 Concert Technology Corporation System and method for identifying music content in a p2p real time recommendation network
US20090083307A1 (en) * 2005-04-22 2009-03-26 Musicstrands, S.A.U. System and method for acquiring and adding data on the playing of elements or multimedia files
US20090083117A1 (en) * 2006-12-13 2009-03-26 Concert Technology Corporation Matching participants in a p2p recommendation network loosely coupled to a subscription service
US20090094248A1 (en) * 2007-10-03 2009-04-09 Concert Technology Corporation System and method of prioritizing the downloading of media items in a media item recommendation network
US20090094285A1 (en) * 2007-10-03 2009-04-09 Mackle Edward G Recommendation apparatus
US20090119265A1 (en) * 2007-11-05 2009-05-07 National Taiwan University Distributed multimedia access system and method
US20090132526A1 (en) * 2007-11-19 2009-05-21 Jong-Hun Park Content recommendation apparatus and method using tag cloud
US7542992B1 (en) * 2005-08-01 2009-06-02 Google Inc. Assimilator using image check data
US20090144774A1 (en) * 2006-08-01 2009-06-04 Sony Corporation And Sony Electronics Inc. System and method for neighborhood optimization for content recommendation
US20090158382A1 (en) * 2007-12-17 2009-06-18 Cisco Technology, Inc. System and Method for Using Mobile Media Players in a Peer-to-Peer Network
US20090164516A1 (en) * 2007-12-21 2009-06-25 Concert Technology Corporation Method and system for generating media recommendations in a distributed environment based on tagging play history information with location information
US20090187467A1 (en) * 2008-01-23 2009-07-23 Palo Alto Research Center Incorporated Linguistic extraction of temporal and location information for a recommender system
US20090198732A1 (en) * 2008-01-31 2009-08-06 Realnetworks, Inc. Method and system for deep metadata population of media content
US20090217203A1 (en) * 2006-03-06 2009-08-27 Veveo, Inc. Methods and systems for segmeting relative user preferences into fine-grain and course-grain collections
US20090276351A1 (en) * 2008-04-30 2009-11-05 Strands, Inc. Scaleable system and method for distributed prediction markets
US20090276284A1 (en) * 2008-05-01 2009-11-05 Microsoft Corporation Peer to peer network personal assistant
US20090299945A1 (en) * 2008-06-03 2009-12-03 Strands, Inc. Profile modeling for sharing individual user preferences
US20090328105A1 (en) * 2008-06-27 2009-12-31 Guideworks, Llc Systems and methods for ranking assets relative to a group of viewers
US20090327320A1 (en) * 2008-06-26 2009-12-31 Microsoft Corporation Clustering aggregator for rss feeds
US20100010997A1 (en) * 2008-07-11 2010-01-14 Abo Enterprise, LLC Method and system for rescoring a playlist
US20100023578A1 (en) * 2008-07-28 2010-01-28 Brant Kelly M Systems, methods, and media for sharing and processing digital media content in a scaleable distributed computing environment
US20100030772A1 (en) * 2008-07-30 2010-02-04 Ran Zilca System and method for creating and using personality models for user interactions in a social network
EP2153388A1 (en) * 2007-04-30 2010-02-17 Jime Sa Method of intermediation within a social network of users of a service/application to expose relevant media items
US7680959B2 (en) 2006-07-11 2010-03-16 Napo Enterprises, Llc P2P network for providing real time media recommendations
US20100070537A1 (en) * 2008-09-17 2010-03-18 Eloy Technology, Llc System and method for managing a personalized universal catalog of media items
US20100070917A1 (en) * 2008-09-08 2010-03-18 Apple Inc. System and method for playlist generation based on similarity data
US20100082579A1 (en) * 2008-01-03 2010-04-01 Shyamsundar Rajaram Identification Of Data Objects Within A Computer Database
US20100094935A1 (en) * 2008-10-15 2010-04-15 Concert Technology Corporation Collection digest for a media sharing system
US20100106827A1 (en) * 2008-10-23 2010-04-29 Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. Method and apparatus for recommending content
US20100131896A1 (en) * 2008-11-26 2010-05-27 George Fitzmaurice Manual and automatic techniques for finding similar users
US20100161380A1 (en) * 2008-12-23 2010-06-24 Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. Rating-based interests in computing environments and systems
US20100161381A1 (en) * 2008-12-23 2010-06-24 Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. Semantics-based interests in computing environments and systems
US20100161544A1 (en) * 2008-12-23 2010-06-24 Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. Context-based interests in computing environments and systems
US20100169328A1 (en) * 2008-12-31 2010-07-01 Strands, Inc. Systems and methods for making recommendations using model-based collaborative filtering with user communities and items collections
US20100198604A1 (en) * 2009-01-30 2010-08-05 Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. Generation of concept relations
US7797321B2 (en) 2005-02-04 2010-09-14 Strands, Inc. System for browsing through a music catalog using correlation metrics of a knowledge base of mediasets
US20100251174A1 (en) * 2009-03-31 2010-09-30 Sony Corporation Widget server, method of operating a widget server and method and device for providing a widget recommendation
US20100257131A1 (en) * 2007-12-28 2010-10-07 Kun-Oh Kim Apparatus and method for controlling hybrid motor
US20100318374A1 (en) * 2007-04-30 2010-12-16 Flake Gary W Determining influencers
US20100332384A1 (en) * 2003-03-21 2010-12-30 Ebay Inc. Transaction aggregation engine
US20100328312A1 (en) * 2006-10-20 2010-12-30 Justin Donaldson Personal music recommendation mapping
US7865522B2 (en) 2007-11-07 2011-01-04 Napo Enterprises, Llc System and method for hyping media recommendations in a media recommendation system
US20110004465A1 (en) * 2009-07-02 2011-01-06 Battelle Memorial Institute Computation and Analysis of Significant Themes
US20110029928A1 (en) * 2009-07-31 2011-02-03 Apple Inc. System and method for displaying interactive cluster-based media playlists
US20110060738A1 (en) * 2009-09-08 2011-03-10 Apple Inc. Media item clustering based on similarity data
US20110125763A1 (en) * 2009-11-24 2011-05-26 Nokia Corporation Method and apparatus for determining similarity of media interest
US7970922B2 (en) 2006-07-11 2011-06-28 Napo Enterprises, Llc P2P real time media recommendations
US20110191332A1 (en) * 2010-02-04 2011-08-04 Veveo, Inc. Method of and System for Updating Locally Cached Content Descriptor Information
US7996754B2 (en) 2006-02-13 2011-08-09 International Business Machines Corporation Consolidated content management
US8028323B2 (en) 2004-05-05 2011-09-27 Dryden Enterprises, Llc Method and system for employing a first device to direct a networked audio device to obtain a media item
US20110258190A1 (en) * 2010-04-19 2011-10-20 Aiyou Chen Spectral Neighborhood Blocking for Entity Resolution
US20110295843A1 (en) * 2010-05-26 2011-12-01 Apple Inc. Dynamic generation of contextually aware playlists
US8078884B2 (en) 2006-11-13 2011-12-13 Veveo, Inc. Method of and system for selecting and presenting content based on user identification
US8086602B2 (en) 2006-04-20 2011-12-27 Veveo Inc. User interface methods and systems for selecting and presenting content based on user navigation and selection actions associated with the content
US8090606B2 (en) 2006-08-08 2012-01-03 Napo Enterprises, Llc Embedded media recommendations
US20120023101A1 (en) * 2010-07-21 2012-01-26 Microsoft Corporation Smart defaults for data visualizations
US8112720B2 (en) 2007-04-05 2012-02-07 Napo Enterprises, Llc System and method for automatically and graphically associating programmatically-generated media item recommendations related to a user's socially recommended media items
US8117193B2 (en) 2007-12-21 2012-02-14 Lemi Technology, Llc Tunersphere
US20120084669A1 (en) * 2010-09-30 2012-04-05 International Business Machines Corporation Dynamic group generation
US8200602B2 (en) 2009-02-02 2012-06-12 Napo Enterprises, Llc System and method for creating thematic listening experiences in a networked peer media recommendation environment
US8224856B2 (en) 2007-11-26 2012-07-17 Abo Enterprises, Llc Intelligent default weighting process for criteria utilized to score media content items
US20120209748A1 (en) * 2011-02-12 2012-08-16 The Penn State Research Foundation Devices, systems, and methods for providing gift selection and gift redemption services in an e-commerce environment over a communication network
US8266220B2 (en) 2005-09-14 2012-09-11 International Business Machines Corporation Email management and rendering
US20120233183A1 (en) * 2011-03-08 2012-09-13 Sony Corporation Information processing apparatus, terminal apparatus, information presentation system, calculation method of evaluation scores, and program
US8271107B2 (en) 2006-01-13 2012-09-18 International Business Machines Corporation Controlling audio operation for data management and data rendering
US8276076B2 (en) 2005-10-04 2012-09-25 Apple Inc. Methods and apparatus for visualizing a media library
US8285595B2 (en) 2006-03-29 2012-10-09 Napo Enterprises, Llc System and method for refining media recommendations
US8285776B2 (en) 2007-06-01 2012-10-09 Napo Enterprises, Llc System and method for processing a received media item recommendation message comprising recommender presence information
US8301692B1 (en) * 2009-06-16 2012-10-30 Amazon Technologies, Inc. Person to person similarities based on media experiences
US8312017B2 (en) 2005-02-03 2012-11-13 Apple Inc. Recommender system for identifying a new set of media items responsive to an input set of media items and knowledge base metrics
US8312022B2 (en) 2008-03-21 2012-11-13 Ramp Holdings, Inc. Search engine optimization
US20120290621A1 (en) * 2011-05-09 2012-11-15 Heitz Iii Geremy A Generating a playlist
US8316088B2 (en) 2004-07-06 2012-11-20 Nokia Corporation Peer-to-peer engine for object sharing in communication devices
US8327266B2 (en) 2006-07-11 2012-12-04 Napo Enterprises, Llc Graphical user interface system for allowing management of a media item playlist based on a preference scoring system
US8332406B2 (en) 2008-10-02 2012-12-11 Apple Inc. Real-time visualization of user consumption of media items
US8356038B2 (en) 2005-12-19 2013-01-15 Apple Inc. User to user recommender
US8396951B2 (en) 2007-12-20 2013-03-12 Napo Enterprises, Llc Method and system for populating a content repository for an internet radio service based on a recommendation network
US20130117276A1 (en) * 2011-11-08 2013-05-09 Google Inc. Methods and apparatus for discovery of attributes using a social mobile application
US8477786B2 (en) 2003-05-06 2013-07-02 Apple Inc. Messaging system and service
US8484311B2 (en) 2008-04-17 2013-07-09 Eloy Technology, Llc Pruning an aggregate media collection
US8484227B2 (en) 2008-10-15 2013-07-09 Eloy Technology, Llc Caching and synching process for a media sharing system
CN103369373A (en) * 2012-03-29 2013-10-23 索尼公司 Method and apparatus for updating content channels
US8577874B2 (en) 2007-12-21 2013-11-05 Lemi Technology, Llc Tunersphere
US8583671B2 (en) 2006-02-03 2013-11-12 Apple Inc. Mediaset generation system
US8583791B2 (en) 2006-07-11 2013-11-12 Napo Enterprises, Llc Maintaining a minimum level of real time media recommendations in the absence of online friends
US8620699B2 (en) 2006-08-08 2013-12-31 Napo Enterprises, Llc Heavy influencer media recommendations
US8676761B1 (en) 2009-09-30 2014-03-18 Emc Corporation Preparation of a system image for rapid restore
US20140095619A1 (en) * 2006-11-08 2014-04-03 Epals, Inc. System for synchronizing nodes on a network
US8694531B1 (en) 2008-08-15 2014-04-08 S. Merrell Stearns System and method for analyzing and matching digital media libraries
US8694319B2 (en) 2005-11-03 2014-04-08 International Business Machines Corporation Dynamic prosody adjustment for voice-rendering synthesized data
US20140114998A1 (en) * 2010-11-29 2014-04-24 Viralheat, Inc. Determining demographics based on user interaction
US8725740B2 (en) 2008-03-24 2014-05-13 Napo Enterprises, Llc Active playlist having dynamic media item groups
US20140136534A1 (en) * 2012-11-14 2014-05-15 Electronics And Telecommunications Research Institute Similarity calculating method and apparatus
US20140136713A1 (en) * 2007-09-28 2014-05-15 Yelster Digital Gmbh Server directed client originated search aggregator
US8745048B2 (en) 2005-09-30 2014-06-03 Apple Inc. Systems and methods for promotional media item selection and promotional program unit generation
US20140188785A1 (en) * 2012-12-28 2014-07-03 Fujitsu Limited Information processing device, computer-readable recording medium, and node extraction method
US8805831B2 (en) 2006-07-11 2014-08-12 Napo Enterprises, Llc Scoring and replaying media items
US8839141B2 (en) 2007-06-01 2014-09-16 Napo Enterprises, Llc Method and system for visually indicating a replay status of media items on a media device
US8892495B2 (en) 1991-12-23 2014-11-18 Blanding Hovenweep, Llc Adaptive pattern recognition based controller apparatus and method and human-interface therefore
US20140344718A1 (en) * 2011-05-12 2014-11-20 Jeffrey Alan Rapaport Contextually-based Automatic Service Offerings to Users of Machine System
US8903843B2 (en) 2006-06-21 2014-12-02 Napo Enterprises, Llc Historical media recommendation service
US8909667B2 (en) 2011-11-01 2014-12-09 Lemi Technology, Llc Systems, methods, and computer readable media for generating recommendations in a media recommendation system
US8959061B1 (en) 2009-09-30 2015-02-17 Emc Corporation Rapid restore from a prepared system image
US8977636B2 (en) 2005-08-19 2015-03-10 International Business Machines Corporation Synthesizing aggregate data of disparate data types into data of a uniform data type
US8983905B2 (en) 2011-10-03 2015-03-17 Apple Inc. Merging playlists from multiple sources
US8983950B2 (en) 2007-06-01 2015-03-17 Napo Enterprises, Llc Method and system for sorting media items in a playlist on a media device
US9037632B2 (en) 2007-06-01 2015-05-19 Napo Enterprises, Llc System and method of generating a media item recommendation message with recommender presence information
US9060034B2 (en) 2007-11-09 2015-06-16 Napo Enterprises, Llc System and method of filtering recommenders in a media item recommendation system
US9081780B2 (en) 2007-04-04 2015-07-14 Abo Enterprises, Llc System and method for assigning user preference settings for a category, and in particular a media category
US9092542B2 (en) 2006-03-09 2015-07-28 International Business Machines Corporation Podcasting content associated with a user account
US9135339B2 (en) 2006-02-13 2015-09-15 International Business Machines Corporation Invoking an audio hyperlink
US9135258B1 (en) * 2009-09-30 2015-09-15 Emc Corporation Redundant backup elimination
CN104969212A (en) * 2013-01-30 2015-10-07 奎克西公司 Performing application search based on entities
US9164993B2 (en) 2007-06-01 2015-10-20 Napo Enterprises, Llc System and method for propagating a media item recommendation message comprising recommender presence information
US9177081B2 (en) 2005-08-26 2015-11-03 Veveo, Inc. Method and system for processing ambiguous, multi-term search queries
US20150326454A1 (en) * 2014-05-08 2015-11-12 Tru Optik Data Corp Tru torrent platform methods, apparatuses and media
US9224150B2 (en) 2007-12-18 2015-12-29 Napo Enterprises, Llc Identifying highly valued recommendations of users in a media recommendation network
US9235563B2 (en) 2009-07-02 2016-01-12 Battelle Memorial Institute Systems and processes for identifying features and determining feature associations in groups of documents
US9317185B2 (en) 2006-02-10 2016-04-19 Apple Inc. Dynamic interactive entertainment venue
US9336302B1 (en) 2012-07-20 2016-05-10 Zuci Realty Llc Insight and algorithmic clustering for automated synthesis
US9397627B2 (en) 1998-01-22 2016-07-19 Black Hills Media, Llc Network-enabled audio device
US9535563B2 (en) 1999-02-01 2017-01-03 Blanding Hovenweep, Llc Internet appliance system and method
US20170031920A1 (en) * 2015-07-31 2017-02-02 RCRDCLUB Corporation Evaluating performance of recommender system
US9678623B2 (en) 2009-06-11 2017-06-13 Apple Inc. User interface for media playback
US9697230B2 (en) 2005-11-09 2017-07-04 Cxense Asa Methods and apparatus for dynamic presentation of advertising, factual, and informational content using enhanced metadata in search-driven media applications
US9734507B2 (en) 2007-12-20 2017-08-15 Napo Enterprise, Llc Method and system for simulating recommendations in a social network for an offline user
US9807436B2 (en) 2014-07-23 2017-10-31 Rovi Guides, Inc. Systems and methods for providing media asset recommendations for a group
US9849784B1 (en) 2015-09-30 2017-12-26 Waymo Llc Occupant facing vehicle display
US20180018318A1 (en) * 2016-07-18 2018-01-18 Dell Products L.P. Multi-Threaded Text Affinity Analyzer for Text and Sentiment Analytics
US9928753B2 (en) 2006-11-08 2018-03-27 Cricket Media, Inc. Dynamic characterization of nodes in a semantic network for desired functions such as search, discovery, matching, content delivery, and synchronization of activity and information
US20180307765A1 (en) * 2017-04-24 2018-10-25 Kabushiki Kaisha Toshiba Interactive system, interaction method, and storage medium
US10185754B2 (en) 2010-07-31 2019-01-22 Vocus Nm Llc Discerning human intent based on user-generated metadata
US10341699B2 (en) 2004-07-30 2019-07-02 Broadband Itv, Inc. System for addressing on-demand TV program content on TV services platform of a digital TV services provider
US20190339927A1 (en) * 2018-05-07 2019-11-07 Spotify Ab Adaptive voice communication
US10491955B2 (en) 2004-07-30 2019-11-26 Broadband Itv, Inc. Video-on-demand content delivery system for providing video-on-demand services to TV services subscribers
US10560733B2 (en) 2007-06-26 2020-02-11 Broadband Itv, Inc. Dynamic adjustment of electronic program guide displays based on viewer preferences for minimizing navigation in VOD program selection
US10567846B2 (en) 2007-06-26 2020-02-18 Broadband Itv, Inc. Dynamic adjustment of electronic program guide displays based on viewer preferences for minimizing navigation in VOD program selection
US10691726B2 (en) * 2009-02-11 2020-06-23 Jeffrey A. Rapaport Methods using social topical adaptive networking system
US10733987B1 (en) * 2017-09-26 2020-08-04 Amazon Technologies, Inc. System and methods for providing unplayed content
US10777197B2 (en) * 2017-08-28 2020-09-15 Roku, Inc. Audio responsive device with play/stop and tell me something buttons
US10846332B2 (en) * 2015-10-21 2020-11-24 Guangzhou Kugou Computer Technology Co., Ltd. Playlist list determining method and device, electronic apparatus, and storage medium
US10878482B2 (en) * 2018-01-19 2020-12-29 Hypernet Labs, Inc. Decentralized recommendations using distributed average consensus
US10909150B2 (en) 2018-01-19 2021-02-02 Hypernet Labs, Inc. Decentralized latent semantic index using distributed average consensus
US10936653B2 (en) 2017-06-02 2021-03-02 Apple Inc. Automatically predicting relevant contexts for media items
US10942783B2 (en) 2018-01-19 2021-03-09 Hypernet Labs, Inc. Distributed computing using distributed average consensus
US11062702B2 (en) 2017-08-28 2021-07-13 Roku, Inc. Media system with multiple digital assistants
US11062710B2 (en) 2017-08-28 2021-07-13 Roku, Inc. Local and cloud speech recognition
US11126389B2 (en) 2017-07-11 2021-09-21 Roku, Inc. Controlling visual indicators in an audio responsive electronic device, and capturing and providing audio using an API, by native and non-native computing devices and services
US11145298B2 (en) 2018-02-13 2021-10-12 Roku, Inc. Trigger word detection with multiple digital assistants
US11205103B2 (en) 2016-12-09 2021-12-21 The Research Foundation for the State University Semisupervised autoencoder for sentiment analysis
US11244243B2 (en) 2018-01-19 2022-02-08 Hypernet Labs, Inc. Coordinated learning using distributed average consensus
US11252459B2 (en) 2004-07-30 2022-02-15 Broadband Itv, Inc. System for addressing on-demand TV program content on TV services platform of a digital TV services provider
US11269946B2 (en) * 2013-12-19 2022-03-08 Gracenote, Inc. Station library creation for a media service
US11301915B2 (en) * 2016-06-13 2022-04-12 Affinio Inc. Modelling user behavior in social network
US11314746B2 (en) 2013-03-15 2022-04-26 Cision Us Inc. Processing unstructured data streams using continuous queries
US11356538B2 (en) * 2018-03-16 2022-06-07 Tokyo Electron Limited Semiconductor manufacturing system and server device
US11481459B2 (en) * 2006-08-28 2022-10-25 Uber Technologies, Inc. Inferential user matching system
US11570521B2 (en) 2007-06-26 2023-01-31 Broadband Itv, Inc. Dynamic adjustment of electronic program guide displays based on viewer preferences for minimizing navigation in VOD program selection
US11748311B1 (en) * 2012-10-30 2023-09-05 Google Llc Automatic collaboration
US11816743B1 (en) 2010-08-10 2023-11-14 Jeffrey Alan Rapaport Information enhancing method using software agents in a social networking system
US11935537B2 (en) 2023-04-19 2024-03-19 Roku, Inc. Trigger word detection with multiple digital assistants

