| Document | Document Title |
|---|---|
| US08181268B2 |
Scanning probe microscope and method of observing sample using the same
Optical information and topographic information of the surface of a sample are measured at a nanometer-order resolution and with high reproducibility without damaging a probe and the sample by combining a nanometer-order cylindrical structure with a nanometer-order microstructure to form a plasmon intensifying near-field probe having a nanometer-order optical resolution and by repeating approach/retreat of the probe to/from each measurement point on the sample at a low contact force. |
| US08181264B2 |
Method and apparatus for deferred security analysis
It has been discovered that identifying files introduced into a system, particularly those originating from external sources, as being subject to security evaluation and deferring the security evaluation until access or attempted access of the file reduces security vulnerabilities of a system. A file introduced into a processing system is tagged with a security tag if the file is introduced via a supervised introduction point and/or introduced by a supervised program. Upon access or attempted access of the tagged file, security evaluation is initiated on the file. |
| US08181262B2 |
Network user authentication system and method
In a network user authentication system, a network user is identified for authentication purposes using the unique identifier for a dedicated physical communication line associated with the building in which the network user is located or a digital certificate which is associated with a secure component or communication line physically attached to a building. An authentication server initially verifies the identification of the dedicated communication line to be associated with a network service subscriber or issues a unique digital certificate to be associated with the dedicated communication line for authentication purposes. The digital certificate may be stored in a building gateway or in an edge site module which is connected to the secure components of a plurality of buildings and stores unique digital certificates for each building. |
| US08181261B2 |
System and method for controlling reproduction of documents containing sensitive information
A system and method for controlling the reproduction of documents containing sensitive information includes an input for receiving a document; a device for storing a digitized document; a detector for identifying encoded sensitive information; a decoder operatively connected to the detector, which extracts digitally encoded information from the sensitive information; a processor operatively connected to the decoder, which receives digitally decoded sensitive information; a user interface module for receiving a user identity and an access mediator for receiving decoded sensitive information from the processor, comparing the user identity with a decoding scheme associated with the document and allowing or disallowing the decoded sensitive information to be reproduced. |
| US08181260B2 |
Tracking the origins of data and controlling data transmission
Provided are methods, apparatus and computer programs for tracking the origins of data and controlling transmission of the data. In one embodiment, transmission of sensitive data by script operations is limited, to prevent transmission to any network location other than to the source of that sensitive data, by a new function within a scripting engine of an HTTP client that is responsive to origin tags placed within the data. Origin tags that are associated with data inputs are propagated to any output data items, so that transmission of derived information can also be controlled. |
| US08181257B2 |
Method to allow role based selective document access between domains
An improved solution for allowing role based selective access to a document between a plurality of domains is provided. In an embodiment of the invention, a method for allowing selective access to a document between a plurality of domains includes: obtaining a composed section of the document at a first domain; applying a security policy at the first domain to the composed section of the document; distributing the security policy from the first domain to a second domain, wherein the second domain is different than the first domain; and applying the security policy to the document at the second domain. |
| US08181255B2 |
Digital rights management system
A digital rights management system including a controlled content disk to store content in an encrypted format, and a processor to run a plurality of applications and a secure device driver thereon, the processor being operationally associated with the controlled content disk, the applications being unable to decrypt content from the encrypted format, the secure device driver having a receiving module to receive a request from one of the applications to access the content, a validation module to validate the request based upon a recognized access pattern to the content by the one application, and a transport module to transfer the content from the controlled content disk to the one application, contingent upon a positive result of the validating of the validation module. Related apparatus and methods are also described. |
| US08181251B2 |
Methods and systems for detecting malware
A method for detecting malware is disclosed. The method may include examining a plurality of metadata fields of a plurality of known-clean-executable files. The method may also include examining a plurality of metadata fields of a plurality of known-malicious-executable files. The method may further include deducing, based on information obtained from examining the plurality of metadata fields of the plurality of known-clean- and known-malicious-executable files, metadata-field attributes indicative of malware. Corresponding systems and computer-readable media are also disclosed. |
| US08181250B2 |
Personalized honeypot for detecting information leaks and security breaches
A honeypot in a computer network is configured for use with a wide variety of computing resources that are defined by a network administrator or user which may include desktop and network resources such as address book contacts, instant messaging contacts, active directory user accounts, IP addresses, and files that contain particular content or that are stored in particular locations. The resources may be real for which protection against leakage is desired, or fake to operate as bait to lure and detect malicious attacks. The honeypot is implemented in an extensible manner so that virtually any resource may be honeypotted to apply honeypot benefits to resources beyond static IP addresses in order to improve both the breadth of information leakage prevention and the detection of malicious attacks. |
| US08181247B1 |
System and method for protecting a computer system from the activity of malicious objects
Disclosed are systems, methods and computer program products for protecting a computer from activities of malicious objects. The method comprises: monitoring events of execution of one or more processes on the computer; identifying auditable events among the monitored events, including events of creation, alteration or deletion of files, events of alteration of system registry, and events of network access by processes executed on the computer; recording the identified auditable events in separate file, registry and network event logs; performing a malware check of one or more software objects on the computer; if an object is determined to be malicious, identifying from the file, registry and network event logs the events associated with the malicious object; performing rollback of file events associated with the malicious object; performing rollback of registry events associated with the malicious object; terminating network connections associated with the malicious object. |
| US08181242B2 |
Interactive virtual library system for expeditiously providing user-desired information from content providers, at least one of which is commercial, to a user without the need for the user to access the content providers individually
An interactive library system is disclosed which receives, by a library system computer, a user identification and password from a user computer. The library system computer compares the user identification and password with authorized user identifications and corresponding passwords stored in the library system to determine whether to grant access to the interactive library system. If comparison results in grant of access, the interactive library system provides a user with desired information and sets the user's privileges. |
| US08181238B2 |
Systems and/or methods for streaming reverse HTTP gateway, and network including the same
In certain example embodiments of this invention, there is provided systems and/or methods for a streaming reverse HTTP gateway, and/or networks including the same. In such a network, a reverse HTTP gateway is located within a demilitarized zone (DMZ) disposed between public (or external) and private (or internal) networks for providing security therebetween. Requests from external clients may be streamed from the external network to the internal network over various connections and ports, including a substantially persistent reverse connection between an internal server and a reverse HTTP gateway. The reverse HTTP gateway architecture of certain example embodiments removes the need for proprietary protocols implemented between the reverse HTTP gateway located in the DMZ and the internal server located in the internal network. In certain example embodiments, the reverse HTTP gateway architecture is configured to leverage the capabilities of HTTP 1.1. |
| US08181236B2 |
Method for and apparatus for retrieving username and password in an authentication protocol
Disclosed is a computer implemented method and apparatus to retrieve authentication records required for user validation and creation of authentication credentials from an authentication server to be passed to the user. The method is comprised of the authentication server storing a first authentication record, then generating a first authentication credential based on the first authentication record. The authentication server associates the first authentication record with a first credential expiration time. The authentication server stores a second authentication record. The authentication server generates a second authentication credential based on the second authentication record, wherein the second authentication credential is associated with a second credential expiration time. Next, the authentication server associates the second authentication credential with a second credential expiration time. The authentication server determines that the first credential expiration time is earlier than the second credential expiration time and caches the first authentication record to cache. |
| US08181233B2 |
Pairing of wireless devices using a wired medium
Techniques that facilitate pairing of wireless devices with other wireless devices are disclosed. According to one aspect, a pair of wireless devices can be paired for wireless data exchange using an available wired link. Advantageously, the wired link can be used to transport a pin code from one of the wireless devices to the other. Consequently, pairing of the wireless devices can be completed without necessitating user entry of a pin code so long as the wired link is available. |
| US08181230B2 |
System and method for adaptive approximating of a user for role authorization in a hierarchical inter-organizational model
A system and method are provided for adaptive approximating of a user for role authorization in a hierarchical inter-organization model. The system includes an authorization redirector for receiving a request for an access control decision for a user. The system further includes an adaptive authorizer for dynamically determining, at run-time, a user role approximation for the user responsive to the request. The user role approximation is based on at least one of a system state and a system goal corresponding to a hierarchical inter-organizational model. |
| US08181229B2 |
Methods, systems and computer program products for operating a communications network with enhanced security
A communications system includes a plurality of patch panels having a plurality of connector ports connected to individual communication channels, a switch that provides access to multiple networks via one or more switch ports, a system manager that controls interconnections between the patch panels and the switch, and a plurality of patch cords configured to selectively interconnect patch panel connector ports. The system manager is configured to receive a request to connect an individual communication channel to a specific network, to identify which patch panel connector ports are required to be patched together via one or more patch cords in order to establish a circuit to the requested network, and to enable a switch port to activate the circuit. The system manager is configured to monitor connectivity of a circuit and to park a switch port associated with the circuit in response to detecting a change in circuit connectivity. |
| US08181228B2 |
Network constructing method and communication apparatus
In a wireless network communication device, multiple items of network identification information, which are for identifying wireless network systems, are read out of a memory and displayed on a display unit. Network identification information of a wireless network system, which is capable of being constructed anew, is selected from the multiple items of network identification information displayed and a wireless network system corresponding to the network identification information selected is constructed. |
| US08181227B2 |
System and method for client-side authenticaton for secure internet communications
A system and method for client-side authentication for secure Internet communications is disclosed. In one embodiment, an intermediate device receives a web browser secure socket layer certificate from a web browser, authenticates the web browser using the secure socket layer certificate, and then re-signs the secure socket layer certificate with an intermediate device public key and an intermediate device certificate authority signature. The intermediate device sends the re-signed secure socket layer certificate to a web server and the web server authenticates the intermediate device using the re-signed secure socket layer certificate. In another embodiment, an intermediate device receives a web browser secure socket layer certificate from a web browser, inserts the web browser secure socket layer certificate into a HTTP header of a packet, and sends the packet to a web server. |
| US08181224B2 |
Method for recognizing information flow and detecting information leakage by analyzing user's behaviors
A method for analyzing user's behaviors is provided. API function call patterns occurring when operations on various objects are performed on a computer system are configured with contexts. User's behaviors are recognized as associations between the contexts and systematically expressed. Information flow occurring in the user's behaviors (i.e., associations between the contexts) is tracked. The information flow chain is divided into a source and a destination. When the information flow a confidential object to a leakage point occurs, the information leakage is rapidly detected and blocked. By exactly recognizing behaviors belonging to the corresponding information flow chain, user's behaviors related to the information leakage can be detected. Furthermore, the behavior expression based on the contexts configured with the API function call patterns with respect to the system object can be achieved by naturally connecting the API function call occurring on the system as an abstract behavior. |
| US08181223B2 |
Electronic apparatus conducting two-port authentication, method of authenticating and receiving job data, an recording medium containing job data authentication-reception program
The present invention provides an electronic apparatus such as a printer with a signal control port for authenticating a job and a job data port for receiving job data of the job authenticated via the signal control port. Namely, the job data port accepts job data of only an authenticated job. |
| US08181222B2 |
Locally adaptable central security management in a heterogeneous network environment
A system and method for defining and enforcing a security policy. Security mechanism application specific information for each security mechanism is encapsulated as a key and exported to a semantic layer. Keys are combined to form key chains within the semantic layer. The key chains are in turn encapsulated as keys and passed to another semantic layer. A security policy is defined by forming key chains from keys and associating users with the key chains. The security policy is translated and exported to the security mechanisms. The security policy is then enforced via the security mechanisms. |
| US08181220B2 |
Method and apparatus for digital rights management policies
Method and apparatus are described wherein, in one example embodiment, there is provided one or more policy templates that may define a set of policy permissions or other attributes that may be desirable to specify in a policy. One or more policy templates may be specified in a user interface of a policy creation and maintenance program that may run oh the policy server and/or run on a workstation computer. Each policy template specified by a user may include permissions for how a user may access and use a document. The maintenance program may, in one embodiment, associate both templates to a policy used for a specific unit of digital content, or, for example, an electronic document. The permissions for the policy are determined by aggregating the permissions associated with each respective templates chosen by the user. According to another example embodiment, a user selects a policy template and defines one or more additional permissions to form an augmented policy. |
| US08181216B2 |
Data processing apparatus, data processing method, and data processing system
A data processing apparatus that appropriately adjusts the image quality of an image. At a plurality of user terminals, image data transmitted from a broadcasting station is processed based on parameters input by users, and user information including the image data and the parameters is provided to a management server. The management server calculates noise amounts of the respective sets of image data included in the user information provided from the plurality of user terminals, calculates an average value of parameters input by users for each noise amount, and associates the average value with the noise amount. Furthermore, the management server provides a user terminal with server information including a parameter associated with a noise amount of image data from a user terminal. The user terminal processes the image data based on the parameter included in the server information from the management server. |
| US08181213B2 |
IP-based hometown TV program delivery system
The present invention is to disclose an IP-based hometown TV program delivery system comprising at least one TV program provider for providing a plurality of channels of TV programs; and at least one agency at a server-end for providing a plurality of digital video contents converted from said corresponding TV programs; characterized in that said agency at a server-end distributes said plurality of digital video contents to authorized users at a client-end via a broadcasting network, wherein each authorized users has subscription to said TV programs so as to get permission for watching and receives from said agency said digital video contents converted from said corresponding TV programs via said broadcasting network. |
| US08181204B2 |
Linking to video information
A system enables dynamic linking between a variety of video formats including television broadcasts, web pages, and video displays which are stored on magnetic or optical media. Each frame of the video information is identified together with a plurality of locations within that frame. The locations selected by the user for example using a pointing device is then used to access associated information either within the system itself or on an external system. Thus, in some embodiments of the present invention, any item on a given frame may be linked initially or thereafter to other information within or without the particular system containing that information. |
| US08181202B2 |
Program searching in digital multimedia terminal
A digital multimedia terminal comprises a receiving unit to receive a broadcasting signal. The digital multimedia terminal also comprises an input unit adapted to receive input associated with a user preferred program characteristic. The digital multimedia terminal also comprises a controller, operatively coupled to the receiving unit and the input unit, adapted to extract program information from received broadcasting signals and to search extracted program information based on the user preferred program characteristic. The digital multimedia terminal may further comprise a display unit, operatively coupled to the controller, adapted to display program description information associated with the extracted program information that corresponds to a broadcast program having the user preferred program characteristic. |
| US08181200B2 |
Method and system for displaying advertising, video, and program schedule listing
A television schedule system and method for displaying television schedule information on a television screen includes a program guide having a schedule information area that depicts the programs that are being presented on each channel at each time during the day. An input device allows the viewer to browse through the schedule information area and/or obtain more information about programs of particular interest. In one aspect, the viewer may watch a program on the currently-tuned channel, while browsing through the other channels on a portion of the television screen. In another aspect, the viewer may watch programs currently being shown on the television, while he or she browses through the program guide. In yet another aspect, the system includes a database, a processor and associated software for automatically customizing the television schedule guide to an individual viewer or a group of viewers, e.g., a family, to facilitate use of the television schedule. |
| US08181198B2 |
Broadcast receiving apparatus and method for providing widget service thereof via available channel or virtual channel
A method for providing a widget service using a media service providing apparatus is provided. A method for providing the widget service includes operations of scanning channels providing media services therethrough; determining whether or not there is an available channel among the scanned channels for allocating a widget service; if it is determined that there is the available channel, allocating the widget service to the available channel; and providing the widget service allocated to the available channel. Accordingly, a widget service is provided without disturbing a user viewing a television (TV), increasing user convenience. |
| US08181196B2 |
Simulcast resolution in content matching systems
An audience measurement system generates signatures of unknown pieces of content viewed by panel members, and generates reference signatures of known pieces of content. The signatures of the unknown pieces of content are stored and transmitted to a central processing site, where they are compared with the reference signatures for their identification. A scanning engine finds matches between the signatures of the unknown and the known contents, and stores matches so as to build “tracking segments”, i.e., strings of matches that indicate a coincidence between the unknown content and one or more known pieces of content for a certain period of time, and associates the unknown content to the known piece of content with the longest tracking segment. |
| US08181195B2 |
Anonymous aggregated data collection
An anonymous aggregated data collection system aggregates media access information in an anonymous data collection component without associating the media access information with any one particular client device. The anonymous data collection component further prevents a network operator, content provider, or third party from correlating the media access information obtained from a client device with any one particular subscriber by comparing a unique identifier of the client device with corresponding subscription account and subscriber personal identification information. |
| US08181192B2 |
Disk apparatus and disk drive unit including a lock mechanism that is released only when the display unit is in a closed state
A disk apparatus includes: an apparatus body including a disk drive portion for housing a disk medium having an information recording surface and for recording and/or reproducing information; and a lid body including a display for displaying information, and closed and opened with respect to the apparatus body in such a way that the display is postured face down and up. The apparatus body further includes: a drive-portion cover which is movable in a bottom direction of the apparatus body and inserts and ejects the disk medium into and from the disk drive portion; and a lock hook and a cover hook locking the disk medium housed in the apparatus body. A locking state of the lock hook and the cover hook is kept when the lid body is in the open state with respect to the apparatus body. |
| US08181190B2 |
Optical disc apparatus
In an optical disc apparatus, convex portions are provided on the inner surface of a top cover that covers the top surface side of the apparatus such that the convex portions are directly opposite or directly above a flexible printed circuit board during the slide-in/slide-out movements of a tray. The convex portions are positioned further outwardly from the outer circumference of an optical disc with respect to the rotation center of the optical disc upon completion of the slide-in movement of the tray. The convex portions guide or slide part of the flexible printed circuit board along the tip end surfaces of the convex portions in the direction of the slide-in movement of the tray when the part of the flexible printed circuit board comes into contact with the inner surface of the top cover during the slide-in movement of the tray. |
| US08181184B2 |
System and method for scheduling tasks in processing frames
Methods and systems for implementing methods for allocating available service capacity to a plurality of tasks in a data processing system having a plurality of processing channels is provided, where each processing channel is utilized in accordance with a time division multiplex processing scheme. A method can include receiving in the data processing system the plurality of tasks to be allocated to the available service capacity and determining a task from among an unassigned set of the plurality of tasks having a requirement for available service capacity which is greatest. The method can also include identifying at least one of the plurality of processing channels that has an available service capacity greater than or equal to the requirement and selectively assigning the task to the processing channel having a remaining service capacity which least exceeds the requirement. |
| US08181183B2 |
Method, system and program products for managing thread pools of a computing environment to avoid deadlock situations
Deadlock situations within a computing environment are avoided by properly managing pools of threads used to service requests of the computing environment. When a server of the computing environment receives a request to be processed and that request is waiting on a response from a client of the computing environment, the set of eligible thread pools for the response is dynamically altered. This dynamic altering allows the response to be serviced by a thread pool different from the thread pool servicing the request, thereby avoiding a deadlock situation. |
| US08181180B1 |
Managing jobs in shared file systems
Embodiments include methods, apparatus, and systems for managing jobs in a shared file system. One embodiment includes a method that intercepts file accesses within a job on a client to a storage device in a shared file system, detects when a file associated with the job changes, and sends the client a message of the change. |
| US08181178B2 |
Online batch execution
Online batch processing. A job request is received from a user for processing. The job request includes a job configuration and a plurality of operations to process the data. The job configuration is extracted from the job request and stored in a configuration cache. A metadata configuration code is extracted from the job configuration and stored in a code cache. A runtime configuration code is extracted from the job configuration and stored in an instance cache. This allows information to be obtained from the configuration cache, the code cache and the instance cache for processing subsequent job requests with the similar job configuration and the plurality of operations. The data is fetched from at least one of the job request and an external storage device. The plurality of operations is executed on the data to generate a result. The result is provided to the user through at least one of an output stream and the external storage device. |
| US08181170B2 |
Unwind information for optimized programs
Analyzing a first binary version of a program and unwind information associated with the first binary version of the program, performing optimization on the first binary version of the program to produce a second binary version of the program based at least in part on the results of the analysis, and generating new unwind information for the second binary version of the program based at least in part on the results of the analysis and at least in part on the optimization performed. |
| US08181167B2 |
Method and system for presenting and analyzing software source code through intermediate representation
The present invention provides a method and system for producing intermediate representation of source code listings with possibly mixed syntaxes to assist software development applications in presenting and analyzing the source code listings through reading the intermediate representation. A source code processor calls Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to preserve source code information, which includes intermediate representation data sets and is preferably stored in a file-based repository. The source code processor is of a compiler, a preprocessor, a parser, or a comment document processor. The data sets capture lexical, syntax and semantic information of source code construct elements, and comprise of location, processor identification, construct category, and attribute data. A software development environment through a source code search engine is able to present source code construct elements, outlines, and symbol references from software packages over a plurality of distributed servers in a network such as the Internet. |
| US08181166B2 |
System and method for determining when an EJB compiler needs to be executed
A system for determining when an EJB compiler needs to be executed, comprising: a server, including an EJB or plurality of EJBs and an EJB compiler operating thereon that determines a first snapshot of the EJB at a particular moment in time or for a particular server version, and a second snapshot of said EJB at a later moment in time or a subsequent server version, and compares the first and second snapshots to determine whether the EJB should be recompiled. |
| US08181163B2 |
Program synthesis and debugging using machine learning techniques
One embodiment is directed to synthesizing code fragments in a software routine using known inputs and corresponding expected outputs. A computer system provides a software routine with known inputs and corresponding expected outputs, infers software routine instructions based on the known inputs and corresponding expected outputs, and synthesizes a correctly functioning code fragment based on the inferred instructions. Another embodiment is directed to automatically resolving semantic errors in a software routine. A computer system provides the software routine with known inputs and corresponding expected outputs for portions of a program fragment where an error has been localized. The computer system learns a correctly functioning program fragment from pairs of input-output descriptions of the program fragment, determines the program statements that can transform given input states into given output states after execution of those program statements, and alters portions of the software routine with the learned program fragments. |
| US08181156B1 |
System and method for managing web-based forms and dynamic content of website
Managing dynamic content of a website, including creating static content assigned to dynamic content of the website, with unmodifiable scripts; creating an active content for processing dynamic content, with hidden elements and elements with only visual marks representation; transmitting the static content to a user; selecting references to the active content within the static content; requesting description of the active content from a server; transmitting the active content to the user; displaying the active content; editing dynamic content and visual representations of data requested by user; representing a first document form generated from an HTML representation of server data and unmodifiable scripts, and which includes the elements; generating a request for data needed for a current visualization of the form; generating a second related data representation of another form; delivering second related data representation for display in browser; storing content of the website on server and making it publicly available. |
| US08181154B2 |
Systems and methods for monitoring a computing environment
The invention comprises a system and method for monitoring the performance of an application. The invention includes a monitoring system graphical user interface (GUI) having an interactive window with on-screen graphics representative of the application architecture and component performance. The GUI comprises straightforward and intuitive icons, panels, and dataflows, representing the existence, capacity, or number of processes, memory structures, and the like of the application being monitored. In addition, the monitoring system includes an alert firing mechanism and process for alerting an administrator to potential or actual performance problems in the application. |
| US08181152B2 |
Portlet template based on a state design pattern
A method for designing object-oriented software for implementing portlets, and an associated computer system and computer program product. The portlets are available to a user of the software who clicks on a link of a first page to identify an action object of an Action class and a state object of a State class. The software includes the State class, the Action class, and program code. The State class includes a method for displaying a view of a page. The Action class includes an actionPerformed method for performing an action and a setState method for setting the state object into the session. The program code is adapted to execute: the actionPerformed method of the action object to perform the action; the setState method of the action object to set the state object; and the method of the state object to display a view of a second page. |
| US08181150B2 |
System and method for synchronized workflow management
A workflow manager that offers structure and control over the graphical modeling environment so that the graphical modeling environment is reconfigured in a manner appropriate for a particular workflow is disclosed. The workflow manager of the present invention provides hierarchical task management that is synchronized to the graphical modeling environment. The workflow manager also allows a model designer to navigate a series of steps required to achieve the goal of a particular workflow. An API allows the steps to be customized as required by the end user. |
| US08181145B2 |
Method and apparatus for generating a floorplan using a reduced netlist
One embodiment provides a system comprising methods and apparatuses that generate a floorplan for a hierarchical circuit design. More specifically, the system can receive a non-reduced netlist description for the hierarchical circuit design, and generate a reduced netlist which includes the interface logic elements of the netlist. The system can then generate the floorplan by using the reduced netlist as input. Note that the amount of computational resources and time required to generate a floorplan is substantially reduced because the system generates the floorplan using the reduced netlist instead of using the non-reduced netlist. |
| US08181144B2 |
Circuit timing analysis incorporating the effects of temperature inversion
Methods and apparatus for increasing the accuracy of timing characterization of a circuit including one or more cells in a cell library are provided. One method includes the steps of: performing cell library timing characterization for each of the cells in the circuit for at least first and second prescribed temperatures, the first and second temperatures corresponding to first and second PVT corners, respectively, in the cell library; calculating respective cell delays for the one or more cells in the circuit, the cell delay calculation being a function of temperature for each instance of the one or more cells; and incorporating the cell delay calculation into the timing characterization for each of the cells in the circuit to thereby increase the accuracy of the timing characterization. |
| US08181136B2 |
Circuit operation verification method and apparatus
In order to confirm a propagation range of a signal whose signal value is fixed by a control signal to restrain switchings is within a predetermined range, it is judged by results of the logic simulation whether or not a switching restraining mode is enabled. If it is enabled, a switching probability restraint information list including the detected time and an ID of the net whose signal value is fixed is set to the net whose signal value is fixed, and then is propagated to the next net according to the results of the logic simulation. If the circuit changes are appropriated conducted, the results of the logic simulation do not satisfy the propagation condition of the switching probability restraint information list. Accordingly, the switching probability restraint information list is not propagated over the predetermined range, and no problem is detected. |
| US08181135B2 |
Hold transition fault model and test generation method
A method of hold fault modeling and test generation. The method includes first modeling a fast-to-rise and a fast-to-fall hold fault for a plurality of circuit nets. Testing a fast-to-rise hold fault is accomplished by: setting up a logic value on each of the plurality of circuit nodes to 0; transitioning each of the plurality of circuit nodes from 0 to 1 with a single clock pulse; and determining if at least one downstream node was inadvertently impacted by the transitioning from 0 to 1. Testing a fast-to-fall hold is accomplished by: setting up a logic value on each of the plurality circuit nodes to 1; transitioning each of the plurality of circuit nodes from 1 to 0 with a single clock pulse; and determining if at least one downstream node was inadvertently impacted by the transitioning from 1 to 0. |
| US08181132B2 |
Validating one or more circuits using one or more grids