Families Citing this family (57)

* Cited by examiner, † Cited by third party
Publication number Priority date Publication date Assignee Title
US6714793B1 (en) 2000-03-06 2004-03-30 America Online, Inc. Method and system for instant messaging across cellular networks and a public data network
US7024204B2 (en) * 2002-07-10 2006-04-04 Kabushiki Kaisha Toshiba Wireless communication scheme with communication quality guarantee and copyright protection
US7139524B2 (en) * 2004-05-06 2006-11-21 Bellsouth Intellectual Property Corporation Systems and methods for delivering a stored message to a subscriber
CA2571391C (en) * 2004-06-21 2010-12-21 Research In Motion Limited System and method for handling electronic messages
FI119082B (en) * 2004-09-28 2008-07-15 Kutalab Oy Streaming of media content online
US20070028262A1 (en) * 2005-07-29 2007-02-01 Zermatt Systems, Inc. Virtual discovery of content available to a device
US8868547B2 (en) 2006-02-16 2014-10-21 Dell Products L.P. Programming content on a device
US10296561B2 (en) 2006-11-16 2019-05-21 James Andrews Apparatus, method and graphical user interface for providing a sound link for combining, publishing and accessing websites and audio files on the internet
US8554265B1 (en) * 2007-01-17 2013-10-08 At&T Mobility Ii Llc Distribution of user-generated multimedia broadcasts to mobile wireless telecommunication network users
CA2786004C (en) * 2007-05-07 2015-06-30 Vorne Industries, Inc. Method and system for extending the capabilities of embedded devices through network clients
US7865397B2 (en) * 2007-06-13 2011-01-04 Yahoo! Inc. Category-based advertisement
US20090089142A1 (en) * 2007-09-28 2009-04-02 Dell Products L.P. Method and System for Configuring an Information Handling System for Online Content Feeds
WO2009097459A1 (en) * 2008-01-29 2009-08-06 Educational Testing Service System and method for disambiguating the effect of text document length on vector-based similarit scores
CN101499071A (en) * 2008-01-30 2009-08-05 国际商业机器公司 Device and method for creating and using customized uniform resource locator
US20090313285A1 (en) * 2008-06-16 2009-12-17 Andreas Hronopoulos Methods and systems for facilitating the fantasies of users based on user profiles/preferences
US20090327231A1 (en) * 2008-06-27 2009-12-31 Microsoft Corporation Inline enhancement of web lists
US9846049B2 (en) 2008-07-09 2017-12-19 Microsoft Technology Licensing, Llc Route prediction
EP2261841A1 (en) * 2009-06-11 2010-12-15 Alcatel Lucent Evolving algorithms for telecommunications network nodes by genetic programming
AU2010310769A1 (en) 2009-10-19 2012-05-10 Barnes & Noble, Inc. System and method for consumer-to-consumer-lending of digital content
US8644971B2 (en) * 2009-11-09 2014-02-04 Phil Weinstein System and method for providing music based on a mood
US20110176397A1 (en) * 2010-01-18 2011-07-21 Rabih Salem Ballout Method for Providing an Interactive, Personalized Radio Network
US20110178878A1 (en) * 2010-01-18 2011-07-21 Rabih Ballout System for Providing an Interactive, Personalized Radio Network
US20110178874A1 (en) * 2010-01-18 2011-07-21 Rabih Salem Ballout Service for Providing an Interactive, Personalized Radio Network
US8495235B2 (en) * 2010-03-24 2013-07-23 Research In Motion Limited System and method for music resource connection, selection and rating for providing a radio like user listening experience
US8296422B2 (en) * 2010-05-06 2012-10-23 Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. Method and system of manipulating data based on user-feedback
US8898713B1 (en) 2010-08-31 2014-11-25 Amazon Technologies, Inc. Content aggregation and presentation
US8892472B2 (en) * 2010-10-26 2014-11-18 Barnesandnoble.Com Llc System and method for facilitating the lending of digital content using contacts lists
US9134137B2 (en) 2010-12-17 2015-09-15 Microsoft Technology Licensing, Llc Mobile search based on predicted location
JP2012204894A (en) * 2011-03-24 2012-10-22 Toshiba Corp Information recommendation device
US20120253492A1 (en) * 2011-04-04 2012-10-04 Andrews Christopher C Audio commenting system
US9163952B2 (en) 2011-04-15 2015-10-20 Microsoft Technology Licensing, Llc Suggestive mapping
JP2012256176A (en) * 2011-06-08 2012-12-27 Hitachi Solutions Ltd Information presentation device
US20120317085A1 (en) * 2011-06-13 2012-12-13 United Video Properties, Inc. Systems and methods for transmitting content metadata from multiple data records
US8996650B2 (en) * 2011-08-26 2015-03-31 Accenture Global Services Limited Preparing content packages
US8538686B2 (en) 2011-09-09 2013-09-17 Microsoft Corporation Transport-dependent prediction of destinations
US9576050B1 (en) * 2011-12-07 2017-02-21 Google Inc. Generating a playlist based on input acoustic information
US20130198268A1 (en) * 2012-01-30 2013-08-01 David Hyman Generation of a music playlist based on text content accessed by a user
US8930422B2 (en) * 2012-06-04 2015-01-06 Northrop Grumman Systems Corporation Pipelined incremental clustering algorithm
US8965624B2 (en) 2012-08-14 2015-02-24 Ebay Inc. Method and system of vehicle tracking portal
US9263060B2 (en) 2012-08-21 2016-02-16 Marian Mason Publishing Company, Llc Artificial neural network based system for classification of the emotional content of digital music
US9215269B2 (en) * 2012-08-23 2015-12-15 Amazon Technologies, Inc. Predictive caching for content
US10140372B2 (en) 2012-09-12 2018-11-27 Gracenote, Inc. User profile based on clustering tiered descriptors
US20140214700A1 (en) 2013-01-31 2014-07-31 CopyRightNow, LLC CopyRightNow Application Programming Interface
US9535899B2 (en) 2013-02-20 2017-01-03 International Business Machines Corporation Automatic semantic rating and abstraction of literature
US10540385B2 (en) * 2013-03-15 2020-01-21 Spotify Ab Taste profile attributes
EP2976727A1 (en) * 2013-03-18 2016-01-27 The Echo Nest Corporation Cross media recommendation
US9111577B2 (en) * 2013-09-12 2015-08-18 International Business Machines Corporation Storage space savings via partial digital stream deletion
US9298802B2 (en) * 2013-12-03 2016-03-29 International Business Machines Corporation Recommendation engine using inferred deep similarities for works of literature
US9544388B1 (en) 2014-05-09 2017-01-10 Amazon Technologies, Inc. Client-side predictive caching for content
US20160092481A1 (en) * 2014-09-30 2016-03-31 Airwatch Llc Information integration and assessment
US11100557B2 (en) 2014-11-04 2021-08-24 International Business Machines Corporation Travel itinerary recommendation engine using inferred interests and sentiments
US9326046B1 (en) 2015-03-19 2016-04-26 Amazon Technologies, Inc. Uninterrupted playback of video streams using lower quality cached files
US9542851B1 (en) 2015-11-03 2017-01-10 The Boeing Company Avionics flight management recommender system
US9798823B2 (en) 2015-11-17 2017-10-24 Spotify Ab System, methods and computer products for determining affinity to a content creator
US10726432B2 (en) * 2016-05-09 2020-07-28 International Business Machines Corporation Survey based on user behavior pattern
TWI682284B (en) 2018-08-30 2020-01-11 群光電能科技股份有限公司 System and method for updating upload period of apparatus data
JPWO2020196447A1 (en) * 2019-03-27 2020-10-01

Citations (4)

* Cited by examiner, † Cited by third party
Publication number Priority date Publication date Assignee Title
US6138128A (en) * 1997-04-02 2000-10-24 Microsoft Corp. Sharing and organizing world wide web references using distinctive characters
US20020184128A1 (en) * 2001-01-11 2002-12-05 Matt Holtsinger System and method for providing music management and investment opportunities
US6545209B1 (en) * 2000-07-05 2003-04-08 Microsoft Corporation Music content characteristic identification and matching
US20030144918A1 (en) * 2002-01-31 2003-07-31 Joseph Novelli Music marking system

Family Cites Families (8)

* Cited by examiner, † Cited by third party
Publication number Priority date Publication date Assignee Title
US6804825B1 (en) * 1998-11-30 2004-10-12 Microsoft Corporation Video on demand methods and systems
US6628302B2 (en) * 1998-11-30 2003-09-30 Microsoft Corporation Interactive video programming methods
IL133617A0 (en) * 1999-12-20 2001-04-30 Glide Ltd Career management system
US7606883B1 (en) * 2000-05-11 2009-10-20 Thomson Licensing Method and system for controlling and auditing content/service systems
US7116894B1 (en) * 2002-05-24 2006-10-03 Digeo, Inc. System and method for digital multimedia stream conversion
JP2004234158A (en) * 2003-01-29 2004-08-19 Sony Corp Information processor, contents management method, contents information management method and computer program
US7657499B2 (en) * 2003-04-07 2010-02-02 Belarc, Inc. Grouping of computers in a computer information database system
EP2011002B1 (en) * 2006-03-27 2016-06-22 Nielsen Media Research, Inc. Methods and systems to meter media content presented on a wireless communication device

Patent Citations (4)

* Cited by examiner, † Cited by third party
Publication number Priority date Publication date Assignee Title
US6138128A (en) * 1997-04-02 2000-10-24 Microsoft Corp. Sharing and organizing world wide web references using distinctive characters
US6545209B1 (en) * 2000-07-05 2003-04-08 Microsoft Corporation Music content characteristic identification and matching
US20020184128A1 (en) * 2001-01-11 2002-12-05 Matt Holtsinger System and method for providing music management and investment opportunities
US20030144918A1 (en) * 2002-01-31 2003-07-31 Joseph Novelli Music marking system

Cited By (470)

* Cited by examiner, † Cited by third party
Publication number Priority date Publication date Assignee Title
US8892495B2 (en) 1991-12-23 2014-11-18 Blanding Hovenweep, Llc Adaptive pattern recognition based controller apparatus and method and human-interface therefore
US9397627B2 (en) 1998-01-22 2016-07-19 Black Hills Media, Llc Network-enabled audio device
US9535563B2 (en) 1999-02-01 2017-01-03 Blanding Hovenweep, Llc Internet appliance system and method
US20070220580A1 (en) * 2002-03-14 2007-09-20 Daniel Putterman User interface for a media convergence platform
US20100332384A1 (en) * 2003-03-21 2010-12-30 Ebay Inc. Transaction aggregation engine
US20070011104A1 (en) * 2003-03-21 2007-01-11 Ebay Inc. Payment transactions via substantially instant communication system
US10535049B2 (en) 2003-03-21 2020-01-14 Paypal, Inc. Payment transactions via substantially instant communication system
US8477786B2 (en) 2003-05-06 2013-07-02 Apple Inc. Messaging system and service
US9826046B2 (en) * 2004-05-05 2017-11-21 Black Hills Media, Llc Device discovery for digital entertainment network
US20080209013A1 (en) * 2004-05-05 2008-08-28 Conpact, Inc. System and method for sharing playlists
US8458356B2 (en) 2004-05-05 2013-06-04 Black Hills Media System and method for sharing playlists
US9178946B2 (en) 2004-05-05 2015-11-03 Black Hills Media, Llc Device discovery for digital entertainment network
US20050251565A1 (en) * 2004-05-05 2005-11-10 Martin Weel Hybrid set-top box for digital entertainment network
US8230099B2 (en) 2004-05-05 2012-07-24 Dryden Enterprises, Llc System and method for sharing playlists
US9516370B1 (en) 2004-05-05 2016-12-06 Black Hills Media, Llc Method, device, and system for directing a wireless speaker from a mobile phone to receive and render a playlist from a content server on the internet
US20050251576A1 (en) * 2004-05-05 2005-11-10 Martin Weel Device discovery for digital entertainment network
US9554405B2 (en) 2004-05-05 2017-01-24 Black Hills Media, Llc Wireless speaker for receiving from a mobile phone directions to receive and render a playlist from a content server on the internet
US9584591B1 (en) 2004-05-05 2017-02-28 Black Hills Media, Llc Method and device for sharing a playlist at a dedicated media player device
US8028323B2 (en) 2004-05-05 2011-09-27 Dryden Enterprises, Llc Method and system for employing a first device to direct a networked audio device to obtain a media item
US8028038B2 (en) 2004-05-05 2011-09-27 Dryden Enterprises, Llc Obtaining a playlist based on user profile matching
US8316088B2 (en) 2004-07-06 2012-11-20 Nokia Corporation Peer-to-peer engine for object sharing in communication devices
US11516525B2 (en) 2004-07-30 2022-11-29 Broadband Itv, Inc. System for addressing on-demand TV program content on TV services platform of a digital TV services provider
US10536751B2 (en) 2004-07-30 2020-01-14 Broadband Itv, Inc. Video-on-demand content delivery system for providing video-on-demand services to TV service subscribers
US10785517B2 (en) 2004-07-30 2020-09-22 Broadband Itv, Inc. Method for addressing on-demand TV program content on TV services platform of a digital TV services provider
US10791351B2 (en) 2004-07-30 2020-09-29 Broadband Itv, Inc. System for addressing on-demand TV program content on TV services platform of a digital TV services provider
US11259059B2 (en) 2004-07-30 2022-02-22 Broadband Itv, Inc. System for addressing on-demand TV program content on TV services platform of a digital TV services provider
US10555014B2 (en) 2004-07-30 2020-02-04 Broadband Itv, Inc. System for addressing on-demand TV program content on TV services platform of a digital TV services provider
US11272233B2 (en) 2004-07-30 2022-03-08 Broadband Itv, Inc. System for addressing on-demand TV program content on TV services platform of a digital TV services provider
US11252459B2 (en) 2004-07-30 2022-02-15 Broadband Itv, Inc. System for addressing on-demand TV program content on TV services platform of a digital TV services provider
US11259060B2 (en) 2004-07-30 2022-02-22 Broadband Itv, Inc. System for addressing on-demand TV program content on TV services platform of a digital TV services provider
US10536750B2 (en) 2004-07-30 2020-01-14 Broadband Itv, Inc. Video-on-demand content delivery system for providing video-on-demand services to TV service subscribers
US10893334B2 (en) 2004-07-30 2021-01-12 Broadband Itv, Inc. Video-on-demand content delivery method for providing video-on-demand services to TV service subscribers
US11601697B2 (en) 2004-07-30 2023-03-07 Broadband Itv, Inc. System for addressing on-demand TV program content on TV services platform of a digital TV services provider
US11259089B2 (en) 2004-07-30 2022-02-22 Broadband Itv, Inc. Video-on-demand content delivery method for providing video-on-demand services to TV service subscribers
US10506269B2 (en) 2004-07-30 2019-12-10 Broadband Itv, Inc. System for addressing on-demand TV program content on TV services platform of a digital TV services provider
US10491954B2 (en) 2004-07-30 2019-11-26 Broadband Itv, Inc. Video-on-demand content delivery method for providing video-on-demand services to TV service subscribers
US10491955B2 (en) 2004-07-30 2019-11-26 Broadband Itv, Inc. Video-on-demand content delivery system for providing video-on-demand services to TV services subscribers
US10349101B2 (en) 2004-07-30 2019-07-09 Broadband Itv, Inc. System for addressing on-demand TV program content on TV services platform of a digital TV services provider
US10341699B2 (en) 2004-07-30 2019-07-02 Broadband Itv, Inc. System for addressing on-demand TV program content on TV services platform of a digital TV services provider
US11252476B2 (en) 2004-07-30 2022-02-15 Broadband Itv, Inc. Video-on-demand content delivery system for providing video-on-demand services to TV service subscribers
US20080133601A1 (en) * 2005-01-05 2008-06-05 Musicstrands, S.A.U. System And Method For Recommending Multimedia Elements
US9576056B2 (en) 2005-02-03 2017-02-21 Apple Inc. Recommender system for identifying a new set of media items responsive to an input set of media items and knowledge base metrics
US9262534B2 (en) 2005-02-03 2016-02-16 Apple Inc. Recommender system for identifying a new set of media items responsive to an input set of media items and knowledge base metrics
US8312017B2 (en) 2005-02-03 2012-11-13 Apple Inc. Recommender system for identifying a new set of media items responsive to an input set of media items and knowledge base metrics
US7945568B1 (en) 2005-02-04 2011-05-17 Strands, Inc. System for browsing through a music catalog using correlation metrics of a knowledge base of mediasets
US8185533B2 (en) 2005-02-04 2012-05-22 Apple Inc. System for browsing through a music catalog using correlation metrics of a knowledge base of mediasets
US8543575B2 (en) 2005-02-04 2013-09-24 Apple Inc. System for browsing through a music catalog using correlation metrics of a knowledge base of mediasets
US7797321B2 (en) 2005-02-04 2010-09-14 Strands, Inc. System for browsing through a music catalog using correlation metrics of a knowledge base of mediasets
US11048724B2 (en) 2005-02-28 2021-06-29 Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. Method and system for exploring similarities
US20060195462A1 (en) * 2005-02-28 2006-08-31 Yahoo! Inc. System and method for enhanced media distribution
US11789975B2 (en) 2005-02-28 2023-10-17 Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. Method and system for exploring similarities
US10614097B2 (en) 2005-02-28 2020-04-07 Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. Method for sharing a media collection in a network environment
US7685204B2 (en) * 2005-02-28 2010-03-23 Yahoo! Inc. System and method for enhanced media distribution
US11709865B2 (en) 2005-02-28 2023-07-25 Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. Method for sharing and searching playlists
US10860611B2 (en) 2005-02-28 2020-12-08 Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. Method for sharing and searching playlists
US11573979B2 (en) 2005-02-28 2023-02-07 Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. Method for sharing and searching playlists
US10019500B2 (en) 2005-02-28 2018-07-10 Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. Method for sharing and searching playlists
US11468092B2 (en) 2005-02-28 2022-10-11 Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. Method and system for exploring similarities
US10521452B2 (en) 2005-02-28 2019-12-31 Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. Method and system for exploring similarities
US20060267995A1 (en) * 2005-03-02 2006-11-30 Radloff Jon P Playlists and bookmarks in an interactive media guidance application system
US10908761B2 (en) 2005-03-02 2021-02-02 Rovi Guides, Inc. Playlists and bookmarks in an interactive media guidance application system
US8489990B2 (en) 2005-03-02 2013-07-16 Rovi Guides, Inc. Playlists and bookmarks in an interactive media guidance application system
US9753602B2 (en) 2005-03-02 2017-09-05 Rovi Guides, Inc. Playlists and bookmarks in an interactive media guidance application system
US7840570B2 (en) 2005-04-22 2010-11-23 Strands, Inc. System and method for acquiring and adding data on the playing of elements or multimedia files
US8312024B2 (en) 2005-04-22 2012-11-13 Apple Inc. System and method for acquiring and adding data on the playing of elements or multimedia files
US20090083307A1 (en) * 2005-04-22 2009-03-26 Musicstrands, S.A.U. System and method for acquiring and adding data on the playing of elements or multimedia files
US20110125896A1 (en) * 2005-04-22 2011-05-26 Strands, Inc. System and method for acquiring and adding data on the playing of elements or multimedia files
US7542992B1 (en) * 2005-08-01 2009-06-02 Google Inc. Assimilator using image check data
US8977636B2 (en) 2005-08-19 2015-03-10 International Business Machines Corporation Synthesizing aggregate data of disparate data types into data of a uniform data type
US9177081B2 (en) 2005-08-26 2015-11-03 Veveo, Inc. Method and system for processing ambiguous, multi-term search queries
US8266220B2 (en) 2005-09-14 2012-09-11 International Business Machines Corporation Email management and rendering
US8745048B2 (en) 2005-09-30 2014-06-03 Apple Inc. Systems and methods for promotional media item selection and promotional program unit generation
US8276076B2 (en) 2005-10-04 2012-09-25 Apple Inc. Methods and apparatus for visualizing a media library
US7616124B2 (en) 2005-10-11 2009-11-10 Snif Labs, Inc. Tag system
US20070103296A1 (en) * 2005-10-11 2007-05-10 Snif Labs, Inc. Tag system
US8694319B2 (en) 2005-11-03 2014-04-08 International Business Machines Corporation Dynamic prosody adjustment for voice-rendering synthesized data
US9697230B2 (en) 2005-11-09 2017-07-04 Cxense Asa Methods and apparatus for dynamic presentation of advertising, factual, and informational content using enhanced metadata in search-driven media applications
US20070106660A1 (en) * 2005-11-09 2007-05-10 Bbnt Solutions Llc Method and apparatus for using confidence scores of enhanced metadata in search-driven media applications
US9697231B2 (en) 2005-11-09 2017-07-04 Cxense Asa Methods and apparatus for providing virtual media channels based on media search
US7801910B2 (en) 2005-11-09 2010-09-21 Ramp Holdings, Inc. Method and apparatus for timed tagging of media content
US20090222442A1 (en) * 2005-11-09 2009-09-03 Henry Houh User-directed navigation of multimedia search results
US20070112837A1 (en) * 2005-11-09 2007-05-17 Bbnt Solutions Llc Method and apparatus for timed tagging of media content
US20070118873A1 (en) * 2005-11-09 2007-05-24 Bbnt Solutions Llc Methods and apparatus for merging media content
US20070106685A1 (en) * 2005-11-09 2007-05-10 Podzinger Corp. Method and apparatus for updating speech recognition databases and reindexing audio and video content using the same
US20070106693A1 (en) * 2005-11-09 2007-05-10 Bbnt Solutions Llc Methods and apparatus for providing virtual media channels based on media search
US20080288982A1 (en) * 2005-11-30 2008-11-20 Koninklijke Philips Electronics, N.V. Method and Apparatus for Generating a Recommendation for at Least One Content Item
US10237604B2 (en) * 2005-11-30 2019-03-19 S.I.Sv.El Societa' Italiana Per Lo Sviluppo Dell'elettronica S.P.A. Method and apparatus for generating a recommendation for at least one content item
US20070157797A1 (en) * 2005-12-14 2007-07-12 Sony Corporation Taste profile production apparatus, taste profile production method and profile production program