In one embodiment, a method includes simulating by one or more computer systems a larger circuit to assign one or more values to one or more latch variables associated with the larger circuit, generating by the one or more computer systems one or more reduced circuits from the larger circuit according to the values assigned to the latch variables, generating by the one or more computer systems a transition relation (TR) for each reduced circuit, and generating by the one or more computer systems an initial state set for one or more instances of validation on the reduced circuits according to the TRs. |
| US08181127B2 |
Standardization of assist pattern inserted into outermost pattern for enhancing depth of focus margin
A method for processing optical proximity correction is disclosed which eliminates a need for repeated implementation of experiments and result in a reducing the processing time as compared to trial and error. Furthermore, the method can realize an optimal insertion of the assist pattern by applying different conditions to specific layers. The method includes determining whether or not to insert an assist pattern around an outermost pattern. A shape of the assist pattern inserted around the outermost pattern is determined. The contrast of the outermost pattern is compared against a contrast of a cell array pattern. The contrast of the outermost pattern is repeated compared with the contrast of the cell array pattern under a defocus state. |
| US08181123B2 |
Managing virtual port associations to users in a gesture-based computing environment
Techniques for managing virtual ports are disclosed herein. Each such virtual port may have different associated features such as, for example, privileges, rights or options. When one or more users are in a capture scene of a gesture based system, the system may associate virtual ports with the users and maintain the virtual ports. Also provided are techniques for disassociating virtual ports with users or swapping virtual ports between two or more users. |
| US08181109B2 |
Enabling unicode input in legacy operating systems
An apparatus and method for providing Unicode support in legacy operating systems are provided. With the apparatus and method, a focus hook module, keyboard hook module, and keystroke conversion module are registered with the legacy operating system. The focus hook module determines the currently active application and whether the currently active application is Unicode capable. The keyboard hook module receives keyboard events from an input interface and sends those keyboard events to the keystroke conversion module. The keystroke conversion module converts the keyboard events into Unicode characters which are sent back to the keyboard hook module. The keyboard hook module then stores the Unicode characters in a temporary storage memory, e.g., the clipboard. The keyboard hook module then sends a command to the application to paste the contents of the temporary storage memory to the currently active application. |
| US08181108B2 |
Device for editing metadata of divided object
In a system that performs object division of a manuscript and adds metadata, a method is provided which can edit the metadata by an intuitive operation when no appropriate metadata is added or when it is desired that the metadata be increased by adding. An image processing device, which divides an manuscript acquired through an input component into a plurality of objects and adds the metadata, has a user interface for editing the metadata of the objects, and switches, after selecting first and second objects, a retouching method of the metadata in accordance with the contents of the respective metadata of the first object and second object. |
| US08181096B2 |
Configurable Reed-Solomon decoder based on modified Forney syndromes
A method of configurable decoding is disclosed. The method generally includes the steps of (A) receiving a variable value in a configuration signal, (B) calculating a plurality of first syndromes corresponding to a particular codeword of a plurality of codewords received in an input signal, the particular codeword having a plurality of information symbols and a plurality of parity symbols coded such that up to a fixed value of a plurality of errors in the particular codeword are correctable, the fixed value being greater than the variable value, (C) transforming the first syndromes into a plurality of second syndromes such that no greater than the variable value of the errors in the particular codeword are correctable and (D) generating an intermediate signal carrying the second syndromes. |
| US08181091B2 |
High speed LDPC decoding
An optical probability-domain LDPC decoder suitable for implementation at 100 Gb/s and above provides large coding gains when based on large-girth LDPC codes. A basic building block, the probabilities multiplier circuit, used to implement both check node and probability node update circuits can be implemented using Mach-Zehnder delay interferometer. |
| US08181089B1 |
Method for auto-correction of errors in a solid-state memory system
A method for auto-correction of errors in an array of solid-state storage devices having a plurality of storage channels dedicated to storing parity data to provide fault tolerance for a loss of at least two of the plurality of storage channels. A read operation from the storage channels transfers data to a plurality of channel memories. The data in the channel memories is checked to confirm the data is valid. Responsive to detection of invalid data, the data may be tested to identify the storage channel in error, including sequentially excluding data read form a different one of the plurality of channel memories from a parity check and determining the validity of data from remaining channel memories. If valid data is obtained, the storage channel from which the data was excluded is identified as the storage channel in error. |
| US08181085B2 |
Method and system for providing short block length low density parity check (LDPC) codes in support of broadband satellite applications
An approach is provided for encoding short frame length Low Density Parity Check (LDPC) codes. An encoder generates a LDPC code having an outer Bose Chaudhuri Hocquenghem (BCH) code. Structure is imposed on the LDPC codes by restricting portion part of the parity check matrix to be lower triangular and/or satisfying other requirements such that the communication between bit nodes and check nodes of the decoder is simplified. Further, a cyclic redundancy check (CRC) encoder is supplied to encode the input signal according to a CRC code. This approach has particular application in digital video broadcast services over satellite. |
| US08181083B2 |
Methods and architectures for layered decoding of LDPC codes with minimum latency
An embodiment of a decoder for decoding a Low-Density Parity-Check encoded input data includes a serial processing unit operating in clock cycles to perform serial update of the layers in the code. Operations of the serial processing unit to produce output data for a current layer are pipelined with acquisition of input data for a next layer, whereby the current layer and the next layer may attempt to use soft output information common to both layers. The serial processing unit is configured for delaying acquisition of input data for the next layer over a number of idle clock cycles. Latency due to the idle clock cycles is minimized by selectively modifying the sequence of layers through the decoding process and the sequence of messages processed by a certain layer. |
| US08181081B1 |
System and method for decoding correlated data
A decoding system for a communication channel includes N parallel channel detection modules that generate N first probability vectors based on sequences of X correlated bits in each of N groups of correlated bits, respectively. N parallel updating modules generate M second probability vectors based on the N first probability vectors and N feedback signals. N parallel estimation modules generate estimates of the X correlated bits in each of the N groups of correlated bits based on the M second probability vectors. N parallel decoding modules generate the N feedback signals and N output signals based on the estimates of the X correlated bits in each of the N groups of correlated bits. X is an integer greater than one, M is an integer greater than or equal to one, and N is an integer greater than or equal to M. |
| US08181075B2 |
Error correction device and recording and reproducing device
An error correction device is a device detecting and correcting an error of uncorrected data. The error correction device includes a temporary storage buffer (data buffer) having a storage area divided into a plurality of units and storing the uncorrected data divided into storage area units, and an error correction part (error correction circuit) repeatedly performing detecting an error of the uncorrected data stored in the temporary storage buffer, correcting the detected error, and writing the corrected error into the temporary storage buffer for each storage area unit. The error correction part corrects the error of the uncorrected data for storage area unit of the temporary storage buffer to successively write the corrected data into the temporary storage buffer. |
| US08181073B2 |
SRAM macro test flop
A SRAM (Static Random Access Memory) macro test flop circuit includes a flip-flop circuit, a scan control circuit, and an output buffer circuit. The flip-flop circuit includes a master latch circuit and a slave latch circuit. The master latch circuit includes a master feed-back circuit including a master storage node and a master feed-forward circuit. The slave latch circuit includes a slave feed-back circuit including a slave storage node and a slave feed-forward circuit driven from the master latch. The scan control circuit includes a scan slave feed-forward circuit, a scan latch circuit, and a scan driver circuit driven by the scan feed-back circuit. The scan latch circuit includes a scan feed-back circuit comprising a scan storage node and a scan feed-forward circuit driven from the slave latch. The output buffer circuit includes a master driver driven from master latch circuit and a slave driver driven from slave latch circuit. |
| US08181071B2 |
Automatically managing system downtime in a computer network
Embodiments are provided to automatically managing system downtime in a computer network. In one embodiment, an event is created in an application server to schedule a system downtime period for a web server. When the scheduled downtime occurs, the web server is automatically removed from the network and a downtime notification message is automatically communicated indicating that the web server is offline. In another embodiment, events may be created to schedule downtime for web-based applications, including websites. Prior to the scheduled downtime, requests to a web-based application may be automatically stopped and redirected to a specified location. In another embodiment, the operation of web servers is automatically monitored to detect the presence of a fault condition and, if a fault condition is present, then a determination may be made that the affected web servers are down and requests to the down web servers are automatically redirected to an alternate server. |
| US08181070B2 |
Error detection in a networked embedded system
A method for detecting errors in a networked embedded system having a multiplicity of components. Error and/or diagnostic data which are relevant to a component are stored in a set of further components of the networked embedded system and are determined if necessary (for example if a disturbance, error or failure occurs). This method is used, in particular, to find error and/or diagnostic data relating to a failed component of a networked embedded system. |
| US08181069B2 |
Method and system for problem determination using probe collections and problem classification for the technical support services
A system and method for problem determination using probe collections and problem classification for the technical support services monitor and collect data associated with a computer system, raise an alarm based on the monitored and collected data, probe the computer system for additional information, filter the monitored and collected data based on the additional information established from probing, and use the filtered data to label a problem associated with the raised alarm. |
| US08181067B2 |
Apparatus and method for test and debug of a processor/core having advanced power management
An interface unit is provided in a JTAG test and debug procedure involving a plurality of processor cores. The interface unit includes a TAP unit. A switch unit is coupled to the interface unit and switch units are coupled to each of the plurality of processor/cores. When the processor/cores have advanced power management systems, a sleep inhibit signal can be applied to the processor/core state machine preventing the state machine from entering a lower power state. The parameters of the processor/core can be tested to determine when the test and debug procedures can be implemented. When the (power) parameters are to low to permit test and debug, the test and debug unit can provide a command forcing the state machine into a state for which test and debug procedures can be implemented. |
| US08181064B2 |
Information processing apparatus for inhibiting instructions, saving and restoring internal information in response to abnormality in redundant processor system
A northbridge, when detecting a synchronization break of a redundant CPU, stops the operation of an abnormal CPU bus where an error has occurred and the firmware in a firmware hub instructs the northbridge to inhibit an external instruction. In addition, the firmware saves the inside information of a normal CPU connected to a normal CPU bus and cache data on a memory and the northbridge issues reset to all CPUs in the home system board. The firmware then restores the inside information of the CPU saved on the memory to all CPUs and instructs the northbridge to cancel the inhibition of the external instruction. |
| US08181061B2 |
Memory management and recovery for datacenters
A system including a plurality of servers, a client, and a metadata server is described herein. The servers each store tracts of data, a plurality of the tracts comprising a byte sequence and being distributed among the plurality of servers. To locate the tracts, the metadata server generates a table that is used by the client to identify servers associated with the tracts, enabling the client to provide requests to the servers. The metadata server also enables recovery in the event of a server failure. Further, the servers construct tables of tract identifiers and locations to use in responding to the client requests. |
| US08181055B2 |
Applying power to a network interface
A host device capable of communicating with an external network. The host device may comprise a power-application unit and a network interface. The power-application unit may receive from a power-supply unit a first power-supply output having a first voltage level and a second power-supply output having a second voltage level. The power-application unit may be controllable for producing selectively a first power-application output having a third voltage level from the first power-supply output and a second power-application output having a fourth voltage level from the second power-supply output. The network interface may transmit data to and receive data from an external network, and may be powered at least in part by the first and second power-application outputs. |
| US08181054B2 |
Arrangement and method for controlling power modes of hardware resources
A circuit arrangement and method of executing program code which utilize power control instructions capable of dynamically controlling power dissipation of multiple hardware resources during execution of a program by a processor. The processor configured to process such power control instructions and to maintain the power modes of the multiple hardware resources to that specified in an earlier-processed power control instruction, such that subsequently-processed instructions will be processed while the power modes of the multiple hardware resources are set to that specified by the earlier-processed power control instruction. |
| US08181053B2 |
Power saving device and all-in-one PC having the same for controlling standby power to memory controller and memory
A power saving device is configured in an all-in-one PC and has a power module expandably composed of a plurality of Ni-MH cells linked up either in series connection or in parallel connection. When an external alternating power provides power supply for the PC, a charging circuit of the power saving device charges the power module. When the alternating power is out or the PC is operated to enter a power saving mode, a controller of the power saving device notifies the PC to enter the power saving mode, while the power module provides power for the memory and memory controller of the PC with low power consumption. The all-in-one PC consumes little power while in power saving mode and is capable of restoring to its normal mode in short time. The power saving device enhances the all-in-one PC with features of instant-on, long-time standby, and backup power provision. |
| US08181050B2 |
Adaptive throttling for data processing systems
An adaptive throttling system for minimizing the impact of non-production work on production work in a computer system is provided. The adaptive throttling system throttles production work and non-production work to optimize production. The adaptive throttling system allows system administrators to specify a quantified limit on the performance impact of non-production or utility work on production work. The throttling rate of the utility is then automatically determined by a supervisory agent, so that the utilities' impact is kept within the specified limit. The adaptive throttling system adapts dynamically to changes in workloads so as to ensure that valuable system resources are well utilized and utility work is not delayed unnecessarily. |
| US08181046B2 |
Transparent self-hibernation of non-volatile memory system
A memory system self-initiates hibernation mode and responds to host commands issued during hibernation within a host protocol timeout period. Hibernation mode is entered after controller state data has been stored and while no host command to the memory system is pending. Power to volatile data storage is diminished during hibernation mode. Upon receiving a host command during hibernation mode, power is restored and a reduced portion of the controller state data is read from non-volatile memory. A removable data storage device or a portable electronic device with embedded data storage may be constructed with such a self-hibernating memory system. |
| US08181045B2 |
Power control bus
A circuit and method utilizing a power control data bus for implementing power control. Various aspects of the present invention provide an electrical circuit that comprises a power supply circuit that outputs electrical power. The electrical circuit may also comprise an integrated circuit that receives electrical power from the power supply circuit. The electrical circuit may also comprise a power control data bus, which communicatively couples a power control data bus interface of the power supply circuit and a power control data bus interface of the integrated circuit. The power control data bus may, for example, carry power control data between the integrated circuit and the power supply circuit. Various aspects of the present invention also provide a method that comprises communicating power control data over a power control data bus and utilizing the power control data to control characteristics of electrical power provided to an integrated circuit or module. |
| US08181041B2 |
Wave-modulated switching frequency voltage regulator
A method and apparatus for a wave-modulated switching frequency voltage regulator VR are described. In one embodiment, a controller dynamically adjusts a phase switching frequency of the VR to render the VR immune from synchronization between an IC load frequency and the VR phase switching frequency. In one embodiment, the method includes generation of a dynamic switching frequency waveform according to a wave modulated reference voltage. The dynamic switching frequency waveform may comprise a plurality of pulses with a modulated frequency. At least two, time-shifted pulse width modulated (PWM) waveforms may be fired to corresponding drivers of a multi-phase switching VR in response to such dynamic switching waveform. In one embodiment, PWM waveforms are fired to the drivers of the regulator in response to a frequency of the pulses of the dynamic switching frequency waveform to provide continuous adjustment of the VR switching frequency. Other embodiments are described and claimed. |
| US08181039B2 |
Disc drive counterfeiting countermeasure
Counterfeiting of optical disc drives used with game systems is prevented by storing an obfuscated authentication key in firmware of the disc drive. Each disc drive can implement a different obfuscation scheme. The authentication key is parsed into components and the components are stored in various locations in firmware of the disc drive. Drive specific software also is stored in the firmware. Remaining locations of the firmware are randomly populated with binary values. |
| US08181031B2 |
Biometric authentication device and system
A biometric sensor device, a portable electronic device including an actuatable biometric input device, and method of biometric authentication that includes an input device that generates a signal or completes a circuit when actuated, and a biometric reader that reads a biometric of a user when the user actuates the input device to generate the signal or complete the circuit. An authentication section authenticates the biometric read on the biometric reader to generate one of a data access allowance function based on authentication of the biometric input to the actuatable biometric input device and a data access prevention function based on non-authentication of the biometric input to the actuatable biometric input device. The data access allowance function permits data to be accessed at the data access interface, and the data access prevention function prevents reading and/or access to data anywhere on the data storage and access device. |
| US08181028B1 |
Method for secure system shutdown
In one embodiment, a key list entry corresponding to a user's private key is securely deleted from a key list of a user device on shutdown of the user device. Subsequently, input of the user's private key will not allow decryption of an encrypted partition storing encrypted data on the user device. In another embodiment, a key list entry corresponding to a user's private key is automatically and securely re-provisioned on boot up of the user device. Subsequently, input of the user's private key will allow decryption of the encrypted partition on the user device. |
| US08181027B2 |
Compressed data scrambled distribution device and playback device thereof
The present invention provides a scrambled compressed data distribution device that can perform a high-resistance scrambled compressed data distribution by selectively using a plurality of types of scramble information and a playback device thereof.A scrambling section scrambles compressed data by unique one of a plurality of scrambling methods. A hash value calculating section determines a hash value based on data b in a position where digital watermark data is not embedded, and an encrypting section encrypts the hash value with a secret key Sk(n) corresponding to the scrambling method and outputs an encrypted hash value c. A watermark data embedding section embeds the encrypted hash value in a watermark data embedding position of the data b and transmits the same as a compressed data stream d. |
| US08181022B2 |
Method and apparatus for controlling access restrictions for media playback
A method and apparatus for controlling access restrictions for media resource playback may include defining a user-specific content control profile authorizing one or more classes of content to be delivered to a client device, generating a media resource request identifying a first media resource associated with a first class of content and one or more attributes of the content control profile, determining whether the first class of content has been authorized for delivery to the client device based at least in part upon the one or more attributes of the content control profile, and delivering the first media resource to the client device if the first class of content has been authorized for delivery to the client device. |
| US08181020B2 |
System and method for securely storing firmware
A mechanism for creating and accessing a secure storage area for firmware that stores a “Virtual ROM” module reference or pointer in the actual ROM that includes a unique identifier for the virtual ROM module to be retrieved is discussed. The actual ROM image also contains a generated unique identifier for the whole machine. In retrieving a Virtual ROM module, both the module identifier and the machine identifier are used. Once retrieved, the module is validated using a message digest stored in the Virtual ROM module reference. If required, the Virtual ROM module is then decrypted using a secret key that is stored elsewhere in the actual ROM. Updates to the Virtual ROM module are made in memory by pre-boot code. At a point in time when these updates are complete, the Virtual ROM module is written back out to the location from which it was retrieved. The Virtual ROM module reference that is in the actual ROM is updated to reflect the new message digest value and the module reference and the machine identifier used for the PC are write-disabled. Additionally, if the storage has been encrypted, and a secret key is being used, the region of the actual ROM that contains the secret key is read-disabled. |
| US08181019B2 |
Systems and methods for managing CRLS for a multi-core system
The present invention is directed towards systems and methods for maintaining Certificate Revocation Lists (CRLs) for client access in a multi-core system. A first core may generate a secondary CRL corresponding to a master CRL maintained by the first core. The CRLs may identify certificates to revoke. The first core can store the secondary CRL to a memory element accessible by the cores. A second core may receive a request to validate a certificate. The second core can provisionally determine, via access to the secondary CRL, whether the certificate is revoked. The second core may also determine not to revoke the certificate. Responsive to the determination, the second core may request the first core to validate the certificate. The first core can determine whether to revoke the certificate based on the master CRL. The first core may send a message to the second core based on the determination. |
| US08181018B2 |
Master key trust grants and revocations for minor keys
A method and apparatus is provided that allows code signed by a master key to grant trust to an arbitrary second key, and also allows code, referred to as an antidote and also signed by the master key to revoke permanently the trust given to the second key. |
| US08181017B2 |
Certificate renewal
An intermediate certificate authority (ICA) for a hierarchical certificate authority structure (HCAS), the HCAS having a plurality of levels, the levels including a root level, at least one intermediate level, and a leaf level, the root level having a root certificate authority, the ICA being in the at least one intermediate level, the ICA including a certificate receiving module to receive a first certificate signed by a certificate authority in a level above the level of the ICA, the first certificate certifying an aspect of the ICA, the first certificate having an expiration time, and a certificate signing module to sign a second certificate for a member of the HCAS, prior to the expiration time of the first certificate, such that the second certificate expires after the expiration time of the first certificate, the member being in a level below the level of the ICA, the second certificate certifying an aspect of the member. Related apparatus and methods are also described. |
| US08181012B2 |
Image processing apparatus transmitting encrypted document to another apparatus, control method thereof, and program product for information processing
An information processing apparatus transmits an encrypted document to a destination that is received as the destination of the encrypted document, stores the received destination, and determines whether the stored destination is a correct destination or not. If it is determined to be the correct destination, it transmits a decryption key of the encrypted document to the relevant destination. |
| US08180996B2 |
Distributed computing system with universal address system and method
A distributed computing system that incorporates enhanced distributed storage and a universal address system and method are provided. |
| US08180995B2 |
Logical address offset in response to detecting a memory formatting operation
The present disclosure includes methods, devices, and systems for a logical address offset. One method embodiment includes detecting a memory unit formatting operation. Subsequently, in response to detecting the formatting operation, the method includes inspecting format information on the memory unit, calculating a logical address offset, and applying the offset to a host logical address. |
| US08180994B2 |
Optimized page programming order for non-volatile memory
During a programming data transfer process in a non-volatile storage system, recording units of data are transferred from a host to a memory device, such as a memory card. For each recording unit, pages of data are arranged in an order such that a page which takes longer to write to a memory array of the memory device is provided before a page which takes less time to write. Overall programming time for the recording unit is reduced since a greater degree of parallel processing occurs. While the page which takes longer to program is being programmed to the memory array, the page which takes less time to program is being transferred to the memory device. After programming is completed, the memory device signals the host to transfer a next recording unit. The pages of data may include lower, middle and upper pages. |
| US08180992B2 |
Method for configuring a memory space divided into memory banks
A method for configuring a memory space, the method including reading a piece of configuration information in the memory space, determining a division of at least one part of the memory space into memory banks according to the configuration information read; and allocating to each of the memory banks an access number to be used to access a data location in the memory bank, in combination with a logic address of the location in the memory bank. |
| US08180989B2 |
Storage controller and storage control method
A storage controller having a plurality of storage devices and a control circuit providing a plurality of virtual volumes, to each of which a storage area in a plurality of pool volumes provided with the plurality of storage devices can be mapped for writing data in response to a write access sent from an information processing apparatus to a logical area in one of the plurality of virtual volumes, respectively. The control circuit, according to a search of the plurality of pool volumes for a certain storage area in which a certain data pattern is written, releases the certain storage area from mapping to a logical area in the plurality of virtual volumes, so that the control circuit can use the released certain storage area for mapping to a virtual volume of the plurality of virtual volumes as a destination of another write access from the information processing apparatus. |
| US08180988B2 |
Method and system for authenticating storage device connected through intermediate converter
A system provided for authenticating a storage device includes a computer system, an intermediate converter and a storage device. The computer system stores an application program to execute functions of a storage device. The intermediate converter connects the computer system and the storage device. The storage device store multiple predetermined sector addresses and an order of the predetermined sector addresses. The computer system authenticates the storage device using the application program and sector data stored at the predetermined sector addresses. The predetermined sector addresses may be predetermined by both the storage device and the application program. |
| US08180985B2 |
Storage switch, storage system, and data copying method using bitmaps representing different sized regions
A storage switch includes a first bitmap generator for generating a first bitmap, a controller for controlling copying of data, a first modifier, a second bitmap generator for generating a second bitmap, a second modifier, a merging controller for controlling to generate a third bitmap. When the writing of data is performed during the copying of data, the merging controller modifies a part of the index bits in the third bitmap corresponding to a part of the index bits of the first bitmap modified by the first modifier on account of the copying of data performed before the writing of data, and merges the second bitmap modified by the second modifier and the third bitmap modified by the merging controller. The controller resumes copying of data of any sub-regions on the basis of the merged bitmap. |
| US08180983B1 |
Caching filenames of a striped directory in predictable locations within a volume locally accessible to a storage server node
A method and system for caching filenames of a directory that is striped across the volumes serviced by a plurality of storage server nodes. The method comprises storing a filename in a first volume and a second volume of the striped volume set in the same locations within the respective volumes. The same locations within the respective volumes refer to the same locations with respect to a reference point of a directory structure in the respective volumes. |
| US08180980B2 |
Device emulation support within a host data processing apparatus
A data processing apparatus 12 is provided with a memory management unit 24 which triggers memory aborts. When a memory abort occurs, data characterizing the memory abort is written to a fault status register 28 (memory-abort register). The data characterizing the memory abort includes data identifying a register number associated with the memory access which gave rise to the memory abort. This register identifying data is used to emulate the action of the memory access instruction without having to read the program instruction lead to the memory abort. This is useful in providing virtualization support for a virtual data processing apparatus 2. |
| US08180978B1 |
Address locked loop
An address locked loop (ALL) apparatus for address recycling is provided. The apparatus comprises a block of memory further comprising a plurality of buffers configured to store a plurality of incoming packets, an address stack configured for storing of a plurality of free addresses, an address locked loop (ALL) control block configured to provide an arbitrated interface with the address stack for filling address requests by a local process and for returning free addresses from the local process to the address stack, and a stack address counter configured to maintain count of the available free addresses remaining on the address stack. |
| US08180975B2 |
Controlling interference in shared memory systems using parallelism-aware batch scheduling
A “request scheduler” provides techniques for batching and scheduling buffered thread requests for access to shared memory in a general-purpose computer system. Thread-fairness is provided while preventing short- and long-term thread starvation by using “request batching.” Batching periodically groups outstanding requests from a memory request buffer into larger units termed “batches” that have higher priority than all other buffered requests. Each “batch” may include some maximum number of requests for each bank of the shared memory and for some or all concurrent threads. Further, average thread stall times are reduced by using computed thread rankings in scheduling request servicing from the shared memory. In various embodiments, requests from higher ranked threads are prioritized over requests from lower ranked threads. In various embodiments, a parallelism-aware memory access scheduling policy improves intra-thread bank-level parallelism. Further, rank-based request scheduling may be performed with or without batching. |
| US08180974B2 |
System, apparatus, and method for modifying the order of memory accesses
Systems and methods for controlling memory access operations are disclosed. The system may include one or more requestors performing requests to memory devices. Within a memory controller, a request queue receives requests from a requestor, a bank decoder determines a destination bank, and the request is placed in an appropriate bank queue. An ordering unit determines if the current request can be reordered relative to the received order and generates a new memory cycle order based on the reordering determination. The reordering may be based on whether there are multiple requests to the same memory page, multiple reads, or multiple writes. A memory interface executes each memory request in the memory cycle order. A data buffer holds write data until it is written to the memory and read data until it is returned to the requestor. The data buffer also may hold memory words used in read-modify-write operations. |
| US08180973B1 |
Servicing interrupts and scheduling code thread execution in a multi-CPU network file server
Interrupts and code threads are assigned in a particular way to the core CPUs of a network file server in order to reduce latency for processing client requests for file access. Threads of the network stack are incorporated into real time threads that are scheduled by a real-time scheduler and executed exclusively by a plurality of the core CPUs that are not interrupted by disk adapter interrupts so that the disk adapter interrupts do not interrupt execution of the network stack. Instances of a storage access driver are hard affinity threads, and soft affinity threads include a multitude of instances of a thread of the file system stack for file access request processing so that file access request processing for a multitude of concurrent file access requests is load balanced over the core CPUs. |
| US08180969B2 |
Cache using pseudo least recently used (PLRU) cache replacement with locking
A cache stores information in each of a plurality of cache lines. Addressing circuitry receives memory addresses for comparison with multiple ways of stored addresses to determine a hit condition representing a match of a stored address and a received address. A pseudo least recently used (PLRU) tree circuit stores one or more states of a PLRU tree and implements a tree having a plurality of levels beginning with a root and indicates one of a plurality of ways in the cache. Each level has one or more nodes. Multiple nodes within a same level are child nodes to a parent node of an immediately higher level. PLRU update circuitry that is coupled to the addressing circuitry and the PLRU tree circuit receives lock information to lock one or more lines of the cache and prevent a PLRU tree state from selecting a locked line. |
| US08180966B2 |
System and method for operating a packet buffer in an intermediate node
A technique implements a novel high-speed high-density packet buffer utilizing a combination of high-speed and low-speed memory devices. The novel packet buffer is organized as a plurality of FIFO queues where each FIFO queue is associated with a particular input or output line. Each queue comprises a high-speed cache portion that resides in high-speed memory and a low-speed high-density portion that resides in low-speed high-density memory. The high-speed cache portion contains FIFO data that contains head and/or tail associated with the novel FIFO queue. The low-speed high-density portion contains FIFO data that is not contained in the high-speed cache portion. |
| US08180965B2 |
System and method for cache access prediction
A cache system includes a cache having a plurality of cache units, a prediction table and a hashing module. The prediction table is utilized to store way information of at least one cache unit corresponding to at least one accessing address, and the hashing module generates a hashing value corresponding to a target accessing address and reads way information from the prediction table or writes the way information to the prediction table by using the hashing value as an index. |
| US08180959B2 |
Efficiently synchronizing with separated disk caches
In a method of synchronizing with a separated disk cache, the separated cache is configured to transfer cache data to a staging area of a storage device. An atomic commit operation is utilized to instruct the storage device to atomically commit the cache data to a mapping scheme of the storage device. |
| US08180957B2 |
Memory control unit and memory control method
An object of the invention is to provide a memory control unit and a memory control method capable of making the operation setting of SDRAM without intentionally stopping access to the SDRAM. A switch signal generation section (18) for generating a switch signal to switch the operation setting of SDRAM (200), a switch control section (16) for switching the operation setting of the SDRAM (200) using a switch setup value (17) as the switch signal is output from the switch signal generation section (18), and an access control section (14) for suppressing acceptance of an access request to the SDRAM (200) in the time period from the switch start time of the operation setting to the switch completion time are provided. Accordingly, when the operation setting of the SDRAM (200) is changed, it is not necessary to intentionally stop access to the SDRAM (200) and it is made possible to change the operation setting of the SDRAM (200) without being affected by the access situation to the SDRAM (200). |
| US08180956B2 |
Method for controlling memory card and method for controlling nonvolatile semiconductor memory
A method controlling a memory card including a nonvolatile semiconductor memory including plural write areas. The method: formats the plural write areas; creates a temporary file entry describing a reserved region size including a free part of the plural write areas and a start position of the reserved region; writes a file in the reserved region from the start position after creating the temporary file entry; when the file has been completely written, determines size of the file written and writes a final file entry describing the start position and file size; when the file has not been completely written, references the temporary file entry to recognize the start position; detects a final position in the reserved region; determines size of the unfinished file using the start position and final position; changes the temporary file entry to a final entry describing the start position and unfinished file size. |
| US08180955B2 |
Computing systems and methods for managing flash memory device
A computing system is provided. A flash memory device includes at least one mapping block, at least one modification block and at least one cache block. A processor is configured to perform: receiving a write command with a write logical address and predetermined data, loading content of a cache page from the cache block corresponding to the modification block according to the write logical address to a random access memory device in response to that a page of the mapping block corresponding to the write logical address has been used, the processor, reading orderly the content of the cache page stored in the random access memory device to obtain location information of an empty page of the modification block, and writing the predetermined data to the empty page according to the location information. Each cache page includes data fields to store location information corresponding to the data has been written in the pages of the modification block in order. |
| US08180954B2 |
Flash management using logical page size
Disclosed are techniques for flash memory management, including tracking payload data via one or more data structures configured to define the size of logical pages in a flash memory. In various embodiments, the logical page size may be larger than, equal to, or smaller than a physical page size of a flash memory chip. |
| US08180951B2 |
Memory system and method of controlling the memory system
A memory system for transmitting data to and receiving data from a host apparatus includes a semiconductor memory and an access-controlling part. The semiconductor memory has storage areas identified by physical addresses, stores data in each of the storage areas, performs data write in accordance with a request made by the host apparatus. The access-controlling part selects a recommended address, which is recommended to be used in a next data write, on the basis of operation information about a factor that influences time consumed for data write in the semiconductor memory, and outputs the recommended address to the host apparatus. |
| US08180950B2 |
Apparatus and method to manage information using an optical and holographic data storage medium
A hybrid optical and holographic data storage medium is disclosed. In addition, a method is disclosed to manage information using that optical and holographic data storage medium. The method reads information from the optical data storage layer before reading data from, or writing data to, the holographic data storage layer. |
| US08180949B1 |
Resource virtualization switch
Methods and apparatus are provided for virtualizing resources including peripheral components and peripheral interfaces. Peripheral component such as hardware accelerators and peripheral interfaces such as port adapters are offloaded from individual servers onto a resource virtualization switch. Multiple servers are connected to the resource virtualization switch over an I/O bus fabric such as PCI Express or PCI-AS. The resource virtualization switch allows efficient access, sharing, management, and allocation of resources. |
| US08180939B2 |
Memory devices implementing clock mirroring scheme and related memory systems and clock mirroring methods
A memory device is configured to operate in first and second data input/output modes. The memory device includes a first electrode pad, a second electrode pad, a clock signal line, a first switching unit, and a second switching unit. The clock signal line is configured to transmit a clock to an integrated circuit inside the memory device. The first switching unit switches to electrically connect the first electrode pad and the clock signal line in response to a control signal occurring for the first data input/output mode. The second switching unit switches to electrically connect the second electrode pad and the clock signal line in response to an inverse signal of the control signal occurring for the second data input/output mode. |
| US08180938B2 |
Method, system, and computer program product for automatic learning of software keyboard input characteristics
A method for automatic learning of software keyboard input characteristics includes the following steps. (a) An input is received. (b) Whether the input is a normal key input is determined. (c) The input value of the input is stored when the input is determined to be the normal key input. (d) Step (a)-(c) are repeated until (N+1) input values are stored, wherein N is a positive integer. (e) When there are (N+1) inputs stored, the input characteristics of the first input in the (N+1) inputs are determined according to the first stored input value in the stored (N+1) input values. A computer program product using the method and a system for automatic learning of software keyboard input characteristics are also disclosed herein. |
| US08180934B2 |
Device monitoring apparatus, control method therefor, device monitoring system, and recording medium
A device monitoring apparatus capable of effectively reducing load on and power consumption of a device monitoring system, even if there is a device not having a function of notifying restoration from a sleep state. When all of monitored object devices are brought in a simple polling state, a controller of the device monitoring apparatus determines that load on the controller becomes smaller and stops polling the monitored object devices. Instead, a LAN controller, which performs processing simpler than that of the controller, carries out simple polling simpler than normal polling. |
| US08180930B2 |
Information processing device, and device initialization method in the information processing device
The information processing device of the present invention includes: an initialization unit that is realized by the execution of firmware for carrying out a first initialization process for enabling access from the firmware to devices that are connected to the information processing device; a control unit that is realized by operation of an OS for carrying out a second initialization process for enabling access to the devices from the OS; and a main memory unit; wherein the initialization unit includes a device initialization unit for setting the device control information that is necessary for accessing devices in the first initialization process and an initialization information storage unit for storing in the main memory unit initialization information that includes the device control information that was set by the device initialization unit, and where in the control unit includes a device information application unit for acquiring the initialization information of devices from the main memory unit in the second initialization process. |
| US08180927B2 |
Transaction control arrangement for device management system
The invention relates to a method for arranging transaction control in a device management system. A required transaction control operation is defined in a managing device for arranging transaction control of a management task for a managed device. At least one device management command is defined for the transaction control operation. The at least one device management command is transmitted to the managed device. A required transaction control operation is specified in the managed device on the basis of one or more received device management commands, and transaction control for a management task is carried out on the basis of the defined transaction control operation. |
| US08180926B2 |
Adaptable resource spoofing for an extended computer system
A spoofing module that mimics remote computer resources to optimize system responsiveness and avoid expiration of intentional and unintentional timeouts in extended computer systems. The invention is capable of appearing to the host system and selectively responding to the host system as if it were the actual hardware. The invention includes a throttling mechanism to prevent data over-run. |
| US08180925B2 |
Service providing method and integrated circuit
An application program relating to a process of an integrated circuit 21 is stored in a virtual integrated circuit 21 storage area server apparatus 13. Following a mutual authentication between the IC 21 and the virtual IC storage area server apparatus 13 through a portable communication function unit 20, the server apparatus 13 executes the application program. Additionally, through the IC 21, the portable communication function unit 20, a wireless communication line 17, and a network 18, communicate with an IC_R/W apparatus 11 and perform a process relating to a service in collaboration with each other. |
| US08180920B2 |
System and method for processing content
A system for routing media content files having different format characteristics to a plurality of clients over a communication network includes a content translation router. The content translation router is capable of retrieving the content files. In addition, the content translation router includes processing modules for concurrently modifying content files having differing format characteristics to be compatible for transmission over the communication network for viewing at different ones of the clients. |
| US08180919B1 |
Integrated circuit and method of employing a processor in an integrated circuit
According to various embodiments of the present invention, an intelligent framer/mapper integrates the framer, mapper, and the controlling function of the host processor, implemented as either a soft processor or an embedded processor, into a single device, such as a programmable logic device. The use of the soft processor or embedded processors on the device reduces the load on the host processor on the line card. According to some aspects of the invention, the devices takes advantage of an embedded, dedicated processor and/or soft processor(s) to allow for a distributed processing on a single chip. |
| US08180913B2 |
Apparatus and method for providing access to a data stream by a plurality of users at a same time
A system for providing access to a data stream by a plurality of users at a same time. A data stream splitter manager listens for new client device connections. When a new client device connection is identified, the data stream splitter manager generates a pseudo-terminal for the client device and adds the client device and pseudo-terminal information to a data stream splitter table. In addition, a data stream splitter is generated to handle the data transfer. The data stream splitter searches the data stream splitter table for client devices participating in a system resource sharing session. The data stream splitter sends a data stream associated with the shared system resource to the associated client device pseudo-terminals. Also, the data stream splitter sends data from the client devices to the pseudo-terminals and then to the data stream. Consequently, client devices involved in the session has shared system resource access. |
| US08180907B1 |
Managing IPMI sessions
Technologies are described herein for managing Intelligent Platform Management Interface (“IPMI”) sessions between an application module and a target IPMI device. A session abstraction layer module receives an IPMI request from the application module over a first communication link. The session abstraction layer module establishes an IPMI session with the target IPMI device over a second communication link and forwards the IPMI request to the target IPMI device via the established IPMI session. The session abstraction layer module then receives a response to the IPMI request from the target IPMI device via the established IPMI session, and forwards the response to the application module over the first communication link. |
| US08180905B2 |
User-mode based remote desktop protocol (RDP) encoding architecture
Techniques are disclosed for a user-mode based remote desktop protocol (RDP) encoding architecture. A user mode desktop application and user mode virtual channel application run in user-mode session space. Virtual channel data from the virtual channel application is marshaled and sent to a RDP encoder process in user-mode system space. There it is converted to RDP protocol data units (PDU) and sent to a remote client across a communications network. Graphics data from the desktop application is sent to a display driver in kernel-mode session space and then to a graphics reflector that marshals the graphics data and sends it to the RDP encoder for a similar transformation. |
| US08180904B1 |
Data routing and management with routing path selectivity
Data transfer over a network is effected in a manner that facilitates the use of available communications channels and makes possible enhanced data routing control and monitoring. According to an example embodiment of the present invention, data is routed to a remote (e.g., mobile) user device over a packet-communicating network having a plurality of communication links. When the transfer of data to the remote use device is requested or otherwise initiated, a host server selects one of the plurality of communications links available for transferring the data to the remote user device. The host server then uses routing functions (e.g., software) at a registered data source to access and transfer data from the registered data source to the remote user device. |
| US08180901B2 |
Layers 4-7 service gateway for converged datacenter fabric
Layer 4 gateway for a converged datacenter fabric is described herein. According to one embodiment, a packet of a network transaction is received from a client over a first network for accessing a server of a datacenter having a plurality of servers over a second network. One or more network services are performed on the packet including terminating a TCP (transport control protocol) connection associated with the network transaction and generating a data stream. The data stream without TCP information is routed to the server via a converged I/O interface over the second network if the second network is a converged fabric network. The data stream with TCP information is routed via a TCP connection to the server if the second network is an Ethernet. Other methods and apparatuses are also described. |
| US08180900B2 |
System and method of managing information distribution to mobile stations
A system and method for distributing information from a host service in communication with a computer network to a mobile station in communication with a wireless network is provided. A data item associated with the mobile station is received at the host service. The host service then determines whether a network resource of the wireless network is currently associated with the mobile station. If the network resource of the wireless network is not currently associated with the mobile station, then the host service transmits a resource request message to the mobile station to instruct the mobile station to acquire the network resource. Subsequently to acquiring the network resource, the host service is then able to transmit the data item to the mobile station using the network resource. |
| US08180899B2 |
Apparatus and method for supporting broadcast/multicast IP packets through a simplified sockets interface
A method for configuring an IP address to receive broadcast or multicast data flow which modifies the bind( ) Application Programming Interface (API) to survey available local interfaces to determine their ability to be configured to receive data from a particular IP address, configure a interface to receive the IP address if it is so configurable, bind the IP address to that interface. The modified bind*( ) API may interact with one or more interfaces to see if each interface is capable of being configured to the IP address. Alternatively, the modified bind*( ) API determines the configurability of interfaces by consulting the access control list. Policy based routing rules may be implemented so that the modified bind*( ) operation configures the highest priority interface based upon policy parameters. |
| US08180897B2 |
Apparatus and method for hardware implementation or acceleration of operating system functions
An apparatus in one embodiment handles service requests over a network, wherein the network utilizes a protocol. In this aspect, the apparatus includes: a network subsystem for receiving and transmitting network service requests using the network protocol; and a service subsystem, coupled to the network subsystem, for satisfying the network service requests. At least one of the network subsystem and the service subsystem is hardware-implemented; the other of the network subsystem and the service subsystem may optionally be hardware-accelerated. A variety of related embodiments are also provided, including file servers and web servers. |
| US08180896B2 |
Global load balancing on a content delivery network
The invention relates to systems and methods of global load balancing in a content delivery network having a plurality of edge servers which may be distributed across multiple geographic locations. According to one aspect of the invention, a global load balancing system includes a first load balancing server for receiving a packet requesting content to be delivered to a client, selecting one of the plurality of edge servers to deliver the requested content to the client, and forwarding the packet across a network connection to a second load balancing server, which forwards the packet to the selected edge server. The selected edge server, in response to receiving the packet, sends across a network connection the requested content with an address for direct delivery to the client, thereby allowing the requested content to be delivered to the client while bypassing a return path through the first load balancing server. |
| US08180895B2 |
Management of podcasts
Improved techniques that facilitate the use of podcasts are disclosed. The improved techniques can pertain to publishing, hosting, accessing, subscribing, managing, organizing, searching, browsing, transferring, and/or playing podcasts. According to one aspect, tags are embedded into syndication feeds (e.g., RSS feeds) that may be made available for distribution by an online media store to facilitate the management of podcasts. Such tags can include a block tag that may be embedded into a syndication feed to indicate whether the feed is to be blocked from being included in the online media store. According to another aspect, management of podcasts may be facilitated by other mechanisms. In accordance with one embodiment, a user may challenge the ownership of a podcast to block or remove a podcast from the online media store. In accordance with another embodiment, images may be stored to allow efficient retrieval of the corresponding episode(s) of a podcast. |
| US08180887B2 |
Geolocation mapping of network devices
A geographic location of a network device is determined using response delay times from internet servers used as landmarks. A coordination server provides to a client a list of area landmark servers (ALS) with known geographic locations. The client probes ALSs, measures response delays, and provides results to the coordination server. The coordination server then provides to the client a list of additional city landmark servers (CLS) within the area. The client probes the CLSs and provides results to the coordination server which then determines the geographic location of the client. |
| US08180885B2 |
Method and system for administering devices with multiple user metric spaces
Method for administering devices, including creating a user metric vector including a plurality of disparate user metrics, creating a plurality of user metric spaces, each user metric space including a plurality of metric ranges, and selecting, from the plurality of user metric spaces, a user metric space. Methods also include determining whether the user metric vector is outside the selected user metric space, identifying an action in dependence upon the user metric vector, if the user metric vector is outside the selected user metric space, and executing the action. |
| US08180881B2 |
Apparatus for analyzing the packet data on mobile communication network and method thereof
A packet data analyzer on a mobile communication network for analyzing packet data traffic, monitoring services, generating billing information per data service, and monitoring the network based on a protocol analysis, comprises a packet data separator provided between one of a mobile communication exchange and a packet controller that provide a wireless data service to the subscriber, and the service server, for separating user packet data transmitted between one of the mobile communication exchange and the packet controller and the service server, and receiving the user packet data; a traffic analyzer for separating the user packet data received through the packet data separator according to transmission directions, and analyzing the user packet data; a statistics storage unit for storing and managing result data analyzed by the traffic analyzer; and a statistics reference unit for retrieving data stored in the statistics storage unit, and providing statistical information desired by the user. |
| US08180879B2 |
Method and apparatus for persistent connections to a device through the use of multiple physical network connections and connection hand-offs between multiple bands, modes and networks
Embodiments communicate messages between mobile devices and destination devices. An exemplary embodiment includes a first border server operable to establish a first communication connection to the mobile device over a first network operating under a first protocol, a second border server operable to establish a second communication connection to the mobile device over a second network operating under a second protocol, and a transport management server communicatively coupled to the first border server and the second border server, and operable to establish a third communication connection to the destination device over a third network operating under a third protocol. The first protocol is configured to communicate a first encapsulated portion of the message. The second protocol is configured to communicate a second encapsulated portion of the message. The third protocol is configured to communicate the first encapsulated portion of the message and the second encapsulated portion of the message. |
| US08180878B2 |
Methods and apparatuses for terminating an IP multimedia subsystem service when IP address is no longer allocated to the user
A method and network node for terminating an IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS)-enabled communication service involving a user terminal, which has been allocated an IP address by an access network used by the terminal to access the communication service. Upon determining that the IP address is no longer allocated to the user by the access network, the node terminates the IMS communication service. |
| US08180875B1 |
Ping-based communication system (PICS)
A method of synchronizing clocks between local and remote unix-like computers comprising: sending internet control message protocol (ICMP) ping packets between at least two computers in a network; archiving ICMP echo-request and echo-reply packets from the networked computers in an archive file with an ICMP packet capture utility; including information in each echo-request sent from a local computer to a remote computer comprising: (1) the local time stamp of when the last echo-request from the remote computer was received at the local computer, and (2) the local time stamp of when the corresponding echo-reply was sent from the local computer; calculating an approximate clock offset between the networked computers based on the time stamps; and synchronizing the clocks of the networked computers based on the approximate clock offset of the computers. |
| US08180871B2 |
Dynamic redeployment of services in a computing network
Methods, systems, and computer program products for improving network operations by dynamically redeploying services (such as web services or other network-accessible services) in a computing network. A programmatic replication or redeployment process is defined, whereby system upgrades may be implemented by redeploying services dynamically, without human intervention, enabling the complexity of upgrading previously-deployed software to be reduced significantly. |
| US08180870B1 |
Programmable access device for a distributed network access system
A programmable access device for use in a network access system includes first and second network interfaces through which packets are communicated with a network, a forwarding table utilized to route packets communicated between the first and second network interfaces, and a packet header filter. The packet header filter identifies messages received at one of the first and second network interfaces on which policy-based services are to be implemented and passes identified messages via a message interface to an external processor for processing. In preferred embodiments, the packet header filter is capable of filtering packets for service processing based upon protocol information pertaining to protocol layers higher than layer 3. In preferred embodiments, the programmable access device may also include a usage monitor that reports events, such as session activity levels, to the external processor, a policer that polices packets by reference to programmed traffic parameters, and a scheduler that schedules the transmission of outgoing packets to support multiple quality of service classes. |
| US08180867B2 |
Configuration management system for power monitoring and protection system devices
A method of analyzing configuration parameters of IEDs across one or more networks in an electrical system and automatically determines whether any anomalies exist in the configuration parameters for a selected group of IEDs. A list of all IEDs in the electrical system along with configuration templates including firmware and program versions maintained in a master list are stored in central database on a server communicatively coupled to the IEDs through the networks. Configuration parameter values from the IEDs and from any newly added IEDs are scanned and compared against the configuration templates. Anomalies in the parameter values are identified and highlighted to the user, who may decide to accept the anomaly as expected or change the anomalous parameter value for one IED or a group of IEDs. The master list is updated with any user-approved changes to parameter values. Periodic polling of configuration parameters is also supported. |
| US08180866B2 |
Device management apparatus and method for setting configuration-value therein
The present invention discloses a DM system and a method for setting configuration values in the same. The DM system includes: a server for generating configuration values for a predetermined resource of a terminal, transmitting the configuration values and a reconfiguration parameter to the terminal through a DM session, and requesting the terminal to set the configuration values; and the terminal for receiving the configuration values and the reconfiguration parameter, and setting the configuration values in the resource according to the reconfiguration parameter, the terminal being operated according to the configuration values. As a result, the server can generate the configuration values and transmit the configuration values to the terminal, and the terminal can directly apply the configuration values from the server. |
| US08180865B2 |
System and method for application server/operating system network/configuration management
The invention discloses a system and method for network application server/operating system management by packaging configuration function(s) into independently partitioned profiles (or “silos”) that can be dynamically invoked by an “administrative agent” server/program using a “proxy server”/program to distribute profile configuration changes to one or more administrative agents (each of which is assigned one or more application servers/systems). |
| US08180864B2 |
System and method for scripting tool for server configuration
The present invention provides a scripting tool through which a user can interact with and execute scripting instructions of a scripting language on a server to perform administrative tasks. It interprets scripting instructions either interactively, supplied one-at-a-time from a command prompt on a scripting interface, or in batches via a script file, and it can be used either online or offline. The scripting tool enables a user to interact with the server in a session-like manner by establishing a persistent connection with the server. Once the connection is established, each instruction that the user enters to configure the server may use the same connection that has already been established. Such “session-permanent-connection” approach eliminates the need for the user to establish and re-authenticate a connection for each instruction. The scripting tool is also capable of converting an existing configuration file into a reusable script that can be used to create duplicate configurations. This description is not intended to be a complete description of, or limit the scope of, the invention. Other features, aspects, and objects of the invention can be obtained from a review of the specification, the figures, and the claims. |
| US08180859B2 |
System and methods for remotely recovering and purging data from a wireless device in a communications network
A system and methods are provided for remotely recovering and purging data from a wireless device in a communications network. The system includes a wireless device capable of executing a data recovery/purge application program for receiving a message from a communications device in the network. The application program retrieves the data in the wireless device, purges the data from the wireless device, and sends a return message, including the data retrieved from the wireless device, to the communications device. |
| US08180857B2 |
Method for downloading file in parallel
Disclosed is the parallel download for a file, which calculates availability values of each block by using node operation rates of each node having blocks constituting a file, and preferentially downloads a block having a minimum availability value among the calculated availabilities, thereby increasing probability to access the file and each block constituting the file, thus to perform file downloading more accurately and rapidly. |
| US08180852B2 |
Apparatus for increasing social interaction over an electronic network
In one embodiment, a system includes a server that hosts webpages facilitating user interaction between multiple endpoints. The system monitors for a user input requesting initiation of a happy hour, and when the input is detected, modifies the webpages to alert users of the happy hour. The users are notified of which user initiated the happy hour, and are also notified that interaction incentives accumulate at an increased rate during the happy hour. The system also tracks user scorings that accumulate based on the user interaction, and enables certain website features based on these user scorings. The system also tracks ratings for user-uploaded objects and identifies top rated objects for displaying on webpages viewable by other users. |
| US08180850B2 |
Data transmission device, data transmission system and address registration method
A data transmission device receives an instruction from a user via a user interface to search for address information registered in an LDAP server. An address management module of the data transmission device acquires the address information from the LDAP server, and a list of the address information is displayed to the user. When instructed by the user to register a piece of the address information, the address management module acquires an absolute path from the LDAP server, and requests an address management device to register the absolute path. The address management device registers the absolute path and notifies the address management module that the absolute path has been registered. |
| US08180847B2 |
Flexible web service deployment
An apparatus and method for deploying web services in a web services infrastructure are provided. With the apparatus and method, a deployment descriptor for a web service is retrieved from a configuration file. A location type in the deployment descriptor is provided for identifying whether the web service is implemented using a web services description language (WSDL) document only, a JavaBean only, or both a WSDL document and a JavaBean. Based on the location type, and associated attributes of the location type, processes are performed for generating an internal definition of the web service to thereby deploy the web service in the web services infrastructure. |
| US08180845B2 |
Remote debugging of software
Methods and apparatus, including computer program products, for allowing an end user at an end user system to remotely debug a back-end application program executing on a back-end system. To access the services of the back-end application program, the end user system interacts with a front-end application program executing on a front-end system, the front-end application program acting as a proxy to the back-end application program. The front-end application program receives a request for a debugger tool from the end user system and provides to the back-end system an identification of the end user system. Based on the identification, the back-end system sends a request to start a debugger tool to the end user system, and in response, the end user system establishes a communication channel with the front-end system to use the debugger tool to receive debugging information. |
| US08180844B1 |
System for linking from objects to remote resources
A machine readable code (e.g., digital watermark or bar code) conveyed with objects is used in establishing links to associated electronic resources, such as web pages. The object can be physical (e.g., a magazine page) or electronic (e.g., music data). The associated electronic resource can be a web site from which goods or services (e.g., music) may be offered for sale. In some embodiments, when a code is sensed from one object, the system can foresee other object codes that may soon be sensed, and can anticipatorily provide address information for their respectively associated electronic resources. In another embodiment, the microphone of a cell phone is used to listen to ambient audio. A watermark in the audio is decoded and its payload is used to link to, or provide, related information. A variety of other concepts are also detailed, such as permitting the free distribution of low fidelity music as marketing agents for higher fidelity versions that are available for sale. |
| US08180843B2 |
Transparent file migration using namespace replication
A NAS switch provides file migrations in a NAS storage network that are transparent to the clients. A source file server exports an original NAS file handles indicative of object locations on the source file server to the NAS switch. The NAS switch modifies the original NAS file handles to an internal file system and maps the original NAS file handles to a switch file handles independent of location. The NAS switch exports the switch file handles to a client. The client looks-up objects and makes NAS requests to the source file server using switch file handles. The NAS switch performs file migration by first replicating the namespace containing data to be migrated from source file server to a destination file server. Separately, the NAS replicates data which is a relatively longer process than the namespace replication. During data replication, namespace access requests for objects are directed to the replicated namespace. After data replication, file object requests for migrated objects are redirected to the destination file server in a process that is transparent to the client. |
| US08180842B2 |
Communication device management program
A communication device management program that enables efficient use of memory space in receiving data using remote direct memory access (RDMA) techniques. The receiving node transmits a virtual ID corresponding to a receiving process to a remote sending node. A sending process in the sending node specifies this virtual ID when starting data transmission. If the receiving node has not reserved a memory area corresponding to that virtual ID, the sending node transmits a reservation request to the receiving node, which causes a data receiving memory area to be reserved for use by a communication device in the receiving node. In the sending node, the sending communication device begins sending transmission data in RDMA mode, from a memory area managed by the sending process to the reserved data receiving memory area. The receiving communication device directs incoming transmission data to a memory area managed by the receiving process. |
| US08180840B2 |
Automatically replying to instant messaging (IM) messages