US8996540B2 (en) 2005-12-19 2015-03-31 Apple Inc. User to user recommender
US8356038B2 (en) 2005-12-19 2013-01-15 Apple Inc. User to user recommender
US8271107B2 (en) 2006-01-13 2012-09-18 International Business Machines Corporation Controlling audio operation for data management and data rendering
US8583671B2 (en) 2006-02-03 2013-11-12 Apple Inc. Mediaset generation system
US9317185B2 (en) 2006-02-10 2016-04-19 Apple Inc. Dynamic interactive entertainment venue
US7996754B2 (en) 2006-02-13 2011-08-09 International Business Machines Corporation Consolidated content management
US20070192683A1 (en) * 2006-02-13 2007-08-16 Bodin William K Synthesizing the content of disparate data types
US20080275893A1 (en) * 2006-02-13 2008-11-06 International Business Machines Corporation Aggregating Content Of Disparate Data Types From Disparate Data Sources For Single Point Access
US7949681B2 (en) 2006-02-13 2011-05-24 International Business Machines Corporation Aggregating content of disparate data types from disparate data sources for single point access
US9135339B2 (en) 2006-02-13 2015-09-15 International Business Machines Corporation Invoking an audio hyperlink
US20080215709A1 (en) * 2006-02-22 2008-09-04 Sony Deutschland Gmbh Method For Updating a User Profile
US9256877B2 (en) * 2006-02-22 2016-02-09 Sony Deutschland Gmbh Method for updating a user profile
WO2007103597A2 (en) * 2006-03-02 2007-09-13 Yahoo! Inc. Providing syndicated media to authorized users
US9270680B2 (en) 2006-03-02 2016-02-23 Yahoo! Inc. Providing a limited use syndicated media to authorized users
WO2007103597A3 (en) * 2006-03-02 2009-09-11 Yahoo! Inc. Providing syndicated media to authorized users
US20070219910A1 (en) * 2006-03-02 2007-09-20 Yahoo! Inc. Providing a limited use syndicated media to authorized users
US20070219908A1 (en) * 2006-03-02 2007-09-20 Yahoo! Inc. Providing syndicated media to authorized users
US8943083B2 (en) 2006-03-06 2015-01-27 Veveo, Inc. Methods and systems for segmenting relative user preferences into fine-grain and coarse-grain collections
US9092503B2 (en) 2006-03-06 2015-07-28 Veveo, Inc. Methods and systems for selecting and presenting content based on dynamically identifying microgenres associated with the content
US8438160B2 (en) 2006-03-06 2013-05-07 Veveo, Inc. Methods and systems for selecting and presenting content based on dynamically identifying Microgenres Associated with the content
US8478794B2 (en) 2006-03-06 2013-07-02 Veveo, Inc. Methods and systems for segmenting relative user preferences into fine-grain and coarse-grain collections
US8112454B2 (en) 2006-03-06 2012-02-07 Veveo, Inc. Methods and systems for ordering content items according to learned user preferences
US9213755B2 (en) 2006-03-06 2015-12-15 Veveo, Inc. Methods and systems for selecting and presenting content based on context sensitive user preferences
US20100293160A1 (en) * 2006-03-06 2010-11-18 Murali Aravamudan Methods and Systems for Selecting and Presenting Content Based on Learned Periodicity of User Content Selection
US20070244768A1 (en) * 2006-03-06 2007-10-18 La La Media, Inc. Article trading process
US8825576B2 (en) 2006-03-06 2014-09-02 Veveo, Inc. Methods and systems for selecting and presenting content on a first system based on user preferences learned on a second system
US8429155B2 (en) 2006-03-06 2013-04-23 Veveo, Inc. Methods and systems for selecting and presenting content based on activity level spikes associated with the content
US20110166949A1 (en) * 2006-03-06 2011-07-07 La La Media, Inc. Article trading process
US20090217203A1 (en) * 2006-03-06 2009-08-27 Veveo, Inc. Methods and systems for segmeting relative user preferences into fine-grain and course-grain collections
US8583566B2 (en) 2006-03-06 2013-11-12 Veveo, Inc. Methods and systems for selecting and presenting content based on learned periodicity of user content selection
US20110161205A1 (en) * 2006-03-06 2011-06-30 La La Media, Inc. Article trading process
US20100121845A1 (en) * 2006-03-06 2010-05-13 Veveo, Inc. Methods and systems for selecting and presenting content based on activity level spikes associated with the content
US20110131161A1 (en) * 2006-03-06 2011-06-02 Veveo, Inc. Methods and Systems for Selecting and Presenting Content on a First System Based on User Preferences Learned on a Second System
US8949231B2 (en) 2006-03-06 2015-02-03 Veveo, Inc. Methods and systems for selecting and presenting content based on activity level spikes associated with the content
US7949627B2 (en) * 2006-03-06 2011-05-24 Veveo, Inc. Methods and systems for selecting and presenting content based on learned periodicity of user content selection
US9128987B2 (en) 2006-03-06 2015-09-08 Veveo, Inc. Methods and systems for selecting and presenting content based on a comparison of preference signatures from multiple users
US8521611B2 (en) 2006-03-06 2013-08-27 Apple Inc. Article trading among members of a community
US8543516B2 (en) 2006-03-06 2013-09-24 Veveo, Inc. Methods and systems for selecting and presenting content on a first system based on user preferences learned on a second system
US9075861B2 (en) 2006-03-06 2015-07-07 Veveo, Inc. Methods and systems for segmenting relative user preferences into fine-grain and coarse-grain collections
US8380726B2 (en) 2006-03-06 2013-02-19 Veveo, Inc. Methods and systems for selecting and presenting content based on a comparison of preference signatures from multiple users
US8429188B2 (en) 2006-03-06 2013-04-23 Veveo, Inc. Methods and systems for selecting and presenting content based on context sensitive user preferences
US20100325111A1 (en) * 2006-03-06 2010-12-23 Veveo, Inc. Methods and Systems for Selecting and Presenting Content Based on Context Sensitive User Preferences
US9092542B2 (en) 2006-03-09 2015-07-28 International Business Machines Corporation Podcasting content associated with a user account
US9037466B2 (en) 2006-03-09 2015-05-19 Nuance Communications, Inc. Email administration for rendering email on a digital audio player
US9361299B2 (en) 2006-03-09 2016-06-07 International Business Machines Corporation RSS content administration for rendering RSS content on a digital audio player
US8849895B2 (en) 2006-03-09 2014-09-30 International Business Machines Corporation Associating user selected content management directives with user selected ratings
US20070213986A1 (en) * 2006-03-09 2007-09-13 Bodin William K Email administration for rendering email on a digital audio player
US20070213857A1 (en) * 2006-03-09 2007-09-13 Bodin William K RSS content administration for rendering RSS content on a digital audio player
US20070214148A1 (en) * 2006-03-09 2007-09-13 Bodin William K Invoking content management directives
US20070214149A1 (en) * 2006-03-09 2007-09-13 International Business Machines Corporation Associating user selected content management directives with user selected ratings
WO2007108986A3 (en) * 2006-03-13 2007-11-29 Ebay Inc Peer-to-peer trading platform
US20070211651A1 (en) * 2006-03-13 2007-09-13 Ebay Inc. Peer-to-peer trading platform with roles-based transactions
US20070214259A1 (en) * 2006-03-13 2007-09-13 Ebay Inc. Peer-to-peer trading platform with relative reputation-based item search and buddy rating
US20070214250A1 (en) * 2006-03-13 2007-09-13 Ebay Inc. Peer-to-peer trading platform with search caching
WO2007108986A2 (en) * 2006-03-13 2007-09-27 Ebay Inc. Peer-to-peer trading platform
US10192249B2 (en) 2006-03-13 2019-01-29 Ebay Inc. Peer-to-peer trading platform
US7877353B2 (en) * 2006-03-13 2011-01-25 Ebay Inc. Peer-to-peer trading platform with relative reputation-based item search and buddy rating
US7958019B2 (en) 2006-03-13 2011-06-07 Ebay Inc. Peer-to-peer trading platform with roles-based transactions
US8949338B2 (en) 2006-03-13 2015-02-03 Ebay Inc. Peer-to-peer trading platform
US20070214249A1 (en) * 2006-03-13 2007-09-13 Ebay Inc. Peer-to-peer trading platform
US11151623B2 (en) 2006-03-13 2021-10-19 Ebay Inc. Peer-to-peer trading platform
US9846900B2 (en) 2006-03-13 2017-12-19 Ebay Inc. Peer-to-peer trading platform
US8335822B2 (en) 2006-03-13 2012-12-18 Ebay Inc. Peer-to-peer trading platform with search caching
US20070220025A1 (en) * 2006-03-15 2007-09-20 Mog, Inc Automatic meta-data sharing of existing media
US7685132B2 (en) 2006-03-15 2010-03-23 Mog, Inc Automatic meta-data sharing of existing media through social networking
US8812580B2 (en) 2006-03-15 2014-08-19 Beats Music, Llc Override of automatically shared meta-data of media
US20070220081A1 (en) * 2006-03-15 2007-09-20 Mog, Inc Override of automatically shared meta-data of media
US11023521B2 (en) 2006-03-15 2021-06-01 Apple Inc. Override of automatically shared meta-data of media
US10061849B2 (en) 2006-03-15 2018-08-28 Beats Music, Llc Override of automatically shared meta-data of media
US8285595B2 (en) 2006-03-29 2012-10-09 Napo Enterprises, Llc System and method for refining media recommendations
US20070237139A1 (en) * 2006-04-11 2007-10-11 Nokia Corporation Node
US8693391B2 (en) 2006-04-11 2014-04-08 Nokia Corporation Peer to peer services in a wireless communication network
US10146840B2 (en) 2006-04-20 2018-12-04 Veveo, Inc. User interface methods and systems for selecting and presenting content based on user relationships
US8688746B2 (en) 2006-04-20 2014-04-01 Veveo, Inc. User interface methods and systems for selecting and presenting content based on user relationships
US8086602B2 (en) 2006-04-20 2011-12-27 Veveo Inc. User interface methods and systems for selecting and presenting content based on user navigation and selection actions associated with the content
US8423583B2 (en) 2006-04-20 2013-04-16 Veveo Inc. User interface methods and systems for selecting and presenting content based on user relationships
US9087109B2 (en) 2006-04-20 2015-07-21 Veveo, Inc. User interface methods and systems for selecting and presenting content based on user relationships
US8375069B2 (en) 2006-04-20 2013-02-12 Veveo Inc. User interface methods and systems for selecting and presenting content based on user navigation and selection actions associated with the content
WO2007134193A3 (en) * 2006-05-12 2008-02-14 Mystrands Inc User programmed media delivery service
US20080005179A1 (en) * 2006-05-22 2008-01-03 Sonicswap, Inc. Systems and methods for sharing digital media content
US8286229B2 (en) 2006-05-24 2012-10-09 International Business Machines Corporation Token-based content subscription
US7778980B2 (en) 2006-05-24 2010-08-17 International Business Machines Corporation Providing disparate content as a playlist of media files
US20070276866A1 (en) * 2006-05-24 2007-11-29 Bodin William K Providing disparate content as a playlist of media files
US20070277233A1 (en) * 2006-05-24 2007-11-29 Bodin William K Token-based content subscription
US20070277088A1 (en) * 2006-05-24 2007-11-29 Bodin William K Enhancing an existing web page
US8903843B2 (en) 2006-06-21 2014-12-02 Napo Enterprises, Llc Historical media recommendation service
US8805831B2 (en) 2006-07-11 2014-08-12 Napo Enterprises, Llc Scoring and replaying media items
US7970922B2 (en) 2006-07-11 2011-06-28 Napo Enterprises, Llc P2P real time media recommendations
US8583791B2 (en) 2006-07-11 2013-11-12 Napo Enterprises, Llc Maintaining a minimum level of real time media recommendations in the absence of online friends
US8762847B2 (en) 2006-07-11 2014-06-24 Napo Enterprises, Llc Graphical user interface system for allowing management of a media item playlist based on a preference scoring system
US8327266B2 (en) 2006-07-11 2012-12-04 Napo Enterprises, Llc Graphical user interface system for allowing management of a media item playlist based on a preference scoring system
US20090077220A1 (en) * 2006-07-11 2009-03-19 Concert Technology Corporation System and method for identifying music content in a p2p real time recommendation network
US9003056B2 (en) 2006-07-11 2015-04-07 Napo Enterprises, Llc Maintaining a minimum level of real time media recommendations in the absence of online friends
US7680959B2 (en) 2006-07-11 2010-03-16 Napo Enterprises, Llc P2P network for providing real time media recommendations
US8059646B2 (en) 2006-07-11 2011-11-15 Napo Enterprises, Llc System and method for identifying music content in a P2P real time recommendation network
US8422490B2 (en) 2006-07-11 2013-04-16 Napo Enterprises, Llc System and method for identifying music content in a P2P real time recommendation network