The present disclosure provides for automatically replying to instant messaging (IM) messages. In some embodiments, an IM message is received by a recipient and displayed to the recipient. If, during a predefined time interval, the recipient does not provide any response to the IM message, then the IM message is automatically replied to. |
| US08180839B2 |
Method, system, and computer program product for synchronization of similar data objects with event information
A computer-implemented method for receiving information at a first device is provided. The method includes storing a first data object on the first device in a first device-specific representation, receiving a batch of information in response to the first device transitioning from an off-line state to an online state, processing the modification event to recover the modification, updating the first data object based on the recovered modification, and transmitting an acknowledgement indicating that the modification event was successfully processed by the first device. The batch of information includes a modification event. The content of the batch was determined based at least on a state of data stored on the first device. The modification event was generated based on at least a modification made to a second data object stored at a second device in a second device-specific representation. |
| US08180836B2 |
Information processing apparatus
An information processing apparatus for communicating a communication apparatus, includes: a transmitting unit configured to transmit a plurality of transmission mails to the communication apparatus; a receiving unit configured to receive a plurality of reception mails from the communication apparatus; an extracting unit configured to extract at least one of the plurality of transmission mails and the plurality of reception mails with respect to a specified other user from the plurality of the transmission mails and the plurality of the reception mails; a creating unit configured to create a list screen, in which at least one of the plurality of transmission mails and the plurality of reception mails are arranged, by using at least one of the plurality of transmission mails and the plurality of reception mails with respect to the specified other user extracted by the extracting unit; and a display unit configured to display the list screen created by the creating unit. |
| US08180833B2 |
Managing working set in an extensible message transfer system
Within a mail transfer agent of a message transfer system, a message is received and if the recipient entity resolves to a number of recipients exceeding a specified quantity, the original message is not processed. Instead, at least two messages are created, with each of the created messages addressed to a subset of the original set of recipients. The created messages are returned to the calling module for processing. |
| US08180830B2 |
Action execution based on user modified hypothesis
A computationally implemented method includes, but is not limited to: presenting to a user a hypothesis identifying at least a relationship between a first event type and a second event type; receiving from the user one or more modifications to modify the hypothesis; and executing one or more actions based, at least in part, on a modified hypothesis resulting, at least in part, from the reception of the one or more modifications. In addition to the foregoing, other method aspects are described in the claims, drawings, and text forming a part of the present disclosure. |
| US08180829B2 |
Message board aggregator
Web content representing a first message is displayed in a window of a computer program. The first message is one of a plurality of messages posted to an online forum. A plurality of message summaries are displayed in the same window of the computer program, contemporaneously with the first message. The plurality of message summaries include first information derived from the first message and second information derived from a second message in the plurality of messages. The web content representing the first message may, for example, be displayed in a first frame of the window and the information derived from the first message may be displayed in a second frame of the same window. The online forum may, for example, be a web-based financial message board. |
| US08180820B1 |
Generation of a remainder from division of a first polynomial by a second polynomial
Generating a remainder from a division of a first polynomial by a second polynomial having a variable width. One or more embodiments include a first sub-circuit, a first adder, a second sub-circuit, and a second adder. The first sub-circuit is adapted to generate a first partial remainder, which has a fixed width greater than or equal to the width of the second polynomial, from the first polynomial excepting a least significant portion. The first adder is adapted to generate a sum of the least significant portion of the first polynomial and a most significant portion of the first partial remainder. The second sub-circuit is adapted to generate a second partial remainder from the sum. The second adder is adapted to generate the remainder from the second partial remainder and the first partial remainder excepting the most significant portion. |
| US08180817B2 |
Encipherment of digital sequences by reversible transposition methods
Methods for transposing elements of a sequence according to a rule, wherein the rule is derived from pseudo-noise or pseudo-noise like binary and non-binary sequences are disclosed. Sequences of transposed symbols can be recovered by applying a reversing rule. Sets of orthogonal hopping and transposition rules are created by applying transposition rules upon themselves. Sets of orthogonal hopping and transposition rules are also created from binary and non-binary Gold sequences. |
| US08180815B2 |
Redundancy-free circuits for zero counters
A more efficient method of counting the number of zeros in a 4-bit value generates three output bits (q0, q1 and q2) from four input bits (a0, a1, a2 and a3) according to the logic equations q0=not(a1+a2+a3+a4), q1=not(a0+a1), q2=a1(not a0)+not(a0+a2). These output bits yield the number of non-significant (leading or trailing) zeros in the 4-bit value. The invention may be implemented in a 16-bit zero counter having four 4-bit decoders, but is applicable to any number of zero counters. The output bits from the four 4-bit decoders can be combined to yield a 5-bit count whose most significant bit is a one when all input bits from all four of the 4-bit blocks are zero. A multiplexer stage derives two outputs based on a portion of the decode bits. For wider counters, the output stage uses four AOI21 gates to merge additional decode bits from a next lower 16-bit zero counter. |
| US08180813B1 |
Content repository implemented in a network storage server system
A network storage server system includes a distributed object store, a presentation layer, a metadata subsystem, and a content management subsystem. The object store has no namespace and provides location-independent addressing of data objects. The presentation layer provides multiple interfaces for accessing data stored in the object store, including a NAS interface and a Web Service interface, and provides at least one namespace for accessing data via the NAS interface or the Web Service interface. The Web Service interface allows access to stored data via the namespace or without using the namespace (“raw object” access). The metadata subsystem stores user-specified and/or system-generated metadata relating to data objects and allows data objects to be identified and retrieved by searching on the metadata. The content management subsystem autonomously manages lifecycles of data objects according to user-specified policies, based on metadata associated with the data objects and tracked by the metadata subsystem. |
| US08180812B2 |
Templates for configuring file shares
Aspects of the subject matter described herein relate to configuring file shares. In aspects, a template is created that includes policies to apply to one or more shares. The template may derive or otherwise obtain policies from other templates and may also refer to other templates. The template may include opaque data to pass to a subsystem that configures a share with a policy corresponding to the data. After the template is created, the template may then be applied to one or more shares to configure the shares according to policies included in the template. When the template or any template upon which the template depends or to which the template refers is changed, shares associated with the template may also be automatically changed as appropriate. |
| US08180809B2 |
Method for efficient data transformation
A digraph including a plurality of ordinary nodes, at least one of a composition node and a decomposition node, and a plurality of arcs interconnecting any of said nodes. |
| US08180806B2 |
Mechanism for supporting indexed tagged content in a general purpose data store
A schema identifies a field in a document as a key field. Using an XML schema, the key field can be identified by attaching a property to the element or attribute to be used as a key field (if the XML schema standard is modified to support properties). Otherwise, attributes can be used to identify the element or attribute that is to be a key field. Fields can be primary keys, secondary keys, or foreign keys, as supported by data stores. The data store can analyze the schema to determine which fields are key fields. The key fields can be duplicated in the native format of the data store for use in indexing, searching, and other data store functions on the documents. The documents themselves can be stored as objects, into which the data store cannot reach, or can be stored in the native format of the data store, as desired. |
| US08180801B2 |
Unified window support for event stream data management
Data stream query mediation may utilize a query handler configured to receive a query from a stream application to be applied against a stream of data including multiple tuples representing events. A stream window manager may be configured to express the query in a specification which defines a window including a subset of the tuples, the specification defining content of the window as a range of the tuples having a range attribute over which the content is specified, defining when to update the window using a synchronization attribute specifying a movement of the window over time with respect to the content, and defining an evaluation of the content of the window using an evaluation attribute specifying when to perform the evaluation. A query translator may be configured to translate the query including mapping the range attribute, the synchronization attribute, and the evaluation attribute to a stream processing language of a data stream management system (DSMS), to thereby obtain a translated query. A DSMS mediator may be configured to provide the translated query to the DSMS for processing therewith. |
| US08180794B2 |
Unified user identification with automatic mapping and database absence handling
An identification system that may be used in heterogeneous computing environments provides a fail-free path to providing identifiers from a single canonical namespace. Objects or gateways requiring an identifier for access are accessed using an identifier for the canonical namespace. If an entity requests access using an identifier from another namespace, an external database is consulted to determine if a mapping exists for the identifier to another identifier the canonical namespace. If no mapping exists, or the external database is unavailable, then an identifier is automatically generated in the canonical namespace and is used for the access. An internal database is updated with the automatically generated identifier, providing a mechanism to add mappings without administrative intervention. To access resources requiring an identifier from another particular namespace, a canonical namespace identifier may be mapped to another identifier in the particular namespace, or a generic identifier may be used. |
| US08180793B2 |
Access to data stored in a file system
Presented is a method of operating a server to enable a client to access data stored by a file system. The method comprises: receiving from the client a request to perform an operation on the data; instructing the file system to perform a preliminary metadata operation and, before the metadata-operation has completed, instructing the file system to perform the operation on the data; waiting for the file system to complete both the metadata-operation and the operation on the data; and responding to the client. |
| US08180788B2 |
Image search engine employing image correlation
An Internet infrastructure that supports searching of images by correlating a search image with that of plurality of images hosted in Internet based servers, containing an image search server, and a web browser contained in a client device that supports displaying of the images. The image search server supports delivery of search result pages to a client device based upon a search string or search image, and contains images from a plurality of Internet based web hosting servers. The image search server delivers a search result page containing images upon receiving a search string and/or search image from the web browser. The selection of images in the search result page is based upon: (i) word match, that is, by selecting images, titles of which correspond to the search string; and (ii) image correlation, that is, by selecting images, image characteristics of which correlates to that of search image. The selection of images in the search result page also occurs on the basis of popularity. |
| US08180787B2 |
Application portability and extensibility through database schema and query abstraction
The present invention generally is directed to a system, method and article of manufacture for accessing data independent of the particular manner in which the data is physically represented. In one embodiment, a data repository abstraction layer provides a logical view of the underlying data repository that is independent of the particular manner of data representation. A query abstraction layer is also provided and is based on the data repository abstraction layer. A runtime component performs translation of an abstract query into a form that can be used against a particular physical data representation. |
| US08180786B2 |
Symbolic query exploration
A symbolic query exploration (QEX) module automatically produces output information that can be used to evaluate a database. The QEX module operates by converting an input query into a formula for processing by a satisfiability module theories (SMT) solver module. The SMT solver module generates a model that satisfies the formula. The model yields table information that is used to populate the database and, optionally, parameter information that is used to instantiate the query. A query evaluation module then submits the instantiated query to the populated database and evaluates whether an evaluation result produced thereby agrees with pre-specified condition information. The QEX module can preprocess the formula using either (or both) an eager expansion approach (in which the formula is expanded in an upfront manner) or a lazy expansion approach (in which axioms are identified for later possible expansion by the SMT solver module). |
| US08180778B1 |
Generating action trails from web history
Methods, systems, and apparatus, including computer programs encoded on a computer storage medium, for generating action trails from web history are described. In one aspect, a method includes receiving a web content access history of a user, the content access history including one or more user actions, each user action being associated with a content item upon which the user action is performed and identifying one or more action trails from the content access history, each action trail including a sequence of user actions performed one content items relating to a topic. Identifying a particular action trail includes clustering the user actions into a series of segments using temporal criteria; calculating semantic similarities between the content items, and adding a segment of the series of segments to the action trail when the semantic similarities between the segment and another segment satisfy a similarity threshold. |
| US08180776B2 |
Variable personalization of search results in a search engine
A search engine provides personalized rankings of search results. A user interest profile identifies topics of interest to a user. Each topic is associated with one or more sites, and a boost value, which can be used to augment an information retrieval score of any document from the site. Search results from any search are provided to the user, with a variable control of the ranking of the results. The results can be ranked by their unboosted information retrieval score, thus reflecting no personalization, or by their fully or partially boosted information retrieval scores. This allows the user to selectively control how their interests affect the ranking of the documents. |
| US08180770B2 |
System and method for creating a playlist
A method, system, and user interface for creating a personalized and customizable playlist. In one embodiment, the method and system for generating a playlist includes the user selecting and/or entering media file identifiers associated with media files and then initiating automatic playlist generation. |
| US08180769B2 |
Content-management system for user behavior targeting
A system including a plurality of web servers configured to serve base content and relevant content to a user system; a set of additional-content servers configured to serve the relevant content to the web servers if units in the user profile match units associated with the relevant content; a parsing server configured to extract the units in the user profile from the base content requested by the user and generate a ranked list of the units in the user profile; and a unit-matching module configured to determine whether the units in the user profile match units associated with the relevant content if the user requests the base content, wherein the web servers are configured to serve the base content and the relevant content if the units in the user profile match units associated with the relevant content. |
| US08180767B2 |
Inferred relationships from user tagged content
A tagged content inference system and method is provided. The system facilitates browsing of content with a pseudo-hierarchical feel using algorithmically-deduced relationships between items based on user applied tags. Based, at least in part, upon tagged content, an inference component can infer relationships between items (e.g., creating a pseudo-hierarchy) in order to facilitate browsing of the items.The system can further include a relationship display component that can provide a visual representation of tagged items based on relationship(s) inferred by the inference component. The visual representation can further be based, at least in part, upon user input (e.g., threshold quantity of tags to be displayed, threshold strength of relationship, color setting(s), etc.). |
| US08180766B2 |
Bayesian video search reranking
A general framework for video search reranking is disclosed which explicitly formulates reranking into a global optimization problem from the Bayesian perspective. Under this framework, with two novel pair-wise ranking distances, two effective video search reranking methods, hinge reranking and preference strength reranking, are disclosed. Experiments conducted on the TRECVID dataset have demonstrated that the disclosed methods outperform several existing reranking approaches. |
| US08180765B2 |
Device and method for selecting at least one media for recommendation to a user
The invention relates to a method and device for selecting at least one media for recommendation to a user. The device comprises an interface to a users database comprising data relative to users medias consumption and data relative to connections between users. The device further comprises a statistical analyzer receiving data relative to users medias consumption and connections between users in inputs and generating a first list of at least one media for output. The device comprises an interface to a medias library comprising parameters indicative of medias content. The device also comprises an analytical analyzer receiving data relative to users medias consumption and parameters indicative of medias content in inputs and generating a second list of at least one media for output. The device also comprises a recommendation engine receiving the first and second lists of media and selecting at least one media for recommendation to the user. |
| US08180761B1 |
Referrer context aware target queue prioritization
A computer, computer program product, and method prioritize a web crawler target link queue using referrer context information associated with a remote object link. An access statistics collection module detects links to remote objects and retrieves referrer context information for the links. An access statistics back end module receives and stores the referrer context information from the access statistics collection module. The referrer context information is analyzed by a target list prioritization module that uses the results of the analysis to prioritize a target queue of a web crawler. The referrer context information is an important resource in identifying information about how a link spreads, e.g., for threat detection or identification of popular links for indexing to produce more relevant search results. |
| US08180759B2 |
Spell checking URLs in a resource
Methods, systems, and computer program products are provided for spell checking URLs in a resource. Embodiments include identifying within a resource a URL, determining whether the URL is valid, and marking the URL as misspelled if the URL is invalid. In typical embodiments, determining whether the URL is valid is carried out by resolving a domain name contained in the URL. Typical embodiments also include suggesting an alternative spelling for the URL. In some embodiments, suggesting an alternative spelling for the URL is carried out by identifying a keyword in the resource, querying a search engine with the identified keyword, and selecting a URL in dependence upon search results returned by the search engine. |
| US08180756B1 |
Similarity-based searching
Pairs of similar objects in a population of objects can be found using a process that includes identifying a comparison vector x in a set of vectors having non-zero features, determining an estimated similarity contribution of a subset of features of the comparison vector x to a similarity between the comparison vector x and each vector in the set of vectors, generating an index that includes features based on a comparison of the similarity contribution with a similarity threshold, and identifying another vector in the set that is similar to the vector x using the index. |
| US08180754B1 |
Semantic neural network for aggregating query searches
A system, method and computer program product for implementation of a Aggregate Neural Semantic Network, which stores the relationships and semantic connections between the key search words for each user. The Aggregate Neural Semantic Network processes the search results produced by a standard search engine such as, for example, Google or Yahoo!. The set of hits produced by the standard search engine is processed by the Aggregate Neural Semantic Network, which selects the hits that are relevant to a particular user based on the previous search queries made by the user. The Aggregate Neural Semantic Network can also use the connections between the terms (i.e., key words) that are most frequently used by all of the previous Aggregate Neural Semantic Network users. The Aggregate Neural Semantic Network is constantly updating and self-teaching. The more user queries are processed by the Aggregate Neural Semantic Network, the more comprehensive processing of search engine outputs is provided by the Aggregate Neural Semantic Network to the subsequent user queries. |
| US08180753B1 |
Automatically extracting data from semi-structured documents
This description provides tools and techniques for automatically extracting data from semi-structured documents. A computer may receive a request for data representing an inferred structure of an input document. For the request, the computer may determine whether a repository containing mined information includes the requested data. If the repository contains the requested data, the computer may return the data representing the inferred structure of the input document in response to the request. |
| US08180748B2 |
Surrogate key generation and utilization
The subject disclosure pertains to databases as well as generation and utilization of keys. A desired or default number of values can be requested from a domain and allocated for use. These values can be utilized to generate surrogate keys. Subsequently or concurrently, the keys can be employed with respect to operations such as single pass loading of databases and/or data warehouses. Any unused keys can be returned and made available for use by other users or processes. Furthermore, the key generation functionality can be provided outside a database thereby relieving a database system of this burden. |
| US08180747B2 |
Load sharing cluster file systems
Load sharing clusters in which each node is responsible for one or more non-overlapping subset(s) of the cluster namespace and will process only those requests that access file or directory objects in the partitioned namespace that the node controls while redirecting requests designated for other nodes. A non-overlapping subset may be migrated from a source node to a destination node, for example, for load sharing or hotspot mitigation. Migration typically includes maintaining a file virtualization link from the destination node to the source node to permit forwarding of requests by the destination node to the source node during migration of metadata and then migration of data from the source node. After migration is complete, the file virtualization link is broken and the destination node services requests for the non-overlapping subset from the migrated metadata and data. |
| US08180743B2 |
Information management
A method, article of manufacture, and apparatus for managing an object are disclosed. In an embodiment, this comprises managing an object having content, in a system having a dynamic policy selector configured with at least one analytic policy applied to evaluate the content of the object. The object is associated to an information management policy. Classification levels may be used, in which classification levels are associated to information management policies and objects are associated with classification levels. Objects containing certain elements or related elements may be associated to form an information group, to which information management policies may be applied as a group. Storage pools may be used for managing objects with similar classification levels or information protection policies. |
| US08180740B1 |
System and method for eliminating duplicate data by generating data fingerprints using adaptive fixed-length windows
A method and system for generating data fingerprints is used to de-duplicate a data set having a high level of redundancy. A fingerprint generator generates a data fingerprint based on a data window. Each byte of the data set is added to the fingerprint generator and used to detect an anchor within the received data. If no anchor is detected, the system continues receiving bytes until a predefined window size is reached. When the window size is reached, the system records a data fingerprint based on the data window and resets the window size. If an anchor is detected, the system extends the window size such that the window ends a specified length after the location of the anchor. If the extended window is greater than a maximum size, the system ignores the anchor. The generated fingerprints are compared to a fingerprint database. The data set is then de-duplicated by replacing matching data segments with references to corresponding stored data segments. |
| US08180739B2 |
Duplicate filtering in a data processing environment
A data processing method is provided. The method comprises collecting a stream of data records from one or more devices in a network; loading one or more persistent indexes associated with the stream of data records into memory; identifying duplicate data records in the stream of data records using the in-memory indexes; and updating a repository such that the duplicate data records are not stored in the repository or managed differently than non-duplicate data records. |
| US08180738B2 |
Memory controller, nonvolatile storage device, and nonvolatile storage device system
A memory controller, a nonvolatile storage device and a nonvolatile storage device system are provided, in which the matching check between content data and meta data can be simplified, a starting time can be shortened, and further, a host device side can provide users with a common GUI without being conscious of the Usage Rule including an encryption method for copyright protection and a copyright protection method and a content management. A write status holding unit that holds write status information to identify the content data being written, and a content management unit that manages the content data and the meta data are included. The content management unit eliminates mismatch between the content data and the meta data based on the write status information. Further, a GUI script generating unit is included which generates a script describing the screen display contents in accordance with a request from the host device for the content data. |
| US08180737B2 |
Content manager
An archive for digital content comprises archive storage, an archive service and a manifest. The archive storage is a unified storage structure for storing items, such a directory having a plurality of subdirectories. The manifest is stored within the archive storage when the archive storage is loaded onto a storage device, and may comprise an index of items stored in the unified structure of the archive and/or an organizational structure that supports defined categories that characterize items stored in the unified structure and/or at least one backup queue that temporarily queues a list of items that satisfy predetermined backup criteria by have not been backed up. The archive service serves as an intermediate between users, e.g., operators, software modules, programs, services, etc., and the archive storage to control requests for access to items stored in the unified storage structure. |
| US08180735B2 |
Managed file backup and restore at remote storage locations through multi-services gateway at user premises
The disclosed examples of a system for providing and managing backup and restore services of one or more endpoint devices include at least one gateway device at a user premises and a service management center. The gateway device has a first interface for enabling bi-directional communications with one or more of the endpoint devices associated with the gateway device, a second interface for enabling bi-directional communications for the one or more endpoint devices via a wide area network, and for enabling at least some bidirectional communications with at least one storage area external to the user premises via the wide area network. The gateway device also has a processor configured to manage backups and restores of data between the one or more of the endpoint devices and the at least one storage area. The service management center is external to the user premises and communicates with the gateway device via the wide area network, and controls access by the gateway device to the at least one storage area. |
| US08180733B2 |
Selective durability in a directory database
Selective durability in a directory database is presented. A directory database that provides durability processing includes a mechanism where selective attributes for directory resources can turn durability processing off. So, when a directory transaction is encountered having a durability processing turned off, the directory database processes that directory transaction without first flushing the directory transaction from memory to storage. |
| US08180731B2 |
Apparatus and method for computing evaluation values of content data stored for reproduction
An information-processing apparatus, reproduction apparatus, communication method and computer program are disclosed wherein an evaluation value can be added automatically to contents stored in a storage apparatus or medium. The information-processing apparatus comprising an acquisition section which acquires, from a portable reproduction apparatus which is capable of reproducing contents data, reproduction history information of the contents data in the portable reproduction apparatus. An evaluation value arithmetic operation section arithmetically operates a computed evaluation value corresponding to the content data based on the reproduction history information acquired by the acquisition section. A transfer section transfers the computed evaluation value arithmetically operated by the evaluation value arithmetic operation section to the portable reproduction apparatus. |
| US08180727B2 |
Method and apparatus for navigating modeling of a building using nonparametric user input building design data
A system and method of navigating modeling of a building, including: receiving nonparametric user input building design data, organizing the nonparametric user input building design data, and globally editing the non-parametric data element in multiple objects within a building design. |
| US08180725B1 |
Method and apparatus for selecting links to include in a probabilistic generative model for text
Some embodiments of the present invention provide a system that selects links while updating a probabilistic generative model for textual documents. During operation, the system receives a current model, which contains terminal nodes representing words and cluster nodes representing clusters of conceptually related words, wherein nodes in the current model are coupled together by weighted links, wherein if a node fires, a link from the node to another node is activated and causes the other node to fire with a probability proportionate to the weight of the link. Next, the system applies a set of training documents containing words to the current model to produce a new model. While doing so, the system: determines expected counts for activations of links and prospective links; determines link-ratings for the links and the prospective links based on the expected counts, and selects links to be included in the new model based on the determined link-ratings. Finally, the system makes the new model the current model. |
| US08180724B1 |
Systems and methods for encoding knowledge for automated management of software application deployments
A method of encoding knowledge is disclosed, which can be used to automatically detect problems in software application deployments. The method includes accessing a source of knowledge describing a problem known to occur in deployments of a particular software application, and which identifies a plurality of conditions associated with the problem. An encoded representation of the knowledge source is generated according to a predefined knowledge encoding methodology. The encoded representation is adapted to be applied automatically by a computer to analyze data representing a current state of a monitored deployment of the software application to detect whether the conditions and the problem exist therein. In various implementations, the encoded representation of the knowledge can include queries for deployment information, information concerning the relative importance of the conditions to a detection of the problem, and/or logical constructs for computing a confidence value in the existence of the problem and for determining whether to report the problem if some of the conditions are not true. The knowledge source can comprise a text document (such as a knowledge base article), a flowchart of a diagnostic troubleshooting method, and the like. Also disclosed are methods of at least partially automating the encoding process. |
| US08180722B2 |
Method and apparatus for data mining within communication session information using an entity relationship model
Methods and apparatus are provided for analyzing user activity and for recording such user activity in an entity relationship model. A network is searched for materials associated with a user and content analysis techniques are performed on the associated materials to extract one or more characteristics from the associated materials based on predefined criteria. The extracted information is stored in an entity relationship model that relates the user to the extracted characteristics. The characteristics may include activity information, expertise information and location information. The entity relationship model can thereafter be searched to identify and optionally contact one or more users having desired characteristics. |
| US08180720B1 |
Content delivery network (CDN) cold content handling
A method of content delivery in a content delivery network (CDN), where the CDN is deployed, operated and managed by a content delivery network service provider (CDNSP). The CDN comprises a set of content servers and a domain name system (DNS) associated with a CDN namespace. For a given content provider, a determination is first made whether the content provider has “cold content” delivery requirements by evaluating one or more factors that include: total content size, size of content objects expected to be served, uniqueness of content, total number of content objects, and a percentage of the total content size that is expected to account for a given percentage of traffic. Upon a determination that the content provider has cold content delivery requirements, a subset of the CDN content servers are configured to implement a set of one or handling rules for managing delivery of the cold content from the CDN content servers. |
| US08180716B2 |
Method and device for forecasting computational needs of an application
The invention comprises methods and devices of forecasting future computational needs of an application based on input load, where the application comprises a plurality of processes executed on a plurality of computing devices. The method of the invention proceeds by monitoring at least a computational load characteristic of at least a first process executed on a first computing device and a second process executed on a second computing device. A mathematical relationship between input load and the computational load characteristic is established, and future computational needs are forecasted based on the established mathematical relationship. |
| US08180714B2 |
Automatic generation of human models for motion capture, biomechanics and animation
An automated method for the generation of (i) human models comprehensive of shape and joint centers information and/or (ii) subject specific models from multiple video streams is provided. To achieve these objectives, a kinematic model is learnt space from a training data set. The training data set includes kinematic models associated with corresponding morphological models. A shape model is identified as well as one or more poses of the subject. The learnt kinematic model space and the identified shape model are combined to generate a full body model of the subject starting from as few as one-static pose. Further, to generate a full body model of an arbitrary human subject, the learnt kinematic model space and the identified shape model are combined using a parameter set. The invention is applicable for fully automatic markerless motion capture and generation of complete human models. |
| US08180711B2 |
Intellectual property trading exchange
A computerized intellectual property trading exchange is disclosed for facilitating the trading of license contracts relating to intellectual property rights or pools of intellectual property rights. The exchange includes at least one intellectual property license contract relating to intellectual property rights or pools of intellectual property rights and a computer-accessible forum configured to allow a plurality of participants to trade the license contract. The plurality of participants includes at least one seller, which may be the owner, having the license contract and desiring to trade the license contract. The plurality of participants also includes at least one buyer desiring to obtain the license contract. The buyer may be an investor, speculator, market maker, or arbitrageur, who purchases the license contract to achieve appreciation. The buyer also may be a licensee, who purchases the license contract to practice the intellectual property rights. |
| US08180708B2 |
Watermarking system that executes received watermarking instructions to embed a watermark
A method of managing keys is provided. According to one exemplary method, digital content data encrypted with a first encrypting key is decrypted using a first decrypting key, and re-encrypted using a second encrypting key. A second decrypting key is encrypted using a third encrypting key to produce an encrypted second decrypting key. In some embodiments, an encrypted first decrypting key that was encrypted using a fourth encrypting key is received, and the encrypted first decrypting key is decrypted using a fourth decrypting key to reproduce the first decrypting key. An application for use on a computer system is also provided. |
| US08180702B2 |
Transactional processing entity device support of an integrated offer network
A method begins by generate, for each of a plurality of merchant devices, an offer data file to produce a plurality of offer data files. The method continues by compiling, for one of a plurality of issuer devices, an options data file for a group of credit cards based on at least one of the plurality of offer data files. The method continues by transmitting the options data file to the one of the plurality of issuer devices. The method continues by receiving, from the one of the plurality of issuer devices, at least one selection from the options data file to produce an options program file for the group of credit cards. The method continues by receiving, from a card holder device associated with one of the group of credit cards, a selection of at least one option from the options program file to produce at least one selected option. The method continues by processing transactions of the one of the group of credit cards in accordance with the at least one selected option. |
| US08180696B2 |
Stock purchase indices
A method and system for determining investor participation driven stock purchase indices. Raw customer trading data is received from an accounting system. The raw customer trading data is then aggregated to generate daily transaction total counts for all stocks (that is, total shares bought and sold, total market value, etc.) as well as daily transaction total counts for each individual stock. Aggregation of the raw customer data also addresses customer privacy concerns. The aggregated data is processed to produce moving averages, stock purchase indices, and stock rankings. The stock purchase indices are based on a diffusion index technique of segregating buyers from sellers, and with these relative counts, measures the breadth of investor purchasing participation. The stock purchase indices are then displayed to a graphical user interface. The display includes stock buy and sell ranking lists. |
| US08180695B2 |
Method of administering an investment fund that seeks to provide regular monthly payments without consuming principal
A method of administering an investment fund. The method includes the steps of creating shares for sale, providing a managed distribution schedule identifying a number of payments to be provided during each of consecutive periods, providing an investment strategy for investing in assets to provide funds sufficient to meet the managed distribution schedule, issuing a share to an investor in exchange for funds received from the investor, investing the received funds according to the investment strategy, calculating the value of each of the payments to be provided according to the managed distribution schedule in a period to the investor, and providing each of the payments to the investor during the period. Each payment is calculated according to a formula that specifies that the value of each payment is based on a trailing Net Asset Value (NAV) of the investor's share. |
| US08180694B2 |
System and method for incorporating qualitative inputs into econometric models
Methods, systems, and computer program products are provided for incorporating qualitative factors into an econometric model. Time series data describing the financial performance generated by corresponding marketing investments that are made as a function of time is provided to configure an econometric model. The econometric model includes linear coefficients that define a linear relationship between the financial performance and the corresponding marketing investments. The linear coefficients are adjusted in accordance with the qualitative factors received as inputs from experts, thereby enabling the qualitative factors to be quantified into the econometric model. |
| US08180692B2 |
System and method for performing automatic spread trading
The present embodiments are provided to facilitate the automatic trading of spreads in a fast and accurate manner. One or more market data feeds that contain market information for tradeable objects are received at an exchange. A spread data feed is generated in response to the market data feeds and from one or more spread setting parameters, which can be entered by a user. The spread data feed is preferably displayed in a spread window as bid and ask quantities associated with an axis or scale of prices. The user can enter orders in the spread window and the legs will be automatically worked to achieve, or attempt to achieve, the spread. In addition, other tools disclosed herein may be utilized to assist the user in making such trades. |
| US08180688B1 |
Computer-readable medium, system, and method for item recommendations based on media consumption
Disclosed are various embodiments for generating item recommendations based on broadcast media consumed by a user on a client device. An item recommendation application receives a quantity of media information associated with the broadcast media being consumed from the client device. The item recommendation application determines a pattern of media consumption behavior for the user based at least in part on an analysis of the user's consumption history. The item recommendation identifies other consumers of broadcast media that exhibit a substantially similar pattern of media consumption behavior. The item recommendation application then gathers items purchased by the other consumers and provides those items as the item recommendations to the requesting process. |
| US08180683B2 |
Method and system for providing order status information using an update status flag
A method and system for providing account status information using an update status flag to receive status information pertaining to a customer account. It is determined whether the received status information is new relative to further status information stored within a status record pertaining to the account. The status record is updated to include the received status information if the received status information is new. The updated message indicating the received status information is then composed and sent to the customer. |
| US08180681B2 |
Automated entitlement management method and apparatus for capturing maintenance renewals revenues
The presently preferred embodiment of the invention provides a method and apparatus that enables software publishers and other sellers of subscription services. e.g. subscriptions, such as maintenance or license programs, to track when the subscription period for each customer expires, to inform interested contacts at the customer proactively that a renewal for their subscription is coming due, and to provide a way for those contacts at the customer to purchase a renewal of their subscription program. |
| US08180675B2 |
System and method for automatically managing avail inventory data and avail pricing
A system, computer code, and method are provided for automatically managing avail inventory data of media programming streams for a communications network, such as a cable TV network. The computer-implemented method includes the steps of correlating available addressable units of the communications network with the avail inventory data, and generating a proposed price for purchase of at least one avail based on the results of the correlating step. |
| US08180672B2 |
Systems and methods for placing advertisements
Systems and methods provide techniques for associating advertisements with relevant content on a user interface. A method for placing advertisements on a user interface includes providing a user interface having a plurality of user interface screens, at least some of the plurality of user interface screens containing user-selectable control objects, and determining which of a plurality of advertisements to display on a user interface screen based on at least one of the following criteria: topical relevance, contextual relevance, path relevance and cognitive prominence. |
| US08180671B2 |
Point pooling loyalty system and method
The invention facilitates pooling, gifting or transferring of geographic area loyalty points between accounts. The invention also facilitates a transfer of geographic area loyalty points from a consumer account associated with a sponsoring company to a consumer account associated with a host company. The invention may also facilitate gifting of loyalty points to charitable organizations on a recurring basis, wherein the gifting may transfer any portion of geographic based points to various charities. The system may also convert the geographic area loyalty points to a monetary value, thereby allowing the points to be donated to a charity such that the donation appears to be a monetary value donation to the charity. |
| US08180665B2 |
Systems and methods for analyzing performance of a print device in a managed print service
A managed print system for analyzing performance of a print device may include a computing device and a computer-readable storage medium in communication with the computing device. The computer-readable storage medium may include one or more programming instructions for receiving a black and white print volume variable associated with a print device, receiving a color print volume variable associated with the print device, determining a black and white cost variable associated with the black and white print volume variable and determining a color cost variable associated with the color print volume variable, determining a standard relationship, determining an empirical relationship, determining, based on the empirical relationship, whether the print device has a poor fit to the standard relationship, and in response to the print device having a poor fit to the standard relationship, determining which of the variables influenced the poor fit. |
| US08180661B2 |
System and method for managing property
A system and method for managing property that in one embodiment provides a network-based system and method for creating, tracking and managing events, known herein as “incidents”, such as service requests, maintenance reminders and other events associated with managing property for supporting and enhancing the functions of tenant, property manager and vendor. |
| US08180655B1 |
Systems and methods for processing vehicle or driver performance data
Apparatus and methods to process vehicle or driver behavior data are described herein. In some examples, the behavior data is used by a premium calculating engine to derive a premium for a vehicle insurance policy using the data. The behavior data may be associated with a single driver, or may be associated with all drivers of a vehicle without regard to the actual drivers, in some examples. Data received from the vehicle may also include vehicle performance data, in further examples. Additionally, a method of underwriting a dynamic vehicle insurance policy is described, in one example. |
| US08180651B2 |
System and method of patient destination prediction
A system and method of predicting telemetry signal dropout creates a prediction of patient destination. The method includes defining a telemetry coverage area, receiving a location of a monitored patient, recording the received location, calculating a trajectory and speed, and comparing the location, trajectory, and speed of the patient to historical patient movement trends to predict patient destination. The system includes a remote unit worn by a patient and at least one telemetry receiver, a location services computer, a patient location database, a location prediction computer, and a graphical display. The location services computer receives the location information and computes a location, speed, and trajectory of the patient. The location prediction computer compares the computed location, speed, and trajectory of the patient to previously acquired locations, speeds, and trajectories to predict a patient destination. |
| US08180649B2 |
Computer control of non-debt funding system for home finance
Machine for controlling a system changing electrical signals to separately value components temporally decomposed from residential property, the computer apparatus including: a computer system, arranged for receiving information into a memory, the data representing the residential property, the computer system further comprising: logic means controlling the computer system to change the data to produce modified signals representing a separate valuation of each of a plurality of components temporally decomposed from the residential property, the components including a residential estate for years interest and a residential remainder interest; and an output device connected to convert the modified signals into documentation including the respective valuation of each of the components. |
| US08180647B2 |
Automated sentence planning in a task classification system
The invention relates to a task classification system (900) that interacts with a user. The task classification system (900) may include a recognizer (920) that may recognize symbols in the user's input communication, and a natural language understanding unit (900) that may determine whether the user's input communication can be understood. If the user's input communication can be understood, the natural language understanding unit (930) may generate understanding data. The system may also include a communicative goal generator that may generate communicative goals based on the symbols recognized by the recognizer (920) and understanding data from the natural language understanding unit (930). The generated communicative goals may be related to information needed to be obtained from the user. The system may further include a sentence planning unit (120) that may automatically plan one or more sentences based on the communicative goals generated by the communicative goal generator with at least one of the sentences plans being output to the user. |
| US08180643B1 |
Script compliance using speech recognition and compilation and transmission of voice and text records to clients
Apparatus and methods are provided for using automatic speech recognition to analyze a voice interaction and verify compliance of an agent reading a script to a client during the voice interaction. In one aspect of the invention, a communications system includes a user interface, a communications network, and a call center having an automatic speech recognition component. In other aspects of the invention, a script compliance method includes the steps of conducting a voice interaction between an agent and a client and evaluating the voice interaction with an automatic speech recognition component adapted to analyze the voice interaction and determine whether the agent has adequately followed the script. In still other aspects of the invention, respective data for specific interactions, including voice records or panels, transcribed text equivalents to such voice records or panels, and/or script text governing such voice records or panels, can be forwarded to one or more respective clients. |
| US08180642B2 |
Factorial hidden Markov model with discrete observations
A method for analyzing hidden dynamics, includes acquiring discrete observations, each discrete observation having an observed value selected from two or more allowed discrete values. A factorial hidden Markov model (FHMM) relating the discrete observations with a plurality of hidden dynamics is constructed. A contribution of the state of each hidden dynamic to the discrete observation may be represented in the FHMM as a parameter of a nominal distribution which is scaled by a function of the state of the hidden dynamic. States of the hidden dynamics are inferred from the discrete observations based on the FHMM. Information corresponding to at least one inferred state of at least one of the hidden dynamics is output. The parameters of the contribution of each dynamic to the hidden states may be learnt from a large number of observations. An example of a networked printing system is used to demonstrate the applicability of the method. |
| US08180640B2 |
Grapheme-to-phoneme conversion using acoustic data
Described is the use of acoustic data to improve grapheme-to-phoneme conversion for speech recognition, such as to more accurately recognize spoken names in a voice-dialing system. A joint model of acoustics and graphonemes (acoustic data, phonemes sequences, grapheme sequences and an alignment between phoneme sequences and grapheme sequences) is described, as is retraining by maximum likelihood training and discriminative training in adapting graphoneme model parameters using acoustic data. Also described is the unsupervised collection of grapheme labels for received acoustic data, thereby automatically obtaining a substantial number of actual samples that may be used in retraining. Speech input that does not meet a confidence threshold may be filtered out so as to not be used by the retrained model. |
| US08180639B2 |
Method for variable resolution and error control in spoken language understanding
A method for variable resolution and error control in spoken language understanding (SLU) allows arranging the categories of the SLU into a hierarchy of different levels of specificity. The pre-determined hierarchy is used to identify different types of errors such as high-cost errors and low-cost errors and trade, if necessary, high cost errors for low cost errors. |
| US08180635B2 |
Weighted sequential variance adaptation with prior knowledge for noise robust speech recognition
A method for adapting acoustic models used for automatic speech recognition is provided. The method includes estimating noise in a portion of a speech signal, determining a first estimated variance scaling vector using an estimated 2-order polynomial and the noise estimation. The estimated 2-order polynomial represents a prior knowledge of a dependency of a variance scaling vector on noise, determining a second estimated variance scaling vector using statistics from prior portions of the speech signal, determining a variance scaling factor using the first estimated variance scaling vector and the second estimated variance scaling vector, and using the variance scaling factor to adapt an acoustic model. |
| US08180633B2 |
Fast semantic extraction using a neural network architecture
A system and method for semantic extraction using a neural network architecture includes indexing each word in an input sentence into a dictionary and using these indices to map each word to a d-dimensional vector (the features of which are learned). Together with this, position information for a word of interest (the word to labeled) and a verb of interest (the verb that the semantic role is being predicted for) with respect to a given word are also used. These positions are integrated by employing a linear layer that is adapted to the input sentence. Several linear transformations and squashing functions are then applied to output class probabilities for semantic role labels. All the weights for the whole architecture are trained by backpropagation. |
| US08180629B2 |
Automatic pattern generation in natural language processing
Disclosed herein is a computer implemented method and system of generating declared patterns from components of a sentence. Parts of speech in the sentence are tagged for identifying parts of speech of each word and phrase in the sentence. Sentence chunking is then performed using the identified parts of speech of each word and phrase to generate pattern units. A first dictionary and a database of equivalent pattern specification sets are then applied to identify grammatical roles and senses of the generated pattern units. A second dictionary and a conceptionary are then applied to identify an equivalent name set for each of the generated pattern units. The declared patterns are then generated for the sentence using the identified equivalent name set for each of the generated pattern units. |
| US08180626B2 |
Language detection service
Language detection techniques are described. In implementation, a method comprises determining which human writing system is associated with text characters in a string based on values representing the text characters. When the values are associated with more than one human language, the string is compared with a targeted dictionary to identify a corresponding human language associated with the string. Linguistic services are designated to be available based on service properties of the linguistic services and based on the corresponding human language associated with the string. |
| US08180624B2 |
Fast beam-search decoding for phrasal statistical machine translation
Improved systems, methods and apparatuses are provided for fast beam-search decoding for phrasal statistical machine translation. The provided techniques incorporate a front-loaded distortion penalty estimate for future estimated distortion penalty and/or early pruning to reduce the search space. The improvements result in up to an order of magnitude increase in translation speed for statistical machine translation systems. The disclosed details enable various refinements and modifications according to decoder and system design considerations. |
| US08180623B2 |
Integration of a discrete event simulation with a configurable software application
In general terms, the invention can be described as a computer system for enhancing the performance of underlying policies and execution-rules of real-world activities. The computer system includes a demand input section for providing demand information to drive the system. A real-time software application has a series of discrete steps for implementing the underlying policies and execution-rules of the activities and converts the demand information into instructions. A simulation-time operations-simulation model implements the underlying policies and execution-rules of the activities and receives the instructions. A control section includes a synchronization clock which synchronizes the discrete steps of the software application with the operations-simulation model by delaying the execution of some of the discrete steps and which communicates the instructions from the software application to the operations-simulation model. An output section outputs data to enhance the performance of the underlying policies and the execution-rules of the activities. |
| US08180621B2 |
Parametric perturbations of performance metrics for integrated circuits
A method of simulating parametric variations in an integrated circuit (IC) includes: specifying an IC model, wherein the IC model includes one or more parameters for variation about a nominal condition; calculating parametric perturbations about the nominal condition; and saving one or more values for the parametric perturbations in a computer-readable medium. Calculating the parametric perturbations includes: simulating the nominal condition for the IC; determining perturbation values for the IC model about the nominal conditions, wherein the perturbation values include linear time-varying matrices and parametric right-hand sides, determining a performance metric for the IC and a performance sampling vector for sampling the performance metric about the nominal condition from the perturbation values; and determining voltage-sensitivity values and performance-sensitivity values from the perturbation values and the performance-sampling vector. |
| US08180615B2 |
System and method for simulation, modeling and scheduling of equipment preparation in batch process manufacturing facilities
A method and system for simulating, modeling and scheduling equipment preparation procedures in the biopharmaceutical production process is described herein. The use of process vessels in batch process manufacturing is optimized through the use of peak load scheduling frames. The system and method includes the steps of identifying soiled process components and their associated equipment preparation procedures. After the soiled process components are identified, a master list of soiled process components and their associated equipment preparation procedures is generated. After the soiled process components and the equipment preparation procedures are identified, the equipment preparation procedures are scheduled out based on preparation equipment protocols to generate a equipment preparation load summary table. Next, the size and capacity of the preparation equipment is determined based on the information in the load summary table. After the size and capacity of the preparation equipment is determined, an equipment preparation time line is generated. |
| US08180614B2 |
Modeling vibration effects introduced by mud motor
Torsional, axial and lateral vibrations introduced when a mud motor is used with a drilling tool to drill a borehole are calculated using a model. The model includes different computational modules for each of three distinct motor sections: power, transmission and bearing. The resulting calculated vibration effects are used to enhance the drilling tool and drilling operation. |
| US08180613B1 |
Wrinkles on fabric software
The present invention introduces a simulation software for displaying a human being comprising an arm. When the arm joint angle value, which indicates the angle created by the upper arm and the lower arm at the arm joint, indicates the first angle value, the fabric of a first wrinkle image is generated on or near the arm joint. When the arm joint angle value indicates the second angle value, the fabric of a second wrinkle image is generated on or near the arm joint. |
| US08180607B2 |
Acoustic modeling method
A cross-spectral correlation function of a structure may be determined by providing a finite element model of the structure having a plurality of elements each having a centroid. A plurality of composite centroids may be determined wherein each one of the composite centroids is based on at least one of the elements. The cross-spectral correlation function between at least one pair of the elements in the finite element model may be assigned to be the cross-spectral correlation function of the composite centroids that include the centroids of the elements. If the pair of elements is included in the same composite centroid, then the cross-spectral correlation function between the elements is assigned to be the autocorrelation function of the composite centroid that includes the pair of elements. |
| US08180605B1 |
Methods and systems for creating a smooth contact-impact interface in finite element analysis
Improved systems and methods of creating a smooth contact-impact interface (i.e., a curve fitted surface) in finite element analysis are disclosed. According to one aspect, a smooth contact interface is created for a master segment used for simulating contacts. First, for every nodal point in the master segment, a list of elements that share at least the node is determined. Then a nodal normal vector is calculated using a weighted average of respective element normal vectors of all elements in the list. The calculated nodal normal vector is adjusted for special edge effect, which is an intersection between flat and curved geometries. A set of edge control points are created using a pair of adjacent corner nodes. A mid-element control point is further created for quadrilateral shell elements. The smooth contact interface is configured to encompass all corner nodes and all of the control points. |
| US08180603B2 |
Process for producing sandwich structures with particulate material pattern
The present invention is concerned with a process for forming a very well defined pattern of particulate material in a composite material comprising a web material and particulate absorbent material. The present invention relates also to a method for determining the equipment design and process parameter for such a process. In a particular application, the present invention provides a process for preparing liquid absorbent structures, such as may be useful for disposable absorbent articles. |
| US08180599B2 |
Network design utilizing network management routing algorithm
Techniques for designing networks. The techniques utilize network management-based routing (NMS routing) in conjunction with the planning step (design-based routing) of the design process so that an optimal network may be designed. An automated technique for designing a network may comprise the following steps. First, one or more traffic demands are obtained. Then, a network is computed by determining one or more routes for the one or more traffic demands using a design-based routing methodology based on feedback from a network management-based routing methodology. |
| US08180598B2 |
System and method for performing thermal analysis on a building through universal meshing
A universal mesh for a building insulation model is established from a template representing a wide range of insulation profiles, with the mesh being used for conducting one, two or three-dimensional finite element analysis (FEA) regarding thermal insulation factors for the building. The system and method take into account a wide range of heat related factors, including structural materials of the building, insulation components encompassing both insulation materials employed in the building process and established air pockets or gaps, and even fasteners used in the construction process. |
| US08180597B2 |
Utility network engineering and design rules in three-dimensional models of utility networks
One embodiment of the invention provides a method for modeling a variety of three-dimensional (3D) utility networks constructed from individual parts. In one embodiment, users may construct a utility network by selecting and assembling a network of inter-connected parts, where each part may be associated one or more design rules. When a part is placed within the model, the rules corresponding to the part may be applied. The network part rules may be configured to adjust the position, properties or attributes associated with a network part to comply with a rule. Alternatively, a user interface display may provide an indication of any network parts of a 3D model that violate a particular network part rule. |
| US08180595B2 |
Portable data acquisition system
According to typical inventive embodiments, a compact data acquisition unit is modularly assembled of COT components, based on a PC-104 or other form factor of relatively small size. Inside a durable casing, a dc-dc converter increases battery-generated dc voltage for a computer processor that communicates with storage/memory and collects sensory information via an a-to-d converter. The inventive data acquisition unit can be implemented in either handheld (e.g., so as to include touchscreen interactivity) or situate (e.g., so as to be combined with sensory instrumentation) fashion. Especially propitious inventive practice involves wireless communication with an inventive “podded” device, remotely placed, that includes an inventive data acquisition unit, one or more sensors, and a pod containing the unit and the sensor(s). For underwater applications, a preferred embodiment of an inventive podded device is planoconvex, having a flat side for mounting on vehicular structure and an outwardly curved/rounded side for mitigating hydrodynamic penalties. |
| US08180590B2 |
Railroad surveying and monitoring system
A Railroad Surveying and Monitoring System configured on a mobile platform for surveying, monitoring, and analyzing rail position and superstructure and terrain substructure of railroad tracks (20a,b) or other structures. The system employs two or more High Accuracy Differential Global Positioning System devices (110,112), ground penetrating radar devices (116), terrain conductivity instruments (118), optical cameras (124), and data receivers and processors (126), which in turn process, display, and store the data in a usable database. Precise coordinate data generated from a High Accuracy Global Positioning System provides both location data for subsurface sensors and surface sensors and rail position coordinates to monitor track displacements during track inspection in real time. |
| US08180587B2 |
System for brokering fault detection data
A method of brokering information in a manufacturing system which includes a broker coupled between a supplier of information and a consumer of information. The manufacturing system receives information from the supplier in a first format and sends information from the broker to the consumer in a second format. |
| US08180584B2 |
Apparatus and method for testing a power source
A method and apparatus for communicating battery information to a remote device or database. A battery tester and/or charger can communicate with a wired or wireless connection to the remote device. Battery identifying information, test results and warranty information can be communicated to the remote device or database. |
| US08180581B2 |
Systems and methods for identifying correlated variables in large amounts of data
Groups of correlated representations of variables are identified from a large amount of spectrometry data. A plurality of samples is analyzed and a plurality of measured variables is obtained from a spectrometer. A processor executes a number of steps. The plurality of measured variables is divided into a plurality of measured variable subsets. Principal component analysis followed by variable grouping (PCVG) is performed on each measured variable subset, producing one or more group representations for each measured variable subset and a plurality of group representations for the plurality of measured variable subsets. While the total number of the plurality of group representations is greater than a maximum number, the plurality of group representations is divided into a plurality of representative subsets and PCVG is performed on each subset. PCVG is performed on the remaining the plurality of group representations, producing a plurality of groups of correlated representations of variables. |
| US08180580B2 |
Method for identifying a compound that modulates SIR2 protein activity
The present invention relates to a method for identifying compounds that modulate the activity of sirtuin deacetylase protein family members. Compounds of the invention are identified by designing or screening for a compound which binds to at least one amino acid residue of the newly identified nicotinamide inhibition and base exchange site of Sir2 and testing the compound for its ability to modulate the activity of the Sir2 protein. Compositions and methods for preventing or treating diseases or disorders associated with Sir2 are also provided. |
| US08180576B2 |
Data processor for mass spectrometer
When a target substance's composition formula is deduced by using a mass spectrometer, if the target substance's composition formula is deduced based on an MSn spectrum and candidates are found, a composition formula candidate list including all the composition formula candidates is created, and the list is displayed in a list format. The composition formula candidates are narrowed down based on the MSn spectrum by an MS2 analysis or MS3 analysis. If there is a candidate to be excluded, the composition formula candidate list is updated, and the excluded candidate is moved to the exclusion list. Accompanying this, a composition formula candidate table is displayed in a list format on the display window. In this table, the composition formula candidates included in the exclusion list and the remaining composition formula candidates in the composition formula candidate list are simultaneously displayed with different colors so that they are visually discriminable. |
| US08180575B2 |
Process and system for on-line and in situ counting of cells in a biological culture medium
A process for on-line and in situ counting of cells in a biological culture medium, including a plurality of steps of measuring the capacitance of the medium or a plurality of steps of measuring the conductance of the medium, at distinct frequencies varying within a predetermined range of measurement frequencies. The process includes an extraction of information on the variation of permittivity due to the β-dispersion in the medium, from the capacitance measurements, and processing of the variation of this information on the variation of permittivity as a function of the frequency, in order to provide information regarding the counting of cells in the medium. |
| US08180568B2 |
Method for operating a navigation system
A method for operating a navigation system includes the following steps: a) computing a route from a starting point to a destination, wherein the route consists of a sequence of road segments and junctions between the road segments that is selected from a database, in which a geographic area is described in the form of road segments and junctions, with a route computation method, b) computing at least one maneuvering instruction that contains instructions for the user in order to follow the route from the current position, and c) computing and displaying a schematic maneuvering image on a display device, wherein the schematic maneuvering image graphically illustrates the maneuvering instructions in schematic form, wherein adjacent junctions that do not lie along the route and/or adjacent road segments that do not lie along the route and do not converge with a junction along the route are also analyzed during the computation of the schematic maneuvering image, wherein at least part of the adjacent road segments and/or adjacent junctions is illustrated in the schematic maneuvering image in addition to the maneuvering instruction that represents the route. |
| US08180563B2 |
Method for modifying navigation information and navigation apparatus using the same
A method for modifying navigation information is provided in the present invention. The method comprises steps of detecting a status information with respect to a moving carrier guiding by a navigating route; comparing the status information with a characteristic information corresponding to a characteristic point on the navigating route; and finally, determining whether the moving carrier is passing the characteristic point according to the comparing result and modifying the coordinate position of the carrier. In another embodiment, the present invention further provides a navigating apparatus comprising a sensing module for detecting the status of the moving carrier, a signal processing unit, and a storage unit for storing a map information. The signal processing unit comparing the status information to the characteristic information with respect to the characteristic point on the navigating route, and modifying the deviation of the moving carrier to the modify location according to the comparing result. |