US10469549B2 (en) 2006-07-11 2019-11-05 Napo Enterprises, Llc Device for participating in a network for sharing media consumption activity
US9292179B2 (en) 2006-07-11 2016-03-22 Napo Enterprises, Llc System and method for identifying music content in a P2P real time recommendation network
US20090144774A1 (en) * 2006-08-01 2009-06-04 Sony Corporation And Sony Electronics Inc. System and method for neighborhood optimization for content recommendation
US8458747B2 (en) * 2006-08-01 2013-06-04 Sony Corporation System and method for neighborhood optimization for content recommendation
US7895626B2 (en) * 2006-08-01 2011-02-22 Sony Corporation System and method for neighborhood optimization for content recommendation
US20110061077A1 (en) * 2006-08-01 2011-03-10 Nikolaos Georgis System and method for neighborhood optimization for content recommendation
US8620699B2 (en) 2006-08-08 2013-12-31 Napo Enterprises, Llc Heavy influencer media recommendations
US8090606B2 (en) 2006-08-08 2012-01-03 Napo Enterprises, Llc Embedded media recommendations
US7814144B2 (en) * 2006-08-24 2010-10-12 Kabushiki Kaisha Toshiba Recommending system, recommending server, content recommending method, and recommending program product
US20080082633A1 (en) * 2006-08-24 2008-04-03 Kabushiki Kaisha Toshiba Recommending system, recommending server, content recommending method, and recommending program product
US11481459B2 (en) * 2006-08-28 2022-10-25 Uber Technologies, Inc. Inferential user matching system
US20080052371A1 (en) * 2006-08-28 2008-02-28 Evolution Artists, Inc. System, apparatus and method for discovery of music within a social network
US20140032676A1 (en) * 2006-08-28 2014-01-30 Myspace, Llc System, apparatus and method for discovery of music within a social network
US8572169B2 (en) * 2006-08-28 2013-10-29 Myspace, Llc System, apparatus and method for discovery of music within a social network
US7831432B2 (en) 2006-09-29 2010-11-09 International Business Machines Corporation Audio menus describing media contents of media players
US20080082635A1 (en) * 2006-09-29 2008-04-03 Bodin William K Asynchronous Communications Using Messages Recorded On Handheld Devices
US20080082576A1 (en) * 2006-09-29 2008-04-03 Bodin William K Audio Menus Describing Media Contents of Media Players
US9196241B2 (en) 2006-09-29 2015-11-24 International Business Machines Corporation Asynchronous communications using messages recorded on handheld devices
US20100095009A1 (en) * 2006-10-02 2010-04-15 Nokia Corporation Method, System, and Devices for Network Sharing or Searching Of Resources
WO2008041173A3 (en) * 2006-10-02 2008-07-03 Nokia Corp Method system and devices for network sharing or searching of resources
WO2008041173A2 (en) * 2006-10-02 2008-04-10 Nokia Corporation Method system and devices for network sharing or searching of resources
US20090077160A1 (en) * 2006-10-06 2009-03-19 Concert Technology Corporation System and method for providing media content selections
US9008634B2 (en) 2006-10-06 2015-04-14 Napo Enterprises, Llc System and method for providing media content selections
US20080134316A1 (en) * 2006-10-13 2008-06-05 Quipa Holdings Limited private network system and method
US8196181B2 (en) * 2006-10-13 2012-06-05 Quipa Holdings Limited Private network system and method
US20080091763A1 (en) * 2006-10-13 2008-04-17 Quipa Holdings Limited method for sharing functionality and/or data between two or more linked entities
US20100328312A1 (en) * 2006-10-20 2010-12-30 Justin Donaldson Personal music recommendation mapping
US20080109364A1 (en) * 2006-11-03 2008-05-08 Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. Method for enhancing DRM authority, enhanced DRM authority content, and portable terminal using the same
US20140095619A1 (en) * 2006-11-08 2014-04-03 Epals, Inc. System for synchronizing nodes on a network
US20170366633A1 (en) * 2006-11-08 2017-12-21 Cricket Media, Inc. System for Synchronizing Nodes on a Network
US10636315B1 (en) 2006-11-08 2020-04-28 Cricket Media, Inc. Method and system for developing process, project or problem-based learning systems within a semantic collaborative social network
US10547698B2 (en) 2006-11-08 2020-01-28 Cricket Media, Inc. Dynamic characterization of nodes in a semantic network for desired functions such as search, discovery, matching, content delivery, and synchronization of activity and information
US9928753B2 (en) 2006-11-08 2018-03-27 Cricket Media, Inc. Dynamic characterization of nodes in a semantic network for desired functions such as search, discovery, matching, content delivery, and synchronization of activity and information
US20170078421A1 (en) * 2006-11-08 2017-03-16 Cricket Media, Inc. System for Synchronizing Nodes on a Network
US10999383B2 (en) * 2006-11-08 2021-05-04 Cricket Media, Inc. System for synchronizing nodes on a network
US20100325650A1 (en) * 2006-11-10 2010-12-23 Rovi Guides, Inc. Systems and methods for using playlists
US20080114794A1 (en) * 2006-11-10 2008-05-15 Guideworks Llc Systems and methods for using playlists
US20110170840A1 (en) * 2006-11-10 2011-07-14 Rovi Guides, Inc. Systems and methods for using playlists
US20080115173A1 (en) * 2006-11-10 2008-05-15 Guideworks Llc Systems and methods for using playlists
US9118868B2 (en) 2006-11-10 2015-08-25 Rovi Guides, Inc. Systems and methods for using playlists
US9967509B2 (en) 2006-11-10 2018-05-08 Rovi Guides, Inc. Systems and methods for using playlists
US8078884B2 (en) 2006-11-13 2011-12-13 Veveo, Inc. Method of and system for selecting and presenting content based on user identification
US20080120288A1 (en) * 2006-11-17 2008-05-22 Wei Guan Collaborative-filtering content model for recommending items
US7584171B2 (en) * 2006-11-17 2009-09-01 Yahoo! Inc. Collaborative-filtering content model for recommending items
US20080141134A1 (en) * 2006-12-08 2008-06-12 Mitsuhiro Miyazaki Information Processing Apparatus, Display Control Processing Method and Display Control Processing Program
WO2008073594A1 (en) * 2006-12-09 2008-06-19 Motorola, Inc. A content recommendation system and a method of operation therefor
US20090083117A1 (en) * 2006-12-13 2009-03-26 Concert Technology Corporation Matching participants in a p2p recommendation network loosely coupled to a subscription service
US8874655B2 (en) 2006-12-13 2014-10-28 Napo Enterprises, Llc Matching participants in a P2P recommendation network loosely coupled to a subscription service
US20080147500A1 (en) * 2006-12-15 2008-06-19 Malcolm Slaney Serving advertisements using entertainment ratings in a collaborative-filtering system
US8219402B2 (en) 2007-01-03 2012-07-10 International Business Machines Corporation Asynchronous receipt of information from a user
US20080162131A1 (en) * 2007-01-03 2008-07-03 Bodin William K Blogcasting using speech recorded on a handheld recording device
US20080161948A1 (en) * 2007-01-03 2008-07-03 Bodin William K Supplementing audio recorded in a media file
US20080162130A1 (en) * 2007-01-03 2008-07-03 Bodin William K Asynchronous receipt of information from a user
US9318100B2 (en) 2007-01-03 2016-04-19 International Business Machines Corporation Supplementing audio recorded in a media file
US20090070185A1 (en) * 2007-01-17 2009-03-12 Concert Technology Corporation System and method for recommending a digital media subscription service
WO2008108952A3 (en) * 2007-03-05 2008-12-04 Kaleidescape Inc Media playlist generator and modifier responsive to media file content comparisons
US20080222188A1 (en) * 2007-03-05 2008-09-11 Kaleidescape, Inc. Playlists responsive to coincidence distances
US11589093B2 (en) 2007-03-12 2023-02-21 Broadband Itv, Inc. System for addressing on-demand TV program content on TV services platform of a digital TV services provider
US11245942B2 (en) 2007-03-12 2022-02-08 Broadband Itv, Inc. Method for addressing on-demand TV program content on TV services platform of a digital TV services provider
US20080243997A1 (en) * 2007-03-29 2008-10-02 Motorola, Inc. Distributed content item recommendation system and method of operation therefor
WO2008122021A3 (en) * 2007-04-02 2008-12-11 Concert Technology Corp Rating media item recommendations using recommendation paths and/or media item usage
US9224427B2 (en) 2007-04-02 2015-12-29 Napo Enterprises LLC Rating media item recommendations using recommendation paths and/or media item usage
WO2008122021A2 (en) * 2007-04-02 2008-10-09 Concert Technology Corporation Rating media item recommendations using recommendation paths and/or media item usage
US9081780B2 (en) 2007-04-04 2015-07-14 Abo Enterprises, Llc System and method for assigning user preference settings for a category, and in particular a media category
US8112720B2 (en) 2007-04-05 2012-02-07 Napo Enterprises, Llc System and method for automatically and graphically associating programmatically-generated media item recommendations related to a user's socially recommended media items
US8434024B2 (en) 2007-04-05 2013-04-30 Napo Enterprises, Llc System and method for automatically and graphically associating programmatically-generated media item recommendations related to a user's socially recommended media items
US7912444B2 (en) * 2007-04-23 2011-03-22 Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications Ab Media portion selection system and method
US20080263046A1 (en) * 2007-04-23 2008-10-23 Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications Ab Media portion selection system and method
US20080270242A1 (en) * 2007-04-24 2008-10-30 Cvon Innovations Ltd. Method and arrangement for providing content to multimedia devices
US8671000B2 (en) 2007-04-24 2014-03-11 Apple Inc. Method and arrangement for providing content to multimedia devices
US8712837B2 (en) 2007-04-30 2014-04-29 The Invention Science Fund I, Llc Rewarding independent influencers
US8290973B2 (en) 2007-04-30 2012-10-16 The Invention Science Fund I, Llc Determining influencers
US20080270426A1 (en) * 2007-04-30 2008-10-30 Flake Gary W Collecting influence information
US20080270552A1 (en) * 2007-04-30 2008-10-30 Searete Llc, A Limited Liability Corporation Of The State Of Delaware Determining influencers
US20080270476A1 (en) * 2007-04-30 2008-10-30 Searete Llc, A Limited Liability Corporation Of The State Of Delaware Rewarding independent influencers
US20080270551A1 (en) * 2007-04-30 2008-10-30 Searete Llc, A Limited Liability Corporation Of The State Of Delaware Rewarding influencers
US20080270473A1 (en) * 2007-04-30 2008-10-30 Searete Llc, A Limited Liability Corporation Of The State Of Delaware Determining an influence on a person by web pages
US20100106730A1 (en) * 2007-04-30 2010-04-29 Aminian Mehdi Method of intermediation within a social network of users of a service/application to expose relevant media items
US20080270474A1 (en) * 2007-04-30 2008-10-30 Searete Llc Collecting influence information
US8793155B2 (en) 2007-04-30 2014-07-29 The Invention Science Fund I, Llc Collecting influence information
US20100318374A1 (en) * 2007-04-30 2010-12-16 Flake Gary W Determining influencers
EP2153388A1 (en) * 2007-04-30 2010-02-17 Jime Sa Method of intermediation within a social network of users of a service/application to expose relevant media items
US20080301187A1 (en) * 2007-06-01 2008-12-04 Concert Technology Corporation Enhanced media item playlist comprising presence information
US8285776B2 (en) 2007-06-01 2012-10-09 Napo Enterprises, Llc System and method for processing a received media item recommendation message comprising recommender presence information
US8839141B2 (en) 2007-06-01 2014-09-16 Napo Enterprises, Llc Method and system for visually indicating a replay status of media items on a media device
US9037632B2 (en) 2007-06-01 2015-05-19 Napo Enterprises, Llc System and method of generating a media item recommendation message with recommender presence information
US8983950B2 (en) 2007-06-01 2015-03-17 Napo Enterprises, Llc Method and system for sorting media items in a playlist on a media device
US9164993B2 (en) 2007-06-01 2015-10-20 Napo Enterprises, Llc System and method for propagating a media item recommendation message comprising recommender presence information
US11272235B2 (en) 2007-06-26 2022-03-08 Broadband Itv, Inc. Dynamic adjustment of electronic program guide displays based on viewer preferences for minimizing navigation in VOD program selection
US11570500B2 (en) 2007-06-26 2023-01-31 Broadband Itv, Inc. Dynamic adjustment of electronic program guide displays based on viewer preferences for minimizing navigation in VOD program selection