| US08180562B2 |
System and method for taxi route entry parsing
A method and apparatus for building, creating, or otherwise specifying an airport ground taxi navigation route for an aircraft from an input of the route is disclosed. The apparatus includes a keypad, voice recognition device, or other entry device, a processor, a display screen, and a navigation map database. A crewmember on the aircraft uses the entry device to enter all or part of the ground navigation taxi route. The entry device converts the received route information into an input text string, either with or without delimiters. The system parses the input text string by extracting characters or substrings from the input text string. A database lookup component searches the map database to find a route component that matches the character or substring. If the system finds a matching route component, it determines if the matching route component is continuous with the taxi route. The system adds the matching route component to the taxi route and displays any discontinuity. The system then repeats the process with subsequent substrings of the input text string until the entire input string has been processed. The system may automatically or manually handle input errors or ambiguities. |
| US08180556B2 |
System for supply of LPG/ammonia for direct-injection petrol or diesel engines
A system for supply of LPG/ammonia for direct-injection petrol or diesel engine includes an electronic control unit where the control unit governs a petrol/diesel pump, a supplementary petrol/diesel pump, a petrol/diesel-delivery solenoid vale, LPG/ammonia-return solenoid valve, LPG/ammonia pump, a supplementary LPG/ammonia pump, a LPG/ammonia-delivery solenoid vale and a LPG/ammonia injector, such that only one of LPG/ammonia and petrol/diesel is fed to the engine at any point in time, and a combination of i) LPG and petrol, ii) LPG and diesel, iii) ammonia and petrol, and iv) ammonia and diesel is never fed to the engine. |
| US08180555B2 |
Procedure and device for a pressure determination
A method of determining a pressure at a dosing valve of a fuel metering device for metering fuel into an exhaust gas system of a combustion engine with a component of the combustion engine assigned to an exhaust gas system for a regeneration, a temperature impingement and/or a thermo management. The fuel is injected in a flow direction of the exhaust gas in front of the component, and metering of the fuel is determined by an injection valve from a cycle duration and a duty cycle relation for controlling a shut-off valve and the dosing valve depending on a difference pressure. The method includes determining a pressure before the dosing valve via acquisition and processing of at least one replacement value deduced from a pressure sensor signal of a pressure sensor arranged in a flow direction of the fuel behind the dosing valve for recording a measured pressure. |
| US08180550B2 |
Slip suppression control system for vehicle
A slip suppression control system for a vehicle comprises a monitored value detecting device for detecting a monitored value corresponding to a difference between a rotational speed of a front wheel of the vehicle and a rotational speed of a rear wheel of the vehicle; a threshold determiner unit configured to determine a relationship between the monitored value detected by the monitored value detecting device and plural thresholds; and a controller configured to execute traction control for reducing a driving power of a drive wheel based on determination of the threshold determiner unit; wherein the plural thresholds have at least first and second thresholds, and the second threshold is set larger than the first threshold; and wherein the traction control includes an amount-change-based control. |
| US08180545B2 |
Methods and systems for calibrating braking systems and controlling braking in vehicles
A method for controlling braking in a vehicle having a brake pedal includes the steps of obtaining a first measure of braking intent based on movement of the brake pedal, obtaining a second measure of braking intent based on a force applied to the brake pedal, controlling the braking based on the first measure provided that a transition parameter is less than a first predetermined value, controlling the braking based on the second measure provided that the transition parameter is greater than a second predetermined value, and controlling the braking based on the first measure and the second measure provided that the transition parameter is greater than the first predetermined value and less than the second predetermined value. |
| US08180544B2 |
System and method for optimizing a braking schedule of a powered system traveling along a route
An optimization system is provided for a braking schedule of a powered system traveling along a route. The braking schedule is based on at least one predetermined characteristic of the powered system and is configured to be enacted in a braking region along the route. The optimization system includes a sensor configured to measure a parameter related to the operation of the powered system. Additionally, the system includes a processor coupled to the sensor, to receive parameter data. The processor compares the measured parameter with an expected parameter, which is based on the at least one predetermined characteristic of the powered system. The processor adjusts the at least one predetermined characteristic based on the comparison, and adjusts the braking schedule based on the adjustment to the at least one predetermined characteristic. A method is also provided for optimizing a braking schedule of a powered system traveling along a route. |
| US08180543B2 |
Movement stabilizing apparatus for combination vehicle
A movement stabilizing control ECU 25 includes a differential unit 25a, a cycle calculation unit 25b, a time constant/gain setting portion 25c, a first-order lag processing unit 25d, a pendulum movement detection unit 25e, a control amount calculation portion 25f and a control amount output unit 25g. The time constant/gain setting portion 25c sets a time constant τ and a gain K used at the time of subjecting a yaw acceleration ω′ which is a time-differential value of a yaw rate ω to the first-order lag processing at the first-order lag processing unit 25d, with reference to a function or data of a look-up table, for example, depending on the cycle or the frequency of the yaw acceleration ω′ due to the pendulum movement. The control amount calculation portion 25f multiplies the amplitude of a yaw acceleration ωd′ outputted from the first-order lag processing unit 25d by a predetermined constant to calculate a yaw control amount with a phase in opposite to that of the yaw acceleration ωd′ and outputs the yaw control amount to the control amount output unit 25g. |
| US08180541B2 |
Drive and braking force control device for vehicle
In a braking/driving force control apparatus, a vehicle target braking/driving force and a vehicle target yaw moment through the control of braking/driving forces of wheels are calculated, and when the target braking/driving force and the target yaw moment cannot be achieved through the control of the braking/driving forces of the wheels, it is determined which one of the braking/driving force and the yaw moment should take priority on the basis of the target braking/driving force and the target yaw moment. When it is determined that the braking/driving force should take priority, the braking/driving forces of the wheels are controlled so as to attain the target braking/driving force as much as possible, and when it is determined that the yaw moment should take priority, the braking/driving forces of the wheels are controlled so as to attain the target yaw moment as much as possible. |
| US08180538B2 |
Adapting stroke pressure of a transmission control element
A method for controlling a transmission includes applying a reference stroke pressure to an oncoming control element while executing a downshift to a target gear, determining a stroke pressure adjustment in response to a turbine speed flare during the downshift, and re-executing the downshift while applying to the oncoming element an adapted stroke pressure that is a sum of the stroke pressure adjustment and the reference stroke pressure. |
| US08180526B2 |
Equipment for vehicle and communication interface circuit for use in this equipment
Equipment for vehicle in accordance with the present invention includes: a vehicle-mounted unit which runs with respect to a vehicle body ground on a side of a negative electrode of a battery; an impedance component having an end connected to the vehicle body ground, and another end connected to a circuit ground; a circuit to be controlled which runs with respect to the circuit ground; a control unit which runs with respect to the circuit ground, for controlling the circuit to be controlled and for outputting a communication signal in a digital form which is to be transmitted to the vehicle-mounted unit; and a communication interface circuit which runs with respect to both the vehicle body ground and the circuit ground, for cancelling a potential difference between the vehicle body ground and the circuit ground, and for carrying out bidirectional communications between the vehicle-mounted unit and the control unit. |
| US08180523B2 |
Method for recognition of a pressure loss in motor vehicle tires
Disclosed is a method for detection of a pressure loss in motor vehicle tires, which detects pressure loss on at least one vehicle tire based on several parameters, which are calculated from the rolling circumference of the tires. To this end, currently calculated parameters are compared with learnt values of the parameters. |
| US08180522B2 |
Vehicle monitor
A system and method is disclosed for monitoring a motor vehicle. The system includes a sensor unit for collecting at least one vehicle statistic and a portable device for displaying the vehicle statistics. The portable device requests the vehicle statistics from the sensor unit at regular intervals or in response to a particular event and displays statistics on a built-in display screen. In one embodiment, the portable device may be attached to the keys used to operate the vehicle being monitored. |
| US08180520B2 |
Electronic safing system
The electronic safing system is provided with a safing sensor, a comparator, and a microcomputer. The microcomputer has a programmable analog I/O port which is connected to a built-in AD-DA converter. The programmable analog I/O port can be switched to an analog input port and an analog output port according to an internal register. The programmable analog I/O port is connected to an input terminal of the comparator. When diagnosing the comparing circuit, the microcomputer switches the programmable analog I/O port to the analog output port and outputs a predetermined voltage for diagnosis. Then, the microcomputer diagnoses the comparing circuit by monitoring the output of the comparing circuit. |
| US08180519B2 |
Cooperative vehicle diagnostics
Embodiments described herein comprise a system and method for corroborative vehicle diagnostic. The corroborative vehicle diagnostic system allows a vehicle to detect a fault indicator experienced by a vehicle subsystem. The corroborative vehicle diagnostic system allows the vehicle to compare the fault indicator with similar and/or dissimilar conditions experienced by one or more additional vehicle located within a geographic region. A corroborative diagnostic controller compares the fault indicator with the conditions of the additional vehicle. Based on the comparison of the fault indicator with the condition, an error status of the fault indicator is determined. The error status may be that the vehicle subsystem has failed, that the vehicle subsystem has not failed and/or that the results are inconclusive. The corroborative diagnostic controller may communicate directly with a control system of the vehicle. |
| US08180517B2 |
Diagnostic system and method for processing continuous and intermittent faults
A diagnostic system diagnoses a device and includes fault declaring module that selects one of a normal control mode, a temporary default action and a permanent default action. A counter module tracks a first number of successive test samples, a second number of failed samples that occur during the successive test samples, a third number of successive failed samples, a fourth number of failed samples, and a fifth number of samples since a last failed sample. The fault declaring module transitions to a temporary default action when at least one of the third number of successive failed samples is greater than a first value and the fourth number of failed samples is greater than a second value. The fault declaring module transitions to a permanent default action that is different than the temporary default action when the second number of failed samples is greater than a third value. |
| US08180515B2 |
Cellular phone configured with off-board device capabilities and starter/charger and battery testing capabilities
The present invention is directed toward a cellular phone that connects to an existing vehicle data link to perform the functions of an off-board device, such as a scan tool, for displaying diagnostic information relating to vehicles. In addition, the cellular phone connects to a starter/charger system and/or a battery to perform the functions of a starter/charger/battery testing device. Such a device allows a user to connect the cellular phone to a data link connector located in a vehicle, download software to either an adaptor or the cellular phone, retrieve information relating to diagnostic tests on the vehicle and view the results on the cellular phone display, and/or communicate the results to another person or device. |
| US08180513B2 |
Autonomous ground vehicle control system for high-speed and safe operation
The present disclosure relates to a reference yaw rate generator for an autonomous ground vehicle control system. The reference yaw rate generator is configured to generate a reference yaw rate (rr) based on an actual latitudinal position (Y), a desired latitudinal position (Yd), an actual longitudinal position (X), a desired longitudinal position (Xd) and an actual heading (ψ) of the autonomous ground vehicle. |
| US08180512B2 |
Efficient dual source battery pack system for an electric vehicle
A method of optimizing the operation of the power source of an electric vehicle is provided, where the power source is comprised of a first battery pack (e.g., a non-metal-air battery pack) and a second battery pack (e.g., a metal-air battery pack). The power source is optimized to minimize use of the least efficient battery pack (e.g., the second battery pack) while ensuring that the electric vehicle has sufficient power to traverse the expected travel distance before the next battery charging cycle. Further optimization is achieved by setting at least one acceleration limit based on vehicle efficiency and the state-of-charge (SOC) of the first and second battery packs. |
| US08180511B2 |
Hybrid vehicle control apparatus and method
A hybrid vehicle has an internal combustion engine 2 and a flywheel 9. Storage and release of energy by the flywheel 9 is enabled by a continuously variable transmission 10 and clutch 11 under the control of an electronic module 14. The amount of energy transferred from the vehicle one to the flywheel 9 during a deceleration manoeuvre is maximized by increasing the engine speed. As a result, the engine does more work against the braking force of the accelerating flywheel and causes the flywheel to spin up to a higher rotational speed. |
| US08180510B2 |
Control apparatus of vehicle drive apparatus and plug-in hybrid vehicle
A hybrid control controller stores vehicle speed influence values that have been set according to vehicle speeds, a first threshold value of a sum value of the vehicle speed influence values, a second threshold value lower than the first threshold value, and an engine start reference vehicle speed, and during EV running, sums the vehicle speed influence values from moment to moment. The hybrid control controller starts the engine in a case where the sum value is no less than the first threshold value, and in a case where the sum value is no less than the second threshold value and the vehicle speed is no more than an engine start reference vehicle speed. |
| US08180508B2 |
Electricity storage control apparatus and method of controlling electricity storage
An electricity storage control apparatus that controls an electricity storage device mounted on a vehicle includes control device that changes a target state of charge, which is used as the target of a state of charge of the electricity storage device, and calculating device that calculates an amount of decrease in voltage across the electricity storage device caused as the vehicle is operated. The control device increases the target state of charge if a decreased voltage value, which is lower than a reference voltage value of the electricity storage device by the voltage decrease amount calculated by the calculating device, is equal to or lower than a threshold. |
| US08180506B2 |
Flight management computer with consideration of approach speed constraint
The flight management computer discloses and carried onboard an aircraft can be programmed with a newly apparent speed constraint while it ensures the guidance of the aircraft in the course of a landing runway approach. It then takes account of the speed constraint by using it as target speed, when it is greater than an instruction speed which depends on the number of extended flap settings and which corresponds to the addition of a further flap setting. If appropriate, the speed constraint may be bounded below, thus making it possible to remain within the limits of the flight domain of the aircraft in its configuration at the time. |
| US08180503B2 |
Assisted flight computer program and method
An assisted flight computer program and method which assist a non-pilot or partially incapacitated pilot to gain control of an aircraft, summon help, and then land the aircraft under the guidance of a tower controller. The assisted flight computer program is integrated into an avionics system and provides a guided, menu-driven user interface that is simple enough for non-pilots and partially incapacitated pilots to understand and follow in distress situations. |
| US08180501B2 |
Controlling the temperature of a computer system
Some embodiments of the present invention provide a system that controls the temperature of a computer system. First, a performance parameter of the computer system is monitored. Next, a future temperature of the computer system is predicted based on the performance parameter. Then, exhaust air from the computer system is mixed with ambient air from outside the computer system based on the predicted future temperature, and the mixed exhaust air and ambient air are channeled through the computer system to control the temperature of the computer system. |
| US08180499B2 |
Power supply system
In a power supply system (10) having a cogeneration unit (12) equipped with an internal combustion engine (12a) and a generator (12b) to generate power to be supplied to a power destination and hot water to be supplied to a hot water destination, there are provided with a natural energy generation unit (14) that generates power with natural energy, a power supply unit (20) that receives the power generated by the generator and natural energy generation unit to supply the received power to the power destination; a voltage detector (22a) that detects voltage (V1) of the power flowing through an connecting bus (22), and an electric heater (121). The power supply unit (20) controls operation of the electric heater based on the detected connecting bus power voltage (V1), thereby effectively utilizing surplus electricity without transmitting back it to a commercial power source. |
| US08180498B2 |
System and method for monitoring and controlling a wind turbine farm
A system and method for operating a plurality of wind turbines includes a supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system and a display for depicting a graphical output of information from the SCADA system. The SCADA system analyzes the information and transmits a signal to the display to visually depict the information in a dynamic manner. |
| US08180496B2 |
System and method of constant pressure, variable speed pump control with local equalization for dissimilar pumps
A pump control system includes a plurality of different variable speed pumps. Each of the pumps can be operated at a different speed to equalize pump loads. A system wide proportional integral differential control loop increases and decreases the speed of all pump motors to maintain a desired system output pressure. A second proportional integral differential control loop associated with each pump adjusts pump speed to equalize a load profile for each respective pump. |
| US08180494B2 |
System and method for dynamically managing blowers and vents
A method implemented in a computer infrastructure having computer executable code tangibly embodied on a computer readable medium being operable to perform a thermal analysis of a data center and overlay the thermal analysis on a map of the data center to provide an overlaid thermal analysis. Additionally, the computer executable code is operable to dynamically control at least one blower and at least one vent in the data center based on the overlaid thermal analysis to direct cool air to a section of the data center in need of cooling. |
| US08180490B2 |
Video-based sensing for daylighting controls
A video imager may be used to measure the natural and/or artificial light levels in a space. The lighting estimates may be passed to a controller via a communication network. The lighting estimates may be in the form of actual radiance values, brightness, or other forms. The controller may determine if and which areas of the space require more light or if and which areas of the space have more light than required. Based on the lighting estimates, the controller may issue commands to turn on/off or dim/brighten the light from various ones or combinations of light sources in or around the space via actuators. The controller may also directly interface with the light sources. |
| US08180488B2 |
Robot system
A robot system includes a robot and a robot controller including a drive unit, a memory that stores an arm-occupied region and a movement-forbidden region, a target position calculation unit that outputs a target position of a tool or a workpiece, a movement-forbidden region entry monitoring unit that checks whether the arm-occupied region based on the target position enters the movement-forbidden region and outputs a stop request if it is checked that the arm-occupied region enters the movement-forbidden region, and a predicted-coasting-position calculating unit that calculates a predicted coasting position of each axis and a coasting position of the tool or the workpiece in the case that the robot is urgently stopped. The movement-forbidden region entry monitoring unit checks whether the arm-occupied region at the coasting position enters the movement-forbidden region and outputs another stop request if it is checked that the arm-occupied region enters the movement-forbidden region. |
| US08180487B1 |
Calibrated vision based robotic system
A method of calibrating a vision based robotic system. The method includes engaging a calibration pin with a robotic tool and moving the calibration pin to a calibration block that includes at least one set of optical sensors having an optical transmitter to transmit an optical beam and an optical receiver to receive the optical beam. Further, the transmitted optical beam includes a center point. The method further includes: moving the calibration pin to the center point of the transmitted optical beam; determining a calibration pin center position relative to the robotic tool; and commanding a machine vision assembly having a camera to capture an image of a plurality of camera reading points of the calibration block and to determine a camera center position. |
| US08180485B2 |
Medication dispensing cart
A medication dispensing cart (10) having a computer and monitor (12), a work surface (16) with pull out keyboard (18), and plural drawers (30) arranged as a vertical series of cassettes that can be added as needed. The battery powered device uses software and pass codes for controlling access to each drawer, and requires a second pass code for any drawer designated to contain narcotics. Records can be kept of who dispenses what medication and when for each cart in a system of carts. The cart in the system is in wireless communication with a system administrator. Emails alerting the system administrator of low battery power, of a cart switching to off, of an attempted break-in, and of inventory and usage data are sent automatically by email. |
| US08180484B2 |
Apparatus, system and methods for dispensing products
Products are dispensed from a dispensing apparatus in which products marked with transaction information are received in a two-dimensional array of moveable bins. In response to control information synthesized from transaction information on the products in the bins and a dispense request, the array is operated to place a bin at a dispensing station on the dispensing apparatus. At the dispensing station, a mechanism is operated in response to the control information to provide access to the bin. A product in the bin may then be retrieved. |
| US08180483B2 |
Overhead transfer/storage system and overhead transfer/storage method
In an overhead conveyance/storage system 1 including at least a storage area 100 for the storage of products (e.g., tires) 200, at least one transfer holder 300 adapted to move through a ceiling space in the storage area 100 in three dimensions, including vertical, transverse and longitudinal directions while holding the products 200, and unloader 500 for carrying out the products 200 from the storage area 100, a product receiving position (product unloading position) 501 of the unloader 500 is set to a nearly central part of the storage area 100 when seen in plan. The overhead conveyance/storage system 1 further includes loader 400 for carrying the products 200 into the storage area 100, and product discriminator 402 is disposed in the loader 400. |
| US08180481B2 |
Autoloop system and method of operation
A system and method for operating an autoloop system on an electrical distribution system is provided. The system includes a first branch circuit having a first recloser and a midpoint recloser and a second branch circuit having a second feeder recloser and a midpoint recloser. A tie recloser is electrically coupled between the first branch circuit and the second branch circuit wherein the tie recloser closes only after a fault is detected. A master controller associated with the first and second branch circuits communicates with the reclosers of the first and second branch circuits. The master controller includes a processor for blocking a fast tripping function of a feeder recloser in response to the detection of a fault on the other branch circuit. The portion of a circuit where a fault is detected may be isolated to minimize the portion of the first and second branch circuits without power. |
| US08180480B2 |
Tool bit monitoring for on-vehicle brake lathe
A system and method for monitoring the contact of tool bits of a lathe with surfaces of a brake disk being machined employs a vibration sensor coupled to the lathe. Signals from the vibration sensor are processed as time-averaged segments that can be grouped within time intervals; a microprocessor employs a qualifying routine to compare the signal level to a background noise threshold value and indicates as “failed” those time periods where the average signal level is not above the background noise threshold. An accumulator records the indications over a number of intervals and compares the result to a standard to make a determination of whether the lathe is likely actively cutting the disk surfaces. To isolate intermittent, high-intensity noises, a consistency routine can check further to see whether individual segments within an interval fall within a range based on the average signal level for that interval. |
| US08180479B2 |
Adaptive control of composite plycutting
The feed rate of an ultrasonic knife used to cut composite material is optimized using adaptive control. One or more parameters such as ultrasonic power or side load on the knife is sensed and used to generate feedback control signals. The feedback control signals are used to optimize the commanded feedrate of the knife. |
| US08180477B2 |
Machining status monitoring method and machining status monitoring apparatus
A machining status monitoring apparatus is provided on a machine tool, and has an actual CCD camera for imaging the tool and the workpiece and generating actual two-dimensional image data thereof, a virtual image generating section having a virtual CCD camera corresponding to the actual CCD camera, in which the tool and workpiece of three-dimensional model are imaged by the virtual CCD camera and virtual two-dimensional image data thereof are generated, and a display control section for receiving from a control device of the machine tool, information relating to the coolant supply state and checking whether coolant is being supplied to the contact portion of the tool and the workpiece, and displaying on a display device actual two-dimensional image data when coolant is not being supplied and displaying on the display device virtual two-dimensional image data when coolant is being supplied. |
| US08180474B2 |
System and method for certified garment design
There is provided a method for designing a garment having a particular certification based on the visibility characteristics of the garment. The method takes into account various factors including manufacturing tolerances, occlusion by logos, etc. to calculate a certification level for the garment visibility. This certification level is calculated dynamically as the design features are amended. |
| US08180473B2 |
Exposure system, method of testing exposure apparatus, and method of manufacturing device
An exposure system is configured to update control software installed on an exposure apparatus to new control software. The exposure system comprises: at least one exposure apparatus; a simulator configured to test an operation of the exposure apparatus; an output unit configured to output configuration information of the exposure apparatus, which includes information representing a temporal change of the exposure apparatus; a reflecting unit configured to reflect the temporal change of the exposure apparatus on the simulator based on the configuration information output from the output unit; and an updating unit configured to update control software installed on the simulator to new control software. |
| US08180471B2 |
Tuning a process controller based on a dynamic sampling rate
A method for estimating a state of a process implemented by a tool for fabricating workpieces includes collecting metrology data associated with a subset of workpieces processed in the tool. The collecting exhibits an irregular pattern. Metrology data associated with a selected state observation is received for a selected run of the process. A tuning factor for the selected run is determined based on the irregular pattern. The selected state observation is discounted based on the determined tuning factor. A state estimate of the process is determined based on the discounted selected state observation. At least one process tool operable to implement the process is controlled based on the state estimate. |
| US08180460B2 |
Flexible circuit electrode array
A flexible circuit electrode array with more than one layer of metal traces comprising: a polymer base layer; more than one layer of metal traces, separated by polymer layers, deposited on said polymer base layer, including electrodes suitable to stimulate neural tissue; and a polymer top layer deposited on said polymer base layer and said metal traces. Polymer materials are useful as electrode array bodies for neural stimulation. They are particularly useful for retinal stimulation to create artificial vision, cochlear stimulation to create artificial hearing, or cortical stimulation many purposes. The pressure applied against the retina, or other neural tissue, by an electrode array is critical. Too little pressure causes increased electrical resistance, along with electric field dispersion. Too much pressure may block blood flow. |
| US08180458B2 |
Method and apparatus for digital signal processing for radio frequency surgery measurements
A method and apparatus for calculating current lost through a patient during a treatment of a patient using an electromagnetic energy delivery system is disclosed. The system generates electromagnetic energy, contacts a skin surface of the patient, transfers the electromagnetic energy to tissue beneath the surface of the skin, detects a value of at least one characteristic of the electromagnetic energy utilizing synchronous undersampling, and calculates the current lost through the patient. The characteristic measured may be a value of current of the electromagnet energy. An adjustable matching network may be utilized to maximize power to the tissue of the patient. Values of the impedance of the matching network may be utilized to determine the electromagnetic energy delivered to the tissue of the patient. A current correction factor is determined from the impedance of the matching network and utilized to calculate the current lost through the patient. |
| US08180457B2 |
System for cardiac resuscitation
System and method for monitoring and controlling, defibrillation and pacing which allows a victim of a cardiac rhythm abnormality immediate access to a medical professional at a central station, who will remotely monitor, diagnose and treat the victim at one of a plurality of remote sites in accordance with the following steps: (1) providing a plurality of contact electrodes for a victim at a remote site for the receipt of ECG signals and for the application of electrical pulses to the victim; (2) transmitting the signals from the remote site to a central station and displaying them for review by the medical professional; (3) the medical professional selecting from a menu of defibrillation and pacing pulses, if the application thereof is appropriate; (4) transmitting the selection results to the remote site; and (5) receiving the selection results at the remote site and applying the selected pulses to the victim. |
| US08180446B2 |
Method and system for cyclical neural modulation based on activity state
Methods and related systems for modulating neural activity by repetitively or cyclically blocking conduction in a peripheral neural structure are disclosed. Timing of delivery of blocking stimuli may be based upon overall activity level of the subject or use/activity of a portion of the body of a subject. |
| US08180439B2 |
Ischemia detection using intra-cardiac signals
An implanted cardiac rhythm management device is disclosed that is operative to detect myocardial ischemia. This is done by evaluating electrogram features to detect an electrocardiographic change; specifically, changes in electrogram segment during the early part of an ST segment. The early part of the ST segment is chosen to avoid the T-wave. |
| US08180434B2 |
Powerhead of a power injection system
A contrast media injection system detects the absolute position of the syringe ram using a non-contact sensor. A series of magnets and Hall-Effect sensors may be used or an opto-reflective system. Illuminated knobs that are connected to the drive mechanism for the syringe ram rotate with the drive and provide visual feedback on operation through the illumination. Analog Hall-Effect sensors are used to determine the presence or absence of magnets that identify the type of faceplate being used. The faceplates include control electronics, connected to the powerhead through connectors, which may be interchangeably used by the two faceplates. The faceplate electronics include detectors for automatically detecting the capacity of pre-filled syringes. Additional features include using historical data to provide optimum pressure limit values during an injection protocol, a removable memory device for storing and transferring information such as injection protocols and injector statistics, and password protection of such protocols. |
| US08180426B2 |
Method for transforming head surface coordinates to brain surface coordinates and transcranial brain function measuring method using the transformation data
Data collected by a transcranial brain function measuring/stimulating method is accurately projected and displayed onto a brain surface. If there is no three-dimensional head image, data is projected and displayed onto the brain surface of a standard brain. The head surface coordinates are transformed to the brain surface coordinates of the brain surface underlying the head surface by, e.g., a minimum distance search method. The coordinates of a projected point on the brain surface of the head surface and the probability distribution are determined for a standard brain normalized with data on subjects. |
| US08180423B2 |
Sensor with increased biocompatibility
Sensors and methods for producing them are disclosed. A cavity is created and filled with a reagent that includes a conductive matrix, enzyme, catalyst, and binding agent, in a preferred embodiment. The cavity is substantially enclosed, leaving enough of an opening to allow the sample to enter. A portion of the material surrounding the cavity is preferably permeable to a substance useful for measuring reaction, but not to the reagent or the sample. Cavities that have the shape of a cone, conical frustum, pyramidal frustum, and right circular cylinder are given as examples. Other systems include a membrane that contains the sensor's active area and defines an internal volume of fluid, where the membrane or internal volume has a particular geometric relationship to the active area. |
| US08180421B2 |
Resonance energy transfer based detection of nosocomial infection
Disclosed herein are methods and devices for detection of hospital acquired infections. Disclosed methods may be utilized for continuous in vivo monitoring of a potential infection site or for periodic in vitro monitoring of tissue or fluid from a patient and may be utilized to alert patients and/or health care providers to the presence of a pathogen at an early stage of infection. Disclosed methods utilize fluorophore pairs that optically interact with one another according to Forster resonance energy transfer (FRET) or bioluminescence resonance energy transfer (BRET) mechanism. One member of the pair or a cofactor that interacts with an enzyme to form a member of the pair may be tethered to a device by a substrate that is specific for an enzyme expressed by a targeted pathogen. Upon interaction of the enzyme with the substrate, an optically detectable signal may be altered or initiated, detection of which may then provide information as to the existence of the pathogen at the site. |
| US08180418B2 |
Hinge apparatus and portable electronic device
A hinge apparatus includes a hinge unit that pivotably links a first housing and a second housing about a pivot axis, and a slide mechanism that enables the hinge unit to slide with respect to the second housing in a direction perpendicular to the pivot axis of the hinge unit on one face of the second housing. A portable electronic device includes the first housing, the second housing, and the hinge apparatus. |
| US08180417B2 |
Portable terminal
A mobile terminal has an opening and closing mechanism in which when an appropriate force is applied to the upper body to achieve a sliding movement with respect to the lower body, the upper body can be moved in a planar direction along the lower body and then in a non-planar direction to implement an open configuration. |
| US08180413B2 |
Hinge structure and folding mobile terminal using the same
An upper case of the display section includes a first connecting portion having a cylindrical hole, into which an inner cylinder of a dummy hinge composed of two cylindrical portions having the same axis and different diameters is inserted rotatably, wherein the first connecting portion protrudes from an end of the upper case. An upper case of the keybutton section includes a second connecting portion located, along a hinge axis, on the center side of the first connecting portion, and having a cylindrical hole into which an outer cylindrical portion of the dummy hinge is inserted unrotatably, wherein the second connecting portion protrudes from an end of the upper case. The hinge structure comprises a stopper for fixing the dummy hinge, which can be inserted as the dummy hinge is buried in the cylindrical hole, with the inner cylindrical portion inserted into the cylindrical hole of the first connecting portion. |
| US08180412B2 |
Mobile wireless communications device having frequency selective grounding and related method
A mobile wireless communications device includes a portable housing having a metallic front housing forming a peripheral sidewall as a metallic ring. A circuit board is carried by the portable housing and forms a chassis ground plane. A wireless communications circuit is carried by a circuit board. An antenna circuit is carried by a circuit board and connected to the wireless communications circuit. A frequency selective grounding circuit is positioned at a selected grounding location at the chassis ground plane and metallic front housing and forms a harmonic trap that responds to a specific range of frequencies. |
| US08180410B2 |
Housing and clip assembly for portable electronics device
The subject matter described herein includes a housing and clip assembly for a portable electronics device. According to one aspect of the subject matter described herein, a housing for a portable electronics device is provided. The housing includes a housing member for holding components of a portable electronics device. The components include a display. The housing further includes a lens coupled to the housing member for allowing viewing of the display. The lens includes a first position at rest and pivots to a second position for controlling a function of the portable electronics device. |
| US08180409B2 |
Power management of radio transceiver elements
A radio receiver includes a power control module for selectively powering down and powering up radio receiver elements in between known communication periods according to one aspect of the present invention. According to a second aspect of the invention, the radio receiver operates in a low power mode of operation and periodically “sniffs” to determine whether an access point has messages or communication signals to transmit to it. |
| US08180405B2 |
Mobile terminal and operation control method thereof
A method of controlling a mobile terminal, and which includes receiving an blow signal corresponding to a blowing action into a microphone of the mobile terminal, and generating at least one of a visual effect and a vibration effect based on characteristics of the blow signal. |
| US08180403B2 |
Recovery method and radio network controller in radio communication system
When a first MS control signalling device that controls a mobile station fails, a second MS control signalling device takes over the processing of the first MS control signalling device. The second MS control signalling device requests a RLC parameter necessary for communication of the mobile station, and the mobile station transmits the requested RLC parameter to the second MS control signalling device. The second MS control signalling device controls communication of the mobile station, using the obtained RLC parameter. A data path for transmitting user data of the mobile station is not released but is held when the MS control signalling devices are switched. |
| US08180400B2 |
Service setting for mobile communication terminal
A method for setting a service in a mobile communication terminal including at least first and second user identity cards. The method includes selecting the first identity card to be used for mobile communication, and requesting services directed to the second identity card be forwarded to the first identity card. |
| US08180396B2 |
User augmented reality for camera-enabled mobile devices
Disclosed are apparatus and methods for providing a user augmented reality (UAR) service for a camera-enabled mobile device, so that a user of such mobile device can use the mobile device to obtain meta data regarding one or more images/video that are captured with such device. As the user points the mobile device's camera at one or more objects in one or more scenes, such objects are automatically analyzed by the UAR to identify the one or more objects and then provide meta data regarding the identified objects in the display of the mobile device. The meta data is interactive and allows the user to obtain additional information or specific types of information, such as information that will aid the user in making a decision regarding the identified objects or selectable action options that can be used to initiate actions with respect to the identified objects. The user can utilize the UAR to continuously pass the camera over additional objects and scenes so that the meta data presented in the display of the mobile device is continuously updated. |
| US08180395B2 |
Modular wireless communicator
A wireless communicator including a housing, wireless communication functionality located within the housing, native user interface functionality cooperating with the wireless communication functionality and including user interface surfaces located on at least one outer facing surface of the housing, and pouching responsive electrical interconnection functionality responsive to pouching orientation of the housing in a pouch of an enhanced function device for automatically causing the wireless communication functionality to adapt to interoperation with parenting user interface functionality forming part of the enhanced function device at least partially instead of with the native user interface functionality. A method is also described and claimed. |
| US08180389B2 |
Apparatus for adjusting channel interference between devices in a wireless network
The performance and ease of management of wireless communications environments is improved by a mechanism that enables access points (APs) to perform automatic channel selection. A wireless network can therefore include multiple APs, each of which will automatically choose a channel such that channel usage is optimized. Furthermore, APs can perform automatic power adjustment so that multiple APs can operate on the same channel while minimizing interference with each other. Wireless stations are load balanced across APs so that user bandwidth is optimized. A movement detection scheme provides seamless roaming of stations between APs. |
| US08180386B1 |
Promoting push-to-talk communication
A system is provided for promoting push-to-talk communication. An exchange component identifies a voice call between a first mobile device and a second mobile device. The exchange component determines whether the first mobile device selects to share a first push-to-talk contact identifier associated with the first mobile device with other mobile devices. If the first mobile device selects to share the first push-to-talk contact identifier, the component determines whether the second mobile device selects to share a second push-to-talk contact identifier associated with the second mobile device with other mobile devices. If the second mobile device selects to share the second push-to-talk contact identifier, the component communicates the second push-to-talk contact identifier to the first mobile device and the first push-to-talk contact identifier to the second mobile device. |
| US08180376B1 |
Mobile analytics tracking and reporting
Mobile analytics data gathered from Internet sites accessed via mobile devices is tracked and reported. A tracking package at the publisher's server collects unique user, device and page data when a web page is accessed. The tracking package communicates the collected data to a tracking server that logs the data along with a unique identifier for the mobile device request. The tracking package includes the unique identifier in a beacon module that is embedded into the publisher's web page that is delivered to the mobile device. The beacon module at the mobile device communicates the unique identifier along with additional identification and/or usage data to the tracking server. The tracking server stores the additional identification and/or usage data associated with the unique identifier so that the additional data can be correlated to the data initially collected by the tracking package. A reporting server processes the stored data and generates reports. |
| US08180374B2 |
Method and system for transmitting data on the location of a mobile terminal to a receiver by means of a mobile radio network
A method and a system for transmitting data on the location of a mobile radio terminal to a receiver by means of a mobile radio network. An area that lies within the service range of the mobile radio network is defined and is subdivided into several subareas. A plurality of different call numbers are assigned to the receiver, who can be called at each of the call numbers. One respective call number is injectively allocated to the subareas. The location of the mobile radio terminal is determined and is made available to the mobile radio system when a call request is addressed to the receiver by the mobile radio terminal. The determined location is associated with a subarea and thus with a call number of the receiver. A connection between the mobile radio terminal and the receiver is established based on said call number. |
| US08180373B2 |
System and method for controlling device location determination
A controlling device such as a remote control has programming for transmitting a signal response to a plurality of control environments, each environment including a signaling device. Each signaling device in receipt of the signal request sends a signal response having a unique ID which is chosen to be characteristically attenuated by the surroundings of the environment. Because the controlling device can only be in one environment at a given time, and given the attenuation characteristics of the signal response from each signaling device, only one signal response will be received by the controlling device in each environment. Location definitions associated with the received unique ID may be used by programming in the controlling device to recall saved devices states, commands sets, macros, and even to dynamically generate commands based on the location information. |
| US08180371B1 |
System and method for mobile device self-location
A system is provided for mobile client-side location determination. The system includes a mobile device, which includes base transceiver station location data, a memory, a processor, and a location engine stored in the memory. When executed by the processor, the location engine receives information that identifies multiple base transceiver stations. The location engine also reads a location for each of the base transceiver stations from the base transceiver station location data and calculates a location of the mobile device based on the location of each of the base transceiver stations. Additionally, the location engine provides the location of the mobile device in a defined portion of a communication transmitted by the mobile device. |
| US08180366B2 |
Methods, systems, and computer program products for message filtering based on previous path trajectories and probable destination
Methods, systems and computer program products for filtering generally-broadcast messages received by a movable unit based on current spatial position, stored trajectory history, and probable future trajectories. A current spatial position of the movable unit is received and stored to form a stored trajectory history. A generally-broadcast message relating to a target geographical region is also received and stored. Potential trajectories of the movable unit are then computed over a pre-determined time based on at least one of the current spatial position, a current travel direction of the movable unit, and the stored trajectory history of the movable unit. The generally-broadcast message is then disseminated in response to at least one potential trajectory crossing into the target geographical region during the pre-determined time period. The generally-broadcast message may also be disseminated on the basis of specified user preferences. |
| US08180356B2 |
Method for notifying changes of cell information in multimedia broadcast/multicast service
The present invention discloses a method for notifying changes of cell information in MBMS. The method comprises a procedure of the change in cell information of an adjacent cell triggering a UE demodulating the cell information: acquires cell information of adjacent cell in realtime and determines whether the cell information has changed, if changed, carries service information in an instruction message of the control channel and notifies a UE of a change in cell information; otherwise, repeats this step. By means of the method according to the present invention, it is ensured that the UE has correct cell information at any time, even when moving to the border of two adjacent cells. |
| US08180355B2 |
Base station device and cell forming method
A base station device includes a plurality of directional antennas, a power control unit and a frequency management unit. The cell is formed with layers of a base cell having a cell border with a cell formed by a neighboring base station device and including a plurality of sector cells and a small-cell having a cell radius smaller than a cell radius of the base cell and including at least four sector cells by the plurality of directional antennas and the power control unit. The frequency management unit manages frequency bands so that different frequency bands are allocated to the sector cells of the base cell, and a frequency band, which is different from the frequency bands allocated to the base cell and different between neighboring sector cells but the same between at least two sector cells, is allocated to each of the sector cells of the small-cell. |
| US08180351B2 |
Ad-hoc peer-to-peer mobile radio access system interfaced to the PSTN and cellular networks
An ad-hoc, peer-to-peer radio access system for cellular communications systems using time division duplex as a way of maximizing the bits/hz/km2 for cellular systems. The network architecture of the ad-hoc system allows the radio access to be integrated with the fixed components of a conventional cellular system, PSTN or ISP. The objective is to make the system of the invention transparent to the features and services provided by the external network. The advantages of such a system to a cellular operator are that significantly less infrastructure is required, and that the RF spectrum is more efficiently utilized resulting in much lower building and operating costs. The system architecture is comprised of remote terminals, routers, gateways, and at least one gateway controller that interfaces the ad-hoc system to a cellular network system. The ad-hoc system of the invention allows for both voice and data transmissions and receptions. |
| US08180348B2 |
System and method for fast network reentry in a broadband wireless access communication system
A system and method for fast network re-entry in a broadband wireless access communication system. A mobile station transmits a first message requiring fast network re-entry to a base station and performs the fast network re-entry together with the base station when receiving a second message approving the fast network re-entry from the base station. The base station receives the first message, authenticates the first message using final session information of the mobile station that is previously stored in the base station, transmits the second message to the mobile station when succeeding in authentication of the first message, and performs the fast network re-entry together with the mobile station. |
| US08180341B2 |
High altitude platform deployment system
A communication system for supporting communications with a target market area. The system includes one or more solar-powered aircraft maintained in, or successively passing through, flight stations or flight patterns around the market area. Each of the aircraft targets limited beamwidth communication antennas on a substantial portion of the target market area. The control system is configured to fly selective flight patterns depending on the aircraft characteristics and the flight conditions. The flight patterns may emphasize high-power-generation patterns such as flying away from the sun for aircraft with wing-mounted solar cells. |
| US08180340B2 |
Method for saving files in mobile communication terminal
A method for saving files in a mobile communication terminal includes: if an externally pluggable memory is detected, determining whether a count corresponding to the memory is present in the mobile communication terminal; if a count corresponding to the memory is present, checking whether a file save command is input in the memory; and if a file save command is input, increasing the count, and saving the count and the files in the memory. The files can be saved based on folders in the memory, thereby enhancing the file save speed. Each memory has a count, thereby making it easy to ascertain the number of saved files. |
| US08180334B2 |
System and method for leveraging a caller ID to provide a reverse signaling pathway in a network environment
A method for providing signaling in a network environment is provided that includes receiving, at a mobile station, a new call from a mobility application, the new call including a caller ID segment associated with an existing call for the mobile station. The method further includes evaluating data included in the caller ID segment in order to perform an activity related to the data provided in the caller ID segment. |
| US08180330B2 |
Method for collecting user behavior during run-time in a mobile 3GPP IP-based multimedia subsystem (IMS)
The invention relates to a method and an arrangement for collecting user behavior during run-time in a mobile 3GPP IP-based multimedia subsystem (IMS). According to the invention, a collection of statistical data in communications systems ensues, and the user behavior is evaluated during the run-time of the application. |
| US08180328B2 |
Wireless manager and method for configuring and securing wireless access to a network
The disclosure provides a wireless manager operable to receive a request from a mobile device to wirelessly communicate with a network, wherein the request may include information to dynamically identify a location associated with the mobile device. The wireless manager may be further operable to automatically associate the mobile device with an access zone comprising one or more physical or logical characteristics, compare the location associated with the mobile device to the access zone, and authorize the mobile device to wirelessly communicate with the network if the location associated with the mobile device indicates that the mobile device does not violate the access zone. |
| US08180327B2 |
Method, device, and mobile terminal for controlling locking and unlocking
A method, a device, and a mobile terminal for controlling locking and unlocking are provided. The method includes the following steps. An acceleration sensor is adopted to detect a location state of a mobile terminal. A stabilization timer is started and a stabilization timing value of the stabilization timer is monitored when the mobile terminal is in an unlocked or a locked state. The stabilization timing value is reset to restart timing when it is monitored that the location state of the mobile terminal is unstable. The mobile terminal is controlled to enter a stable and unlocked state when it is monitored that the stabilization timing value reaches a stabilization timing threshold. Through the technical solutions, it is determined whether the mobile terminal enters the stable and unlocked state according to the location state of the mobile terminal in the locked or unlocked state. In this manner, the mobile terminal may not be locked in the stable state, and the afterward operations may be facilitated, thereby increasing usability of the mobile terminal and improving user's experience. |
| US08180326B2 |
Method of supporting location privacy
A method of protecting location privacy of a mobile station when the mobile station enters a network is disclosed. A method of supporting location privacy comprises the steps of transmitting a ranging code for performing initial ranging; and receiving a message including temporary station identifier after transmitting a ranging request message including MAC address of a mobile station. In this case, the temporary station identifier is used to provide security of a media access control (MAC) address or mapping information of the MAC address and station identifier, wherein the MAC address is to identify a mobile station within a base station. |
| US08180324B2 |
System and method enabling a wireless device to communicate with a second party without revealing the identity of the wireless device to a third party
A method and apparatus for enabling anonymous communications from a first Bluetooth device to a second Bluetooth device is disclosed wherein a temporary identification number associated with the first Bluetooth device is obtained and used in transmissions from the first Bluetooth device to the second Bluetooth device. A temporary identification number provides no clear indication of the particular Bluetooth communications device transmitting messages. |
| US08180322B2 |
Radio communication device, band setting system
A wireless communication device capable of receiving a content by securing a band as much as possible, if a predetermined band is required to be secured when the content is received by wire. The wireless communication device judges whether or not the predetermined band necessary for receiving the content can be secured with a wireless master device. When it is judged that the predetermined band cannot be secured, the wireless communication device switches a connection destination from the wireless master device to which the wireless communication device has been connected to a different wireless master device that can secure the predetermined band, e.g., a predetermined receiving electric field strength. |
| US08180320B2 |
System and method for effecting special number communications by a multi-mode phone using a preferred mode
A method for effecting emergency service communications using a preferred mode by a communication station configured for communicating using multiple modes includes: (a) evaluating the multiple modes to identify a plurality of extant operationally viable modes for the communication station; (b) evaluating the plurality of extant operationally viable modes to identify the preferred mode among the plurality of extant operationally viable modes; the preferred mode having a generally best communicating milieu among the plurality of extant operationally viable modes; and (c) initiating the emergency service communications employing the preferred mode. |
| US08180314B2 |
Method and system for utilizing givens rotation to reduce feedback information overhead
Aspects of a method and system for utilizing Givens rotation to reduce feedback information overhead are presented. Aspects of the system may include a receiver that may enable computation of a beamforming matrix for signals received from a transmitter in a multiple input multiple output (MIMO) communication system. The receiver may enable computation of Givens rotation angles and/or phase rotation angles based on the computed beamforming matrix. The receiver may also enable feedback of information containing the Givens rotation angles and/or phase rotation angles to the transmitter. |
| US08180310B2 |
Filtering using impedance translator
This disclosure relates to low noise amplifiers (LNAs) and more particularly to LNAs integrated on integrated circuit (IC) chips along with radio frequency (RF) amplifiers. |
| US08180304B2 |
Efficient power amplifier
A technique for efficient power amplification includes providing multiple baseband signals to an amplifier. The signals may be converted to RF and combined through one or more impedance inverters. |
| US08180300B2 |
Wireless communication apparatus, wireless communication method, and computer program
A wireless communication apparatus includes a plurality of antenna branches through which radio signals are transmitted and received; a calibration factor acquiring unit that acquires a calibration factor for compensating an unbalance of phase and amplitude between the antenna branches for every predetermined frequency band; a factor memory storing the calibration factor acquired for every predetermined frequency band; a reliability determining unit that determines a reliability of the calibration factor acquired by the calibration factor acquiring unit; and a calibration factor multiplying unit that reads out the calibration factor from the factor memory to multiply a transmission signal or a reception signal to be calibrated by the readout calibration factor. |
| US08180299B2 |
Optimized AM RLC re-set mechanism
A reset method for an AM RLC entity, the method comprising: receiving a reset PDU that includes a RSN; and if the received reset PDU is not the first received reset PDU after re-establishment of the RLC entity and if the RSN is the same as a RSN included in a last received reset PDU, re-transmitting the reset ACK PDU that was last transmitted. The method further comprising: if the received reset PDU is the first received reset PDU after re-establishment of the RLC entity or if the RSN is not the same as a RSN included in a last received reset PDU, transmitting a reset ACK PDU. |
| US08180297B2 |
Establishment of communications connections between vehicles
A method for setting up communication links between a first vehicle and at least one second vehicle using telematics units, wherein the telematics unit is activated by the respective driver, and the driver of the first vehicle uses the telematics unit to input registration identifiers into the telematics unit in the first vehicle, and the telematics unit in the first vehicle sets up a communication link to at least one second telematics unit in a second vehicle, and the registration identifier is checked by the telematics unit in the second vehicle via the communication link, and the registration identifier of the first vehicle is output to the driver of the second vehicle via the telematics unit in the vehicle, with setup of a communication link to the first vehicle being confirmed by an input, requested by the driver of the second vehicle, using the telematics unit in the second vehicle. |
| US08180296B2 |
Providing haptic effects to users in a short range wireless system
Systems, methods, and associated software for imposing a haptic effect upon a user are disclosed herein. A user device, which is operable within a wireless interaction system according to one implementation, includes a transceiver that is configured to communicate wirelessly with a host device. The user device further includes a processor that is configured to determine whether a specific interaction event occurs. The interaction event, for example, is related to an interaction with the host device. The user device also includes a haptic actuator that is configured to impose a haptic effect upon a user when the processor determines that the specific interaction event has occurred. |
| US08180289B1 |
Public kiosk providing near field communication services
Systems and methods are disclosed for making content elements available for use at a public computing kiosk operated by a first-party operator. The public computing kiosk can receive a wireless communication from a hand-held device utilized by a second-party end user located in close physical proximity to the public computing kiosk. The wireless communication can include information identifying a third-party provider of the hand-held device with the third-party provider and the first-party operator being different entities. The public computing kiosk can transmit a request to a computing system including information identifying the third-party provider of the hand-held device, receive a transmission including a set of content descriptors, and display the set of content descriptors to the second-party end user. The public computing kiosk can also accept selection of content descriptors and execute at least one content element corresponding to at least one content descriptor. |
| US08180288B2 |
Communication system
A communication system according to the present invention includes a transmitter for applying a transmission signal to a human body as an electric field, and a receiver for receiving the transmission signal by detecting the electric field via the human body. The receiver includes a reception electrode which faces the human body, a resonance circuit formed of a resonance inductor and a resonance capacitor, and a coupling capacitor for capacitively coupling the reception electrode and the resonance circuit. |
| US08180287B2 |
Portable terminal
A portable terminal includes: a display unit configured to display various information; an user interface; a proximity communication interface configured to establish a wireless communication path with a counterpart device in a proximity state; a detector configured to detect whether the portable terminal is in an enabled state capable of performing a content movement operation with the user interface or in a disabled state that is not capable of performing the content movement operation with the user interface; and a content controller configured to perform a process for controlling the display unit to display a list of contents which can be transmitted by the proximity communication, when the proximity communication interface establishes the wireless communication path and the detector detects that the portable terminal is in the enabled state. |
| US08180281B2 |
System and method for controlling a mobile repeater
A system and method for controlling a mobile repeater are provided. The method includes determining a signal level for each of a plurality communication sites adjacent the repeater. The method further includes assigning a communication frequency to the repeater based on the determined signal levels for the plurality of communication sites adjacent the repeater. |
| US08180278B2 |
Information processing system, communication terminal, information processing unit and program
There is provided an information processing system including a service provider unit, a communication terminal and an information processing unit. The communication terminal includes a terminal first communication section, a terminal second communication section to communicate with the information processing unit through a first communication channel, a terminal third communication section to communicate with the information processing unit through a second communication channel, and a terminal communication control section. The information processing unit includes a unit first communication section to communicate with the communication terminal through the first communication channel, a unit second communication section to communicate with the communication terminal through the second communication channel, a unit communication control section to switch communication channels with the communication terminal from the first communication channel to the second communication channel, and a unit processing section to perform service processing with the service provider unit. |
| US08180276B2 |
Mobile device that presents interactive media and processes user response
An electronic infrastructure consisting a plurality of client mobile devices, a distribution server and a media creator computer, wherein the client mobile devices present interactive media upon user request. The plurality of client mobile devices support dynamic screen display and, contain a plurality of soft keys. The distribution server that supports delivery of interactive media to the client mobile devices. The media creator is a personal computer that generates interactive media and sends them to the distribution server for distribution. A network such as combination of Internet and mobile network communicatively couple the plurality of client mobile devices, distribution server and personal computer (media creator). The personal computer sends interactive media to the distribution server, the distribution server processes and sends the interactive media to the client mobile device and the client mobile devices presents the interactive media in a series of screens to the user. The client mobile devices interactively send the user responses back to the distribution server. |
| US08180271B2 |
Protective layer setting unit, process cartridge, and image forming apparatus, and method of evaluating protective layer setting unit
A protective layer setting unit includes a protective agent, and an application unit for applying the protective agent on an image carrying member. An attenuated total reflection (ATR) method is used for detecting a surface condition of the image carrying member after applying the protective agent. A peak Pa at a given wavenumber, attributed to the image carrying member, has a peak area Sa in an infrared spectrum observed after applying the protective agent. A peak Pb at a given wavenumber, attributed to the protective agent, has a peak area Sb in the infrared spectrum observed after applying the protective agent. A peak area ratio of Sb/Sa is used for evaluating the protective layer setting unit. The protective layer setting unit is accepted when the Sb/Sa is set to a given range after applying the protective agent to the image carrying member for a given time period. |
| US08180269B2 |
Resistive heating hot roll fuser
A fuser roll adapted to fuse toner on the surface of a recording medium is disclosed. The fuser roll includes a non-metallic core having an outer surface, and a resistive heating element covering at least a portion of the outer surface of the core. A current transmitter is provided for transmitting a current to said resistive heating element, and an insulation layer is provided for covering at least a portion of said resistive heating element. A toner release layer is provided for covering at least a portion of said insulation layer. |
| US08180268B2 |
Method and apparatus for automatic fuser web material advancement in an image production unit
A method and apparatus that automatically advances fuser web material in an image production unit is disclosed. The method may include receiving a signal to advance fuser web material, retrieving stored fuser web material position information, automatically advancing the fuser web material a predetermined amount to expose unused fuser web material, and storing updated fuser web material position information. |
| US08180263B2 |
Developing apparatus and image forming apparatus that incorporates the developing apparatus
A developing apparatus is incorporated in an image forming apparatus. An electrostatic latent image is formed on an image bearing body. A developing member supplies a developer material to the electrostatic latent image. A supplying member supplies the developer material to the developing member. A developer material chamber holds the developer material therein. A layer forming member is provide in the proximity to the supplying member, and forms a layer of the developer material. The layer forming member is positioned such that a gap Δg is defined between the layer forming member and the supplying member. When the supplying member rotates, the surface of the layer forming member applies pressure to the toner on the supplying member to form the layer having a smooth surface not more than 0.5 mm. |
| US08180261B2 |
Image forming apparatus including a developer replenishing device which uses an air feeding device for a two-ingredient type developer
An image forming apparatus of the present invention includes a developing unit for developing a latent image formed on an image carrier with a two-ingredient type developer, i.e., a toner and carrier mixture. A toner replenishing device replenishes toner stored in a toner storing portion to the developing unit. A carrier storing portion, storing a carrier therein, is constructed independently of the toner storing portion. The carrier is fed from the carrier storing portion to the developing unit by a toner conveying force available with the toner replenishing device. |
| US08180260B2 |
Image forming apparatus comprising a vibration applying member
An image forming apparatus includes a vibration applying member for vibrating a developer containing unit in a state where a conveying member for conveying a developer is stopped in a developer cartridge. |
| US08180257B2 |
Photoconductive image forming apparatus with retractable shutter unit
An image forming apparatus includes a light irradiation unit configured to irradiate light on the surface of a photoconductive member and form an electrostatic latent image, a developing unit configured to form a developer image corresponding to the electrostatic latent image on the surface of the photoconductive member, a transfer belt configured to move between a first position where the transfer belt comes into contact with the photoconductive member and a second position where the transfer belt separates from the photoconductive member and transfer the developer image on the photoconductive member onto a sheet, a driving mechanism including a rotating lever and configured to drive the transfer belt between the first position and the second position, a shutter unit configured to open and close a light emission surface of the light irradiation unit, and a power transmission mechanism configured to drive the shutter unit by the torque of the lever. |
| US08180256B2 |
Image forming apparatus featuring first and second brushes for charging residual toner
An image forming apparatus includes: a photosensitive member; a charging member configured to charge the photosensitive member at a photosensitive member charging position to form an electrostatic image on the photosensitive member; a developing device configured and positioned to develop the electrostatic image with toner to form a toner image; a transferring device configured to transfer the toner image to an image receiving member at a transfer position; a first brush, disposed at a position downstream of the transfer position and upstream of the photosensitive member charging position with respect to a rotational direction of the photosensitive member, configured to charge a residual toner on the photosensitive member at a toner charging position to collect the residual toner to the developing device and to be supplied with a charging bias having a polarity opposite to a regular charge polarity of the toner; and a second brush, disposed at a position downstream of the toner charging position and upstream of the photosensitive member charging position with respect to the rotational direction, configured to charge the residual toner on the photosensitive member and to be supplied with a charging bias having the same polarity as the regular charge polarity. The first brush has a fiber density smaller than that of the second brush. |
| US08180254B2 |
Dynamic image positioning and spacing in a digital printing system