US11265589B2 (en) 2007-06-26 2022-03-01 Broadband Itv, Inc. Dynamic adjustment of electronic program guide displays based on viewer preferences for minimizing navigation in VOD program selection
US10560733B2 (en) 2007-06-26 2020-02-11 Broadband Itv, Inc. Dynamic adjustment of electronic program guide displays based on viewer preferences for minimizing navigation in VOD program selection
US10623793B2 (en) 2007-06-26 2020-04-14 Broadband Itv, Inc. Dynamic adjustment of electronic program guide displays based on viewer preferences for minimizing navigation in VOD program selection
US11277669B2 (en) 2007-06-26 2022-03-15 Broadband Itv, Inc. Dynamic adjustment of electronic program guide displays based on viewer preferences for minimizing navigation in VOD program selection
US10567846B2 (en) 2007-06-26 2020-02-18 Broadband Itv, Inc. Dynamic adjustment of electronic program guide displays based on viewer preferences for minimizing navigation in VOD program selection
US11570521B2 (en) 2007-06-26 2023-01-31 Broadband Itv, Inc. Dynamic adjustment of electronic program guide displays based on viewer preferences for minimizing navigation in VOD program selection
US10582243B2 (en) 2007-06-26 2020-03-03 Broadband Itv, Inc. Dynamic adjustment of electronic program guide displays based on viewer preferences for minimizing navigation in VOD program selection
US11290763B2 (en) 2007-06-26 2022-03-29 Broadband Itv, Inc. Dynamic adjustment of electronic program guide displays based on viewer preferences for minimizing navigation in VOD program selection
US11582498B2 (en) 2007-06-26 2023-02-14 Broadband Itv, Inc. Dynamic adjustment of electronic program guide displays based on viewer preferences for minimizing navigation in VOD program selection
US11695976B2 (en) 2007-06-26 2023-07-04 Broadband Itv, Inc. Dynamic adjustment of electronic program guide displays based on viewer preferences for minimizing navigation in VOD program selection
US20090030772A1 (en) * 2007-07-27 2009-01-29 Searete Llc, A Limited Liability Corporation Of The State Of Delaware Rewarding independent influencers
US9135657B2 (en) 2007-07-27 2015-09-15 The Invention Science Fund I, Llc Rewarding independent influencers
US20110035376A1 (en) * 2007-07-31 2011-02-10 Kirshenbaum Evan R Storing nodes representing respective chunks of files in a data store
US20090037456A1 (en) * 2007-07-31 2009-02-05 Kirshenbaum Evan R Providing an index for a data store
US7856437B2 (en) 2007-07-31 2010-12-21 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. Storing nodes representing respective chunks of files in a data store
US8463787B2 (en) 2007-07-31 2013-06-11 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. Storing nodes representing respective chunks of files in a data store
US20090037500A1 (en) * 2007-07-31 2009-02-05 Kirshenbaum Evan R Storing nodes representing respective chunks of files in a data store
US7725437B2 (en) * 2007-07-31 2010-05-25 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. Providing an index for a data store
US20090070437A1 (en) * 2007-09-11 2009-03-12 Perri Ruckart Methods and systems to manage the viral transfer of rental media
US8360248B2 (en) 2007-09-11 2013-01-29 Perri Ruckart Methods and systems to manage the viral transfer of rental media
US20090077093A1 (en) * 2007-09-19 2009-03-19 Joydeep Sen Sarma Feature Discretization and Cardinality Reduction Using Collaborative Filtering Techniques
US20090077081A1 (en) * 2007-09-19 2009-03-19 Joydeep Sen Sarma Attribute-Based Item Similarity Using Collaborative Filtering Techniques
US20140136713A1 (en) * 2007-09-28 2014-05-15 Yelster Digital Gmbh Server directed client originated search aggregator
US9712457B2 (en) * 2007-09-28 2017-07-18 Yelster Digital Gmbh Server directed client originated search aggregator
US20090094248A1 (en) * 2007-10-03 2009-04-09 Concert Technology Corporation System and method of prioritizing the downloading of media items in a media item recommendation network
US20090094285A1 (en) * 2007-10-03 2009-04-09 Mackle Edward G Recommendation apparatus
US20090119265A1 (en) * 2007-11-05 2009-05-07 National Taiwan University Distributed multimedia access system and method
US8688639B2 (en) * 2007-11-05 2014-04-01 National Taiwan University Distributed multimedia access system and method
US7865522B2 (en) 2007-11-07 2011-01-04 Napo Enterprises, Llc System and method for hyping media recommendations in a media recommendation system
US9060034B2 (en) 2007-11-09 2015-06-16 Napo Enterprises, Llc System and method of filtering recommenders in a media item recommendation system
US8209337B2 (en) * 2007-11-19 2012-06-26 Core Logic, Inc. Content recommendation apparatus and method using tag cloud
US20090132526A1 (en) * 2007-11-19 2009-05-21 Jong-Hun Park Content recommendation apparatus and method using tag cloud
US9164994B2 (en) 2007-11-26 2015-10-20 Abo Enterprises, Llc Intelligent default weighting process for criteria utilized to score media content items
US8224856B2 (en) 2007-11-26 2012-07-17 Abo Enterprises, Llc Intelligent default weighting process for criteria utilized to score media content items
US8874574B2 (en) 2007-11-26 2014-10-28 Abo Enterprises, Llc Intelligent default weighting process for criteria utilized to score media content items
US20090158382A1 (en) * 2007-12-17 2009-06-18 Cisco Technology, Inc. System and Method for Using Mobile Media Players in a Peer-to-Peer Network
US8655266B2 (en) * 2007-12-17 2014-02-18 Cisco Technology, Inc. System and method for using mobile media players in a peer-to-peer network
US9224150B2 (en) 2007-12-18 2015-12-29 Napo Enterprises, Llc Identifying highly valued recommendations of users in a media recommendation network
US9071662B2 (en) 2007-12-20 2015-06-30 Napo Enterprises, Llc Method and system for populating a content repository for an internet radio service based on a recommendation network
US9734507B2 (en) 2007-12-20 2017-08-15 Napo Enterprise, Llc Method and system for simulating recommendations in a social network for an offline user
US8396951B2 (en) 2007-12-20 2013-03-12 Napo Enterprises, Llc Method and system for populating a content repository for an internet radio service based on a recommendation network
US8060525B2 (en) 2007-12-21 2011-11-15 Napo Enterprises, Llc Method and system for generating media recommendations in a distributed environment based on tagging play history information with location information
US8983937B2 (en) 2007-12-21 2015-03-17 Lemi Technology, Llc Tunersphere
US20090164516A1 (en) * 2007-12-21 2009-06-25 Concert Technology Corporation Method and system for generating media recommendations in a distributed environment based on tagging play history information with location information
US8577874B2 (en) 2007-12-21 2013-11-05 Lemi Technology, Llc Tunersphere
US8874554B2 (en) 2007-12-21 2014-10-28 Lemi Technology, Llc Turnersphere
US9275138B2 (en) 2007-12-21 2016-03-01 Lemi Technology, Llc System for generating media recommendations in a distributed environment based on seed information
US8117193B2 (en) 2007-12-21 2012-02-14 Lemi Technology, Llc Tunersphere
US9552428B2 (en) 2007-12-21 2017-01-24 Lemi Technology, Llc System for generating media recommendations in a distributed environment based on seed information
US20100257131A1 (en) * 2007-12-28 2010-10-07 Kun-Oh Kim Apparatus and method for controlling hybrid motor
US9141687B2 (en) 2008-01-03 2015-09-22 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. Identification of data objects within a computer database
US20100082579A1 (en) * 2008-01-03 2010-04-01 Shyamsundar Rajaram Identification Of Data Objects Within A Computer Database
US20090187467A1 (en) * 2008-01-23 2009-07-23 Palo Alto Research Center Incorporated Linguistic extraction of temporal and location information for a recommender system
US20090198732A1 (en) * 2008-01-31 2009-08-06 Realnetworks, Inc. Method and system for deep metadata population of media content
US8312022B2 (en) 2008-03-21 2012-11-13 Ramp Holdings, Inc. Search engine optimization
US8725740B2 (en) 2008-03-24 2014-05-13 Napo Enterprises, Llc Active playlist having dynamic media item groups
US8484311B2 (en) 2008-04-17 2013-07-09 Eloy Technology, Llc Pruning an aggregate media collection
US20090276351A1 (en) * 2008-04-30 2009-11-05 Strands, Inc. Scaleable system and method for distributed prediction markets
US20090276284A1 (en) * 2008-05-01 2009-11-05 Microsoft Corporation Peer to peer network personal assistant
US8224714B2 (en) * 2008-05-01 2012-07-17 Microsoft Corporation Peer to peer network personal assistant
US20090299945A1 (en) * 2008-06-03 2009-12-03 Strands, Inc. Profile modeling for sharing individual user preferences
US20090327320A1 (en) * 2008-06-26 2009-12-31 Microsoft Corporation Clustering aggregator for rss feeds
US7958125B2 (en) * 2008-06-26 2011-06-07 Microsoft Corporation Clustering aggregator for RSS feeds
US8510778B2 (en) 2008-06-27 2013-08-13 Rovi Guides, Inc. Systems and methods for ranking assets relative to a group of viewers
US20090328105A1 (en) * 2008-06-27 2009-12-31 Guideworks, Llc Systems and methods for ranking assets relative to a group of viewers
US9148701B2 (en) 2008-06-27 2015-09-29 Rovi Guides, Inc. Systems and methods for ranking assets relative to a group of viewers
US20100010997A1 (en) * 2008-07-11 2010-01-14 Abo Enterprise, LLC Method and system for rescoring a playlist
US20100023578A1 (en) * 2008-07-28 2010-01-28 Brant Kelly M Systems, methods, and media for sharing and processing digital media content in a scaleable distributed computing environment
US20100030772A1 (en) * 2008-07-30 2010-02-04 Ran Zilca System and method for creating and using personality models for user interactions in a social network
US8694531B1 (en) 2008-08-15 2014-04-08 S. Merrell Stearns System and method for analyzing and matching digital media libraries
US20100070917A1 (en) * 2008-09-08 2010-03-18 Apple Inc. System and method for playlist generation based on similarity data
US8601003B2 (en) 2008-09-08 2013-12-03 Apple Inc. System and method for playlist generation based on similarity data
US8914384B2 (en) 2008-09-08 2014-12-16 Apple Inc. System and method for playlist generation based on similarity data
US8966394B2 (en) 2008-09-08 2015-02-24 Apple Inc. System and method for playlist generation based on similarity data
US9496003B2 (en) 2008-09-08 2016-11-15 Apple Inc. System and method for playlist generation based on similarity data
US20100070537A1 (en) * 2008-09-17 2010-03-18 Eloy Technology, Llc System and method for managing a personalized universal catalog of media items
US8332406B2 (en) 2008-10-02 2012-12-11 Apple Inc. Real-time visualization of user consumption of media items
US20100094935A1 (en) * 2008-10-15 2010-04-15 Concert Technology Corporation Collection digest for a media sharing system
US8880599B2 (en) 2008-10-15 2014-11-04 Eloy Technology, Llc Collection digest for a media sharing system
US8484227B2 (en) 2008-10-15 2013-07-09 Eloy Technology, Llc Caching and synching process for a media sharing system
US20100106827A1 (en) * 2008-10-23 2010-04-29 Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. Method and apparatus for recommending content
KR101593991B1 (en) * 2008-10-23 2016-02-17 삼성전자주식회사 Method and apparatus for recommending content
US8990403B2 (en) * 2008-10-23 2015-03-24 Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. Method and apparatus for recommending content
KR20100045195A (en) * 2008-10-23 2010-05-03 삼성전자주식회사 Method and apparatus for recommending content
US8214375B2 (en) * 2008-11-26 2012-07-03 Autodesk, Inc. Manual and automatic techniques for finding similar users
US20100131896A1 (en) * 2008-11-26 2010-05-27 George Fitzmaurice Manual and automatic techniques for finding similar users
US20100161380A1 (en) * 2008-12-23 2010-06-24 Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. Rating-based interests in computing environments and systems
US20100161544A1 (en) * 2008-12-23 2010-06-24 Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. Context-based interests in computing environments and systems
US20100161381A1 (en) * 2008-12-23 2010-06-24 Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. Semantics-based interests in computing environments and systems
US8175902B2 (en) 2008-12-23 2012-05-08 Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. Semantics-based interests in computing environments and systems
US8554767B2 (en) 2008-12-23 2013-10-08 Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd Context-based interests in computing environments and systems
US20100169328A1 (en) * 2008-12-31 2010-07-01 Strands, Inc. Systems and methods for making recommendations using model-based collaborative filtering with user communities and items collections
US20100198604A1 (en) * 2009-01-30 2010-08-05 Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. Generation of concept relations
US9367808B1 (en) 2009-02-02 2016-06-14 Napo Enterprises, Llc System and method for creating thematic listening experiences in a networked peer media recommendation environment
US9824144B2 (en) 2009-02-02 2017-11-21 Napo Enterprises, Llc Method and system for previewing recommendation queues
US8200602B2 (en) 2009-02-02 2012-06-12 Napo Enterprises, Llc System and method for creating thematic listening experiences in a networked peer media recommendation environment
US10691726B2 (en) * 2009-02-11 2020-06-23 Jeffrey A. Rapaport Methods using social topical adaptive networking system
US20100251174A1 (en) * 2009-03-31 2010-09-30 Sony Corporation Widget server, method of operating a widget server and method and device for providing a widget recommendation
US9678623B2 (en) 2009-06-11 2017-06-13 Apple Inc. User interface for media playback
US8301692B1 (en) * 2009-06-16 2012-10-30 Amazon Technologies, Inc. Person to person similarities based on media experiences
US20110004465A1 (en) * 2009-07-02 2011-01-06 Battelle Memorial Institute Computation and Analysis of Significant Themes
US9235563B2 (en) 2009-07-02 2016-01-12 Battelle Memorial Institute Systems and processes for identifying features and determining feature associations in groups of documents
US20110029928A1 (en) * 2009-07-31 2011-02-03 Apple Inc. System and method for displaying interactive cluster-based media playlists
US20110060738A1 (en) * 2009-09-08 2011-03-10 Apple Inc. Media item clustering based on similarity data
US8620919B2 (en) 2009-09-08 2013-12-31 Apple Inc. Media item clustering based on similarity data
US8676761B1 (en) 2009-09-30 2014-03-18 Emc Corporation Preparation of a system image for rapid restore
US9135258B1 (en) * 2009-09-30 2015-09-15 Emc Corporation Redundant backup elimination
US8959061B1 (en) 2009-09-30 2015-02-17 Emc Corporation Rapid restore from a prepared system image
US20110125763A1 (en) * 2009-11-24 2011-05-26 Nokia Corporation Method and apparatus for determining similarity of media interest
WO2011064448A1 (en) * 2009-11-24 2011-06-03 Nokia Corporation Method and apparatus for determining similarity of media interest
US9703779B2 (en) 2010-02-04 2017-07-11 Veveo, Inc. Method of and system for enhanced local-device content discovery
US20110191332A1 (en) * 2010-02-04 2011-08-04 Veveo, Inc. Method of and System for Updating Locally Cached Content Descriptor Information
US20110191331A1 (en) * 2010-02-04 2011-08-04 Veveo, Inc. Method of and System for Enhanced Local-Device Content Discovery
US20110258190A1 (en) * 2010-04-19 2011-10-20 Aiyou Chen Spectral Neighborhood Blocking for Entity Resolution
US8719267B2 (en) * 2010-04-19 2014-05-06 Alcatel Lucent Spectral neighborhood blocking for entity resolution
US20110295843A1 (en) * 2010-05-26 2011-12-01 Apple Inc. Dynamic generation of contextually aware playlists
US10452668B2 (en) * 2010-07-21 2019-10-22 Microsoft Technology Licensing, Llc Smart defaults for data visualizations
US20120023101A1 (en) * 2010-07-21 2012-01-26 Microsoft Corporation Smart defaults for data visualizations
US20140379700A1 (en) * 2010-07-21 2014-12-25 Microsoft Corporation Smart defaults for data visualizations
US8825649B2 (en) * 2010-07-21 2014-09-02 Microsoft Corporation Smart defaults for data visualizations
US10185754B2 (en) 2010-07-31 2019-01-22 Vocus Nm Llc Discerning human intent based on user-generated metadata
US11816743B1 (en) 2010-08-10 2023-11-14 Jeffrey Alan Rapaport Information enhancing method using software agents in a social networking system
US20120084669A1 (en) * 2010-09-30 2012-04-05 International Business Machines Corporation Dynamic group generation
US10162891B2 (en) * 2010-11-29 2018-12-25 Vocus Nm Llc Determining demographics based on user interaction
US20140114998A1 (en) * 2010-11-29 2014-04-24 Viralheat, Inc. Determining demographics based on user interaction
US20120209748A1 (en) * 2011-02-12 2012-08-16 The Penn State Research Foundation Devices, systems, and methods for providing gift selection and gift redemption services in an e-commerce environment over a communication network
US9031941B2 (en) * 2011-03-08 2015-05-12 Sony Corporation Information processing apparatus, terminal apparatus, information presentation system, calculation method of evaluation scores, and program
US20120233183A1 (en) * 2011-03-08 2012-09-13 Sony Corporation Information processing apparatus, terminal apparatus, information presentation system, calculation method of evaluation scores, and program
US10055493B2 (en) * 2011-05-09 2018-08-21 Google Llc Generating a playlist
US20120290621A1 (en) * 2011-05-09 2012-11-15 Heitz Iii Geremy A Generating a playlist
US11461388B2 (en) * 2011-05-09 2022-10-04 Google Llc Generating a playlist
US11805091B1 (en) * 2011-05-12 2023-10-31 Jeffrey Alan Rapaport Social topical context adaptive network hosted system
US11539657B2 (en) * 2011-05-12 2022-12-27 Jeffrey Alan Rapaport Contextually-based automatic grouped content recommendations to users of a social networking system
US10142276B2 (en) * 2011-05-12 2018-11-27 Jeffrey Alan Rapaport Contextually-based automatic service offerings to users of machine system
US20140344718A1 (en) * 2011-05-12 2014-11-20 Jeffrey Alan Rapaport Contextually-based Automatic Service Offerings to Users of Machine System
US20220231985A1 (en) * 2011-05-12 2022-07-21 Jeffrey Alan Rapaport Contextually-based automatic service offerings to users of machine system
US8983905B2 (en) 2011-10-03 2015-03-17 Apple Inc. Merging playlists from multiple sources
US8909667B2 (en) 2011-11-01 2014-12-09 Lemi Technology, Llc Systems, methods, and computer readable media for generating recommendations in a media recommendation system
US9015109B2 (en) 2011-11-01 2015-04-21 Lemi Technology, Llc Systems, methods, and computer readable media for maintaining recommendations in a media recommendation system
US8589393B2 (en) * 2011-11-08 2013-11-19 Google Inc. Methods and apparatus for discovery of attributes using a social mobile application
US20130117276A1 (en) * 2011-11-08 2013-05-09 Google Inc. Methods and apparatus for discovery of attributes using a social mobile application
CN103369373A (en) * 2012-03-29 2013-10-23 索尼公司 Method and apparatus for updating content channels
US10318503B1 (en) 2012-07-20 2019-06-11 Ool Llc Insight and algorithmic clustering for automated synthesis
US9607023B1 (en) 2012-07-20 2017-03-28 Ool Llc Insight and algorithmic clustering for automated synthesis
US9336302B1 (en) 2012-07-20 2016-05-10 Zuci Realty Llc Insight and algorithmic clustering for automated synthesis
US11216428B1 (en) 2012-07-20 2022-01-04 Ool Llc Insight and algorithmic clustering for automated synthesis
US11748311B1 (en) * 2012-10-30 2023-09-05 Google Llc Automatic collaboration
US9317887B2 (en) * 2012-11-14 2016-04-19 Electronics And Telecommunications Research Institute Similarity calculating method and apparatus
US20140136534A1 (en) * 2012-11-14 2014-05-15 Electronics And Telecommunications Research Institute Similarity calculating method and apparatus
US20140188785A1 (en) * 2012-12-28 2014-07-03 Fujitsu Limited Information processing device, computer-readable recording medium, and node extraction method
US9189530B2 (en) * 2012-12-28 2015-11-17 Fujitsu Limited Information processing device, computer-readable recording medium, and node extraction method
US20150286680A1 (en) * 2013-01-30 2015-10-08 Quixey, Inc. Performing application search based on entities
US9959314B2 (en) * 2013-01-30 2018-05-01 Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. Performing application search based on entities
CN104969212A (en) * 2013-01-30 2015-10-07 奎克西公司 Performing application search based on entities
US11314746B2 (en) 2013-03-15 2022-04-26 Cision Us Inc. Processing unstructured data streams using continuous queries
US11269946B2 (en) * 2013-12-19 2022-03-08 Gracenote, Inc. Station library creation for a media service
US10728349B2 (en) * 2014-05-08 2020-07-28 Tru Optik Data Corp. Tru torrent platform methods, apparatuses and media
US20180367624A1 (en) * 2014-05-08 2018-12-20 Tru Optik Data Corp. Tru torrent platform methods, apparatuses and media
US20150326454A1 (en) * 2014-05-08 2015-11-12 Tru Optik Data Corp Tru torrent platform methods, apparatuses and media
US10412180B2 (en) * 2014-05-08 2019-09-10 Tru Optik Data Corp. Household graphing system
US9807436B2 (en) 2014-07-23 2017-10-31 Rovi Guides, Inc. Systems and methods for providing media asset recommendations for a group
US10866987B2 (en) * 2015-07-31 2020-12-15 RCRDCLUB Corporation Evaluating performance of recommender system
US20170031920A1 (en) * 2015-07-31 2017-02-02 RCRDCLUB Corporation Evaluating performance of recommender system
US10093181B1 (en) 2015-09-30 2018-10-09 Waymo Llc Occupant facing vehicle display
US10957203B1 (en) 2015-09-30 2021-03-23 Waymo Llc Occupant facing vehicle display
US11056003B1 (en) 2015-09-30 2021-07-06 Waymo Llc Occupant facing vehicle display
US9950619B1 (en) 2015-09-30 2018-04-24 Waymo Llc Occupant facing vehicle display
US9849784B1 (en) 2015-09-30 2017-12-26 Waymo Llc Occupant facing vehicle display
US10140870B1 (en) * 2015-09-30 2018-11-27 Waymo Llc Occupant facing vehicle display
US11749114B1 (en) 2015-09-30 2023-09-05 Waymo Llc Occupant facing vehicle display
US10846332B2 (en) * 2015-10-21 2020-11-24 Guangzhou Kugou Computer Technology Co., Ltd. Playlist list determining method and device, electronic apparatus, and storage medium
US11301915B2 (en) * 2016-06-13 2022-04-12 Affinio Inc. Modelling user behavior in social network
US10621679B2 (en) * 2016-07-18 2020-04-14 Dell Products L.P. Multi-threaded text affinity analyzer for text and sentiment analytics
US20180018318A1 (en) * 2016-07-18 2018-01-18 Dell Products L.P. Multi-Threaded Text Affinity Analyzer for Text and Sentiment Analytics
US11205103B2 (en) 2016-12-09 2021-12-21 The Research Foundation for the State University Semisupervised autoencoder for sentiment analysis
US20180307765A1 (en) * 2017-04-24 2018-10-25 Kabushiki Kaisha Toshiba Interactive system, interaction method, and storage medium
US10936653B2 (en) 2017-06-02 2021-03-02 Apple Inc. Automatically predicting relevant contexts for media items
US11126389B2 (en) 2017-07-11 2021-09-21 Roku, Inc. Controlling visual indicators in an audio responsive electronic device, and capturing and providing audio using an API, by native and non-native computing devices and services
US10777197B2 (en) * 2017-08-28 2020-09-15 Roku, Inc. Audio responsive device with play/stop and tell me something buttons
US11646025B2 (en) 2017-08-28 2023-05-09 Roku, Inc. Media system with multiple digital assistants
US11804227B2 (en) 2017-08-28 2023-10-31 Roku, Inc. Local and cloud speech recognition
US11062702B2 (en) 2017-08-28 2021-07-13 Roku, Inc. Media system with multiple digital assistants
US11062710B2 (en) 2017-08-28 2021-07-13 Roku, Inc. Local and cloud speech recognition
US10733987B1 (en) * 2017-09-26 2020-08-04 Amazon Technologies, Inc. System and methods for providing unplayed content
US11468492B2 (en) 2018-01-19 2022-10-11 Hypernet Labs, Inc. Decentralized recommendations using distributed average consensus
US10878482B2 (en) * 2018-01-19 2020-12-29 Hypernet Labs, Inc. Decentralized recommendations using distributed average consensus
US10909150B2 (en) 2018-01-19 2021-02-02 Hypernet Labs, Inc. Decentralized latent semantic index using distributed average consensus
US10942783B2 (en) 2018-01-19 2021-03-09 Hypernet Labs, Inc. Distributed computing using distributed average consensus
US11244243B2 (en) 2018-01-19 2022-02-08 Hypernet Labs, Inc. Coordinated learning using distributed average consensus
US11664026B2 (en) 2018-02-13 2023-05-30 Roku, Inc. Trigger word detection with multiple digital assistants
US11145298B2 (en) 2018-02-13 2021-10-12 Roku, Inc. Trigger word detection with multiple digital assistants
US11356538B2 (en) * 2018-03-16 2022-06-07 Tokyo Electron Limited Semiconductor manufacturing system and server device
US20190339927A1 (en) * 2018-05-07 2019-11-07 Spotify Ab Adaptive voice communication
US10877718B2 (en) * 2018-05-07 2020-12-29 Spotify Ab Adaptive voice communication
US11836415B2 (en) 2018-05-07 2023-12-05 Spotify Ab Adaptive voice communication
US11935537B2 (en) 2023-04-19 2024-03-19 Roku, Inc. Trigger word detection with multiple digital assistants

Also Published As

Publication number Publication date
US7783249B2 (en) 2010-08-24
WO2005072405A3 (en) 2007-03-01
WO2005072405A2 (en) 2005-08-11
US8190082B2 (en) 2012-05-29
US20130040556A1 (en) 2013-02-14
US20110143650A1 (en) 2011-06-16
US20080261516A1 (en) 2008-10-23

Similar Documents

Publication Publication Date Title
US8190082B2 (en) Playing digital content from satellite radio media based on taste profiles
CN101160580B (en) The virtual network of the computer of link whose users share similar interests
US7860741B1 (en) Clusters for rapid artist-audience matching
CN102713965B (en) The scalable theme of data source is assembled
US8001187B2 (en) Peer-to-peer active content sharing
US8688673B2 (en) System for communication and collaboration
US7720686B2 (en) Method and system for providing listener-requested music over a network
US20160110464A1 (en) Method of recommending content via social signals
US20020027567A1 (en) Listing network for classified information
US20070011155A1 (en) System for communication and collaboration
EP2149847A1 (en) Systems, methods, and media for sharing and processing digital media content in a scaleable distributed computing environment
US20080208844A1 (en) Entertainment platform with layered advanced search and profiling technology
KR100916162B1 (en) Fingerprint database maintenance method and system
CN101523383B (en) System and method for networked media access
US20090037315A1 (en) System and method for brokering agents and auditionees
Ruffo et al. A peer-to-peer recommender system based on spontaneous affinities
JP2009510598A (en) Communication and collaboration system
WO2005017660A2 (en) Peer-to-peer content sharing
EP1929410B1 (en) A method and system for searching for people or items by keywords
Suri et al. An integrated ranking algorithm for efficient information computing in social networks
Draidi et al. P2Prec: a Recommendation Service for P2P Content Sharing Systems
Chand et al. Cooperative caching in mobile ad hoc networks through clustering
Edge Architecture and optimization for a peer-to-peer content management system
Papapetrou Approximate algorithms for efficient indexing, clustering, and classification in Peer-to-peer networks

Legal Events

Date Code Title Description
STCB Information on status: application discontinuation

Free format text: EXPRESSLY ABANDONED -- DURING EXAMINATION