A dynamic positional shifting, in the process direction, of the images on the second print engine of a tandem machine printing system in order to increase the time (and number of prints) between skipped pitches. Although the photoreceptor belts of each print engine may be out-of-phase, the relative positions of their individual seam zones may be derived during cycle-up. A control procedure then optimizes the position and spacing of each image within each belt revolution of the second engine, while still maintaining the minimum inter-document zone (IDZ) length required for paper path feeding and registration, xerographic process controls, and finishing. Removing the constraints of fixed-dimension IDZ's, as well as being able to adjust spacing and length of individual images on the belt, allows for optimization of system productivity by either delaying or eliminating the need for a skipped pitch. |
| US08180252B2 |
Photosensitive body for electro-photography
A photosensitive body for electro-photography includes a photosensitive drum, a shaft, and a contact segment. The photosensitive drum includes a drum body that has a cylindrical shape, electrical conductivity, and an outer peripheral surface, and a photosensitive layer that is formed on the outer peripheral surface. The photosensitive drum is rotatable about a central axis of the drum body. The shaft penetrates through the drum body and extends along the central axis. The photosensitive drum is rotatable relative to the shaft. The contact segment is interposed between the photosensitive drum and the shaft to electrically connects the shaft and the drum body. The contact segment includes a pair of contact portions that forms a gap therebetween. The pair of contact portions is aligned in a direction perpendicular to the central axis while contacting with an outer circumferential surface of the shaft. A portion of the outer circumferential surface is placed in the gap. |
| US08180251B2 |
Cover and cartridge
An electrophotographic image forming apparatus detachably mountable to a main assembly of the apparatus, includes a rotatable image bearing member on which a latent image is to be formed; charging means for contacting said image bearing member to charge a surface of said image bearing member; a frame supporting said image bearing member and said charging means; a covering member, demountably mounted to said frame, for protecting the surface of said image bearing member; and a spacer member including a spacing portion, movably provided on said covering member, for entering between said image bearing member and said charging means to space them therebetween, and a retaining portion, contacting said covering member when said spacing portion is not between said image bearing member and said charging means, for preventing said spacer member from disengaging from said covering member. |
| US08180243B2 |
Image forming system and maintenance execution program
There is provided an image forming system that are capable of preventing a user or operator from forgetting to carry out a maintenance operation based on required sub-maintenance items after execution of a maintenance operation based on an associated maintenance item, such as component replacement, cleaning, or adjustment. A table of maintenance items and sub-maintenance items associated with respective ones of the maintenance items is stored in a ROM. When a CPU determines that a maintenance operation based on a selected one of the maintenance items has been completed, the CPU determines whether or not there is any sub-maintenance item associated with the selected maintenance item, by referring to the table. When it is determined that there is one or more sub-maintenance items associated with the selected maintenance item, a CPU provides control to display the sub-maintenance item or items in an operating/display unit. |
| US08180241B2 |
Power control method and apparatus to heat a heating roller
An image forming apparatus includes a power supply unit that controls a level of electrical power supplied to the heating lamp during a warm-up of the heating unit that involves at least a first warm-up stage. During the first warm-up stage, when power begins to be supplied to the heating lamp, the power supply unit gradually increases a level of power supplied to the heating lamp from zero to a defined supply level according to a phase control of an alternating current (AC) of the source power. If a second warm-up stage is included, during the second warm-up stage, the power supply unit may maintain the level of power supplied to the heating lamp at the defined supply level until the measured surface temperature of the heating unit has reached a defined target temperature. |
| US08180240B2 |
Color belt fuser warm-up time minimization
A belt fuser assembly for a color EP printer that quickly warms up the fusing belt before allowing a first sheet of print media to run through the printing stations at the fuser assembly. The warm-up cycle includes: (1) a preheat mode, (2) a first portion of a belt temperature warm-up mode, (3) a second portion of the belt temperature warm-up mode, and (4) a tight belt temperature control mode. The preheat mode operates the fuser's heater at less than full power, and prevents the fuser belt from rotating. The first portion of the belt temperature warm-up mode operates the heater at full power, and the fuser belt begins rotating, but not at its full speed. The second portion of the belt temperature warm-up mode operates the heater at less than full power, and the fuser belt begins rotating at its full speed. |
| US08180238B2 |
Voltage control in an image forming apparatus
An image forming apparatus includes an image carrier for carrying developer image, a transfer device configured to transfer the developer image to a recording media, a forward bias applying circuit configured to apply a forward bias voltage to the transfer device, and a reverse bias applying circuit configured to apply a reverse bias voltage to the transfer device. The apparatus includes a detecting circuit configured to detect inflow current flowing from the image carrier into the forward bias applying circuit, and a decision circuit configured to determine a lower limit of the reverse bias voltage based on a detected value of the inflow current when the detected value of the inflow current exceeds a first predetermined value. The reverse bias applying circuit applies the reverse bias voltage of the determined lower limit to the transfer device at least before the forward bias voltage is applied to the transfer device. |
| US08180236B2 |
Image forming apparatus
An image forming apparatus includes a drum; a charging member; a charging bias applying device; an image forming device; a detecting device for detecting a current passing between the charging member and the drum; an executing device for selectively executing a first mode in which the charging bias of a first frequency is applied to form the image on the drum rotated at a first speed and a second mode in which the charging bias of a second frequency is applied to form the image on the drum rotated at a second speed; a calculating device for calculating information indicating a relationship between an output of the detecting device when the AC voltage of the first frequency is applied and an output of the detecting device when the AC voltage of the second frequency is applied; and an adjusting device for adjusting a peak-to-peak voltage to be applied to the charging member in the first mode based on the output of the detecting device obtained by applying the AC voltage of the first frequency to the charging member and for adjusting a peak-to-peak voltage to be applied to the charging member in the second mode based on the output of the detecting device obtained by applying the AC voltage of the first frequency to the charging member and the information calculated by the calculating device. |
| US08180228B1 |
Programmable phase detector for sequence equalizer for optical channels
In a direct-detection receiver having an analog-to-digital converter (ADC) for sampling a received optical signal and a sequence estimator for recovering data symbols from a multi-bit sample stream generated by the ADC, a method of acquiring a channel lock condition of a clock recovery block of the receiver. A plurality of sets of channel statistics are provided. Each set of channel statistics optimizes performance of the sequence estimator for a respective predetermined combination of channel chromatic dispersion and polarization mode dispersion. At least one set of channel statistics will, when installed in the sequence estimator, yield symbol estimates having residual distortions that are within an acquisition range of the clock recovery block. During start-up of the receiver, one of the sets of channel statistics is selected and installed in the Sequence Estimator. If a channel lock condition is not detected within a predetermined time interval, the step of selecting one of the sets of channel statistics and installing the selected set of channel statistics in the Sequence Estimator is repeated until a channel lock condition is detected. |
| US08180226B2 |
Optical receiver
The present invention relates to an optical receiver, and particularly, to an optical receiver by which a DQPSK-modulated optical signal is demodulated to a multilevel phase-modulated signal. |
| US08180225B2 |
Optical data link
The invention provides an optically powered device interface module for operating an external device, and an optically powered data link comprising the same. In one embodiment the device interface module includes an optical interface for receiving optical power and data signals, an electrical USB interface for providing USB compliant electrical data signals and a 5V electrical power signal to an external USB device, a transducer coupled to a signal processor for converting the optical power and data signals into the 5V electrical power signal and the USB-compliant electrical data signals, and a power distribution circuit for providing electrical power obtained from the optical power signal to the device interface module circuitry. The transducer may be embodied using a single photovoltaic power converter for receiving the optical power and for receiving and transmitting optical data signals. |
| US08180224B2 |
Method, apparatus and system for transmitting Ethernet signals in optical transport network
A method, apparatus and system for transmitting Ethernet signals in an OTN are provided. The method may include: mapping the Ethernet signals to timeslot units, where a VCG composed of multiple OPUs is divided into the timeslot units; mapping the Ethernet signals into the OPUs, and then mapped into OTUs and output to the OTN for transmitting. In this way, the Ethernet signals may be transmitted in the OTN transparently. The apparatus may further include: a first adaptation protocol frame mapping module, a first virtual concatenation module, and a first line terminal module, which convert the Ethernet signals to the OTUs. The system may include a first adaptation protocol frame mapping module, a second adaptation protocol frame mapping module, a first virtual concatenation module, a second virtual concatenation module, a first line terminal module, and a second line terminal module, which convert the Ethernet signals to the OTUs and vice versa. |
| US08180223B2 |
System and method for extending reach in a passive optical network
In accordance with the teachings of the present invention, a system and method for extending reach in a passive optical network (PON) is provided. In a particular embodiment, a method for extending reach in a PON includes transmitting traffic at a first wavelength from a transmitter at a first optical network unit (ONU) in a PON and transmitting traffic at a second wavelength from a transmitter at a second ONU in the PON. The method also includes receiving the traffic in the first wavelength at a first input port of a multiplexer at a distribution node in the PON and receiving the traffic in the second wavelength at a second input port of the multiplexer at the distribution node. The method further includes forwarding the traffic in the first wavelength and the traffic in the second wavelength to an optical line terminal (OLT) in the PON. |
| US08180220B2 |
Protocol configuration method
A protocol configuration method for use by a substation to be coupled to a main station in an optical access network is described. The configuration method comprises the following steps: predefining for the substation a plurality of predefined types of protocol for use by the substation of one of the types of protocol during operation; and after being coupled to the main station, determining with a first determiner, a bit-rate and a line-coding for a bit-stream being received from the main station, thereby providing a downstream line-rate and a downstream line-coding; and based upon at least anyone of the downstream line-rate, the downstream line-coding and the bit-stream, selecting with a selector according to predefined rules and conditions a type out of the plurality of predefined types of protocol for the bit-stream, the predefined rules and condition are based upon one or more distinguishing marks between the plurality of predefined types of protocol; and activating the selected type for further operation and thereby enabling the substation to communicate with the main station according to the selected type of protocol. |
| US08180218B2 |
PON system and terminal operation registering method
In a PON system in which communication is performed at a plurality of types of transmission rate (L, M, and H) in an upstream direction from a plurality of terminals connected to a station apparatus through optical fibers, within a discovery period for allowing an unregistered terminal to be recognized by station apparatus, the terminal makes a discovery response at one type of transmission rate (L). With this configuration, station apparatus can wait for a discovery response with a receive function being allowed to support transmission rate (L). |
| US08180216B2 |
Latency measurement in optical networks
A device for measuring optical latency in a test path includes an optical source to generate an optical signal. An optical modulator modulates the optical signal based on a modulation signal. An output port outputs the modulated optical signal to the test path. An input port receives a return optical signal following propagation through the test path. Latency calculating logic calculates the optical latency for the test path based on the modulation signal and the return optical signal. |
| US08180214B1 |
Camera platform for 3-D photography
A camera platform for three dimensional photography comprises a first support wall having an inner surface, an outer surface and a fastening end, and a second support wall having an inner surface, an outer surface and a fastening end. The first and second support walls are connected to each other along at least a part of their respective fastening ends so as to be substantially at right angles to each other. The inner surface of the first support wall and the inner surface of the second support wall define a quadrant. A fixed camera connector is formed on the outer surface of the first support wall for connecting to a first camera, and an adjustable camera connector is formed on the outer surface of the second support wall for connecting to a second camera. A beam splitter support frame is provided for holding a beam splitter, and the beam splitter support frame is located outside the quadrant between the outer surface of the first support wall and the outer surface of the second support wall. |
| US08180212B2 |
Optical system for infinite image formation and method for fabricating camera module using the same
Disclosed are an optical system for infinite image formation and a method for fabricating a camera module using the optical system. The optical system includes a first lens unit including at least one lens; a projection chart capable of partially allowing light to pass therethrough; a backlight unit capable of emitting light; and a first holder coupled with the first lens unit, the projection chart and the backlight unit. The first lens unit is exposed through an opening of the first holder. The method includes coupling the optical system with a camera module including a first lens unit, an image sensor and a printed circuit board, where the optical system is coupled to the first lens unit; and adjusting an effective focal length between the first lens unit and the image sensor by rotating the optical system and the first lens unit of the camera module. |
| US08180208B2 |
Identifying a photographer
A method of identifying a photographer includes determining a steadiness signal related to movement of a camera held by a first photographer while capturing an image or video, wherein the steadiness signal identifies the motion of the camera in at least two dimensions as a function of time and storing a set of steadiness signals where each steadiness signal has an associated known photographer. The method further includes using a processor to compare the steadiness signal to the set of steadiness signals to produce a set of similarity scores between the first photographer and each of the known photographers; and using the set of similarity scores to identify the photographer that has captured the image or video. |
| US08180207B2 |
Heat exchanger
A heat exchanger comprises a substantially pillar sheathed heater, a substantially cylindrical case, and a spiral spring. The sheathed heater is accommodated in the case. The spring is provided so as to be wound around an outer peripheral surface of the sheathed heater. Thus, a spiral flow path is formed among an outer peripheral surface of the sheathed heater, an inner peripheral surface of the case, and the spring. The spring functions as a flow velocity conversion mechanism, a turbulent flow generation mechanism, a flow direction conversion mechanism, and an impurity removal mechanism. A water inlet and a water outlet are respectively arranged at positions eccentric from a central axis of the case on a side surface of the case. |
| US08180204B2 |
Hot beverage brewing apparatus
A hot beverage brewing apparatus. A pressurized hot liquid delivery system provides liquid under pressure within a range of acceptable brewing temperatures without any mechanical pump. Water is apportioned into sealable tank volumes, one of which is heated to boil the liquid and produce steam under pressure. The pressurized steam displaces the liquid from the tank volumes in proportion and at a temperature that is within the acceptable brewing range. The hot liquid under pressure is directed to a capsule receiving station to infuse a material in a capsule. The capsule dispenses the brewed beverage without contacting the brewing apparatus. |
| US08180203B2 |
Direct heating tube and method of heating fluid using same
Provided is a direct heating tube which has a sufficient heating rate and a sufficient cooling rate, and has no cold spots therein, making it possible to ensure a uniform temperature distribution in the whole part thereof or a temperature distribution having a desired temperature gradient, and making it possible to keep constant the temperature of a fluid which is caused to flow through the tube or to give a desired change to the temperature of the fluid. Provided also is a direct heating tube which does not exert an adverse influence on devices near the tube, such as a detector and an oven, even by heating the tube. In a desired portion of the tube to be heated, a second heated tube connected to a first heated tube is provided outside the first heated tube, and an electrode portion is connected to the second heated tube. |
| US08180202B2 |
Robot, reference voltage generator circuit used in transmission path for robot, and hub incorporating reference voltage generator circuit
A robot including a controller and multiple servos, each acting as an actuator, and a supply voltage generator circuit connected to a transmission line between the controller, which controls using the RS485 communication protocol, and the servos. The reference voltage generator circuit maintains one of a pair of differential signals (or an inversion signal) at a constant potential between a high level and a low level. As a result, a TTL communication scheme servo can be mounted and controlled, along with a RS485 scheme servo. A supply voltage generator circuit is formed of a Zener diode and a voltage divider circuit. Without being limited to incorporation at some midpoint on the transmission path, the supply voltage generator circuit can be incorporated in a controller or a hub for splitting a transmission path. |
| US08180199B2 |
Playback apparatus, playback method, program for playback method, and recording medium recorded with program for playback method thereon
A playback apparatus which plays back video or music contents, includes: a playback unit playing back the video or music contents recorded on a recording medium; an output unit outputting the video or music contents played back in the playback unit; and a control unit controlling at least an operation of the playback unit, wherein in the video or music contents, a quick reference mark is set at multiple places, in response to user manipulation, the control unit finds a start of a sequence in accordance with the quick reference mark to control the operation of the playback unit to play back the video or music contents, in response to user manipulation for the quick reference, the control unit varies a priority that expresses a degree served for the quick reference, and for the mark having a low priority, the control unit accepts no user manipulation for quick reference. |
| US08180198B2 |
Playlist creating apparatus and method, and dubbing list creating apparatus and method
A playlist creating apparatus is provided which allows a user to select desired digital images from a plurality of programs and use the desired digital images to simply create a playlist or to select a digital image in dubbing it to another recording medium. One image data that agrees in terms of a specific condition with another image data selected from recorded image data is added to an image screen as a selective candidate for display. |
| US08180196B2 |
Optical recording/reproducing apparatus and data recording method thereof
An optical recording/reproducing apparatus and a data recording method thereof. The optical recording and/or reproducing apparatus includes: an encoder which encodes a data for recording in a specified format; an optical pickup which records the encoded data onto a data record area of an optical recording medium which is loaded in the optical recording/reproducing apparatus; and a controller which allocates a specified area of the optical recording medium as a management information record area, controls the optical pickup to record the management information regarding the data being recorded in the data record area to be recorded in the management information record area, and controls the optical pickup to periodically record the management information of the management information record area onto a file information record area of the optical recording medium. |
| US08180194B2 |
Authored video programs
A storage medium is encoded with a video program created using authoring systems and methods. The processor-based authoring system removes an author from consideration of low-level configuration functions during authoring. The authoring system includes an authoring engine having an interactive graphical authoring interface, a data management engine, an emulator, a compiler, a multiplexer and a simulator. The authoring methods include the use of summary authoring data, a compiler that builds a skeleton-form layout structure comprising abstracted components that include movie chapters, menu buttons and command segements. The compiler resolves abstracted connections between combinations of the abstracted components to produce a video program. Instructions associated with the command segments and a configuration of the command segments within a video program video space and domain structure are abstracted the functional during authoring. |
| US08180193B2 |
Video player with code sensor and memory for video data retrieval
A video player is provided. The video player comprises a body; a sensor positioned in the body for sensing coded data printed on a substrate when the video player body is operatively positioned relative to the substrate; a processor coupled to the sensor for determining an identity from the sensed coded data; a memory coupled to the processor, the memory storing video data associated with the identity derived from the sensed coded data; and a display device positioned in the body for outputting a visual display based on the video data. |
| US08180184B2 |
Absorption modulator and manufacturing method thereof
An absorption modulator is provided. The absorption modulator includes a substrate, an insulation layer disposed on the substrate, and a waveguide having a P-I-N diode structure on the insulation layer. Absorptance of an intrinsic region in the P-I-N diode structure is varied when modulating light inputted to the waveguide. The absorption modulator obtains the improved characteristics, such as high speed, low power consumption, and small size, because it greatly reduces the cross-sectional area of the P-I-N diode structure. |
| US08180180B2 |
Method for magnifying images and videos
This invention is a method applicable to an image processing device, which includes the steps of providing a preprocess module for extracting a high-frequency portion of an image inputted into the device, extracting a gradient of the image and decomposing the image into plane and edge regions according to a predetermined fixed threshold, and providing a composite up-scaling module for executing the magnification processes on the image and the high-frequency portion thereof respectively, wherein the magnification process of plane regions of the image and the high-frequency portion is based on a simple interpolation while the edge regions of the image and the high-frequency portion is based on both a smart interpolation and the simple interpolation. The magnification results of the image and the high-frequency portion are then processed by a fusion process, so as to output an image having sharp but not blocky edges, rich details and strong contrast. |
| US08180179B2 |
Image processing apparatus, image processing method, program executing image processing method, and storage medium
An image processing apparatus including an area sensor unit reading image data items corresponding to frames from an original image, a correction unit correcting the inclinations of the image data items, a high-resolution conversion unit acquiring image data with a resolution higher than the pixel sensor's resolution through interpolation, a maximum frame number storage unit storing data of the maximum number of frames of the acquired image data items, a resolution setting unit setting a resolution for outputting the original image, a necessary frame number acquisition unit acquiring the number of frames necessary to perform the high resolution conversion based on the setting result, a read frequency calculation unit calculating the frequency of reading the original image through the necessary frame number acquisition unit and the maximum frame number storage unit, and a read frequency control unit reading the determined frequency and the original image is provided. |
| US08180176B2 |
Image processing device, image processing method, image processing program, recording medium with image processing program recorded therein, and image processing processor
When an image is captured by an imaging apparatus that is not on the premise that the image is captured, it is not possible to estimate objects included in the image in order to correct a tilt of the captured image. Therefore, a tilt angle of the captured image can be estimated based on areas not suitable for estimating the tilt angle of the captured image, and the captured image is corrected based on an incorrectly estimated tilt angle, which deteriorates the quality of the captured image. An image processing device is provided to divides the captured image into a plurality of areas, determine a directional characteristic shown by a texture of each of the divided areas, and estimate the tilt angle of the captured image based on one or more areas whose textures have the unidirectional characteristic to correct the captured image using the estimated tilt angle. |
| US08180174B2 |
Means for using microstructure of materials surface as a unique identifier
A method and apparatus for the visual identification of materials for tracking an object comprises parameter setting, acquisition and identification phases. The parameter setting phase comprises the steps of defining acquisition parameters for the objects. The acquisition phase comprises the steps of digitally acquiring two-dimensional template image of an object, applying a flattening function and generating downsampled template version of the flattened template and storing it in a reference database with the flattened template. The identification phase comprises the steps of digitally acquiring a snapshot image, applying the flattening function and generating one downsampled version, cross-correlating the downsampled version of the flattened snapshot with the corresponding downsampled templates of the reference database, and selecting templates according to the value of the signal to noise ratio, for the selected templates, cross-correlating the flattened snapshot image with the reference flattened template, and identifying the object by finding the best corresponding template. |
| US08180173B2 |
Flash artifact eye defect correction in blurred images using anisotropic blurring
A method and apparatus for providing defect correction in blurred images is disclosed. For one embodiment of the invention, a digital image is acquired. One or more candidate defect regions in the image are identified. The candidate defect regions are corrected and responsive to the image being blurred, the corrected regions of the image are blurred. For one embodiment of the invention, a digital image is acquired and one or more candidate eye defect regions in the image are identified. The candidate eye defect regions are corrected and if the image is blurred, the corrected regions of the image are blurred accordingly. |
| US08180170B2 |
Apparatus and method of recognizing image feature pixel point
An apparatus and a method of recognizing image feature pixels is related to the recognizing method including receiving an image having a plurality of pixels; subsequent filtering the pixels at least once by detecting the edge pixels of objects in the received image based on pixel values of the pixels, so as to obtain a plurality of candidate pixels; and performing multiple difference of Gaussian (DOG) blurring operations on the candidate pixels to find the candidate pixels having a relative extreme value as a plurality of feature pixels. Therefore, the processing time of recognizing image feature pixels may be reduced. |
| US08180168B2 |
One-pass filtering and infrared-visible light decorrelation to reduce noise and distortions
A scanning device includes a scanning mechanism and a processing mechanism. The scanning mechanism scans an image fixed on a medium to generate a digital infrared representation of the image and a digital visible light representation of the image. The processing mechanism substantially reduces effects of noise and distortions within the digital visible light representation of the image in one pass. The processing mechanism at least decorrelates visible light aspects from the infrared representation of the image and employs a one-pass filter that uses both the infrared and the visible light representations of the image. |
| US08180167B2 |
Model-based error resilience in data communication
Disclosed are embodiments of systems and methods to use a model-based technique for image error recovery in data communication. A low-dimensional representation is constructed of an image that contains errors. A manifold comprising image representations and a statistical model of the manifold are used to correct the errors in the image. |
| US08180157B2 |
Image processing method, image processing system and computer program product
Provided is an image processing method for cropping at least first and second images for presentation in a template, the first image having a first feature and the second image having a second feature, the template comprising a first image boundary shape and a second image boundary shape, the method comprising: determining the location of the first feature in the first image and the second feature in the second image; calculating a constraint on the locations of the first image boundary shape on the first image and the second image boundary shape on the second image, the constraint based on an alignment criterion specifying the alignment of the first feature in the first image and the second feature in the second image when the first and second images are presented in the template; generating a cropped image combination by placing the first image boundary shape on the first image and the second image boundary shape on the second image according to the constraint. |
| US08180151B2 |
Method for segmenting structures in image data records and image processing unit for carrying out the method
In the method according to at least one embodiment of the invention, a first segmentation of a structure in an image data record is firstly carried out, and a first final segmentation result is obtained therefrom. A region in the image data record is selected based on the first final segmentation result obtained. A first band is placed at a first, outwardly pointing distance from the selected region. This first band characterizes a background region. A second band is placed at a second, inwardly pointing distance from the projected first final segmentation result of the first segmentation. This second band characterizes a structure region. A further segmentation is carried out based on the characterized background region and the characterized structure region, and the final segmentation result of the further segmentation is saved and/or displayed. Furthermore, an image processing unit for carrying out the method is disclosed. |
| US08180148B2 |
Imaging apparatus and method of forming composite image from a plurality of source images
Source images, in particular images used for the planning radiotherapy, using internal images of the human body obtained with techniques such as X ray techniques, are processed to form a colored composite image that depends in a robust way on differences between different ones of the source images. For each pixel position in the composite image, the maximum image value in the different source images is determined and used to control brightness of the composite image. For each pixel position, an amount of spread in the images values among the source images is determined and used to control a color saturation in the composite image. |
| US08180146B2 |
Method and apparatus for recognizing and localizing landmarks from an image onto a map
Method and apparatus for recognizing landmark buildings in an image and then locating the recognized landmark buildings onto a map together with related information wherein a first database is employed to store models formed by mathematical set descriptions of landmark buildings which are learned from a set of training images of a model-learning module captured by an imaging device for each building, and a second database is employed to store the related information of each landmark building. The model of each landmark building is represented as a set of features and the geometric relationship between them by clustering the salient features extracted from a set of training images of the landmark building. |
| US08180145B2 |
Method for producing image with depth by using 2D images
A method for producing an image with depth by using 2D image includes obtaining a set of internal parameters of a camera. The camera takes at least a first and a second 2D images with a small shift. The first 2D image has N depths, and N≧2. Several sets of external parameters of the camera corresponding to the 2D images are estimated. A 3D information respectively corresponding to the N depths of the first 2D image at each pixel or block is calculated. A proper depth of each pixel or image block is determined. Through the internal parameters, the external parameters, and the N depths, each pixel or image block of the first 2D image is projected onto N positions of the second 2D image, so as to perform a matching comparison analysis with the second 2D image, thereby determining the proper depth from the N depths. |
| US08180139B2 |
Method and system for inspection of containers
A method and system for producing images of at least one object of interest in a container. The method includes receiving three-dimensional volumetric scan data from a scan of the container, reconstructing a three-dimensional representation of the container from the three-dimensional volumetric scan data, and inspecting the three-dimensional representation to detect the at least one object of interest within the container. The method also includes re-projecting a two-dimensional image from one of the three-dimensional volumetric scan data and the three-dimensional representation, and identifying a first plurality of image elements in the two-dimensional image corresponding to a location of the at least one object of interest. The method further includes outputting the two-dimensional image with the first plurality of image elements highlighted. |
| US08180135B2 |
Method for providing variously processed image data and X-ray image system
Modern image processing systems for the postprocessing of X-ray images require a large number of input parameters and take a great deal of time. So that calculations do not need to be made sequentially for different sets of input parameters, parallel processors are used, in which the same image processing program is executed in each case, but with different input parameters in each case. A large number of processed X-ray images is thus obtained, which in particular can also be displayed simultaneously. From the multiple processed x-ray images, a repeated postprocessing of a processed x-ray image can take place by mixing. |
| US08180133B2 |
Image processing method and image processing apparatus, and program
An image processing method includes identifying a body region in a tomographic image based on pixel values within the tomographic image, extracting a bone muscle region corresponding to essential parts of bones and muscles based on bone muscle pixels having pixel values corresponding to the bones or muscles in the body region, searching boundary points of the bone muscle region from outside a region surrounding the extracted bone muscle region to inside the region, creating a bone-muscle region outer peripheral profile line by joining only boundary points at which each index related to at least one of a length and a slope of a line segment connecting between the adjoining boundary points of the searched boundary points satisfies a predetermined condition, and extracting a visceral fat region comprised of fat pixels having pixel values corresponding to fat in a region lying inside the bone-muscle region outer peripheral profile line. |
| US08180130B2 |
Method for X-ray marker localization in 3D space in the presence of motion
A method and system of determining a radial distance (R), an angular position (φ), and an axial position (Z) of a marker identified in a sequence of projection images. A marker three-dimensional localization module (executable by the electronic processing unit) obtains a sequence of images based on image data generated by a scanner. Each image in the sequence of images represents an angle of rotation by the scanner and includes a marker point position. The behavior of first values and second values of the marker point positions are analyzed through the sequence of images to determine the radial distance of the marker, the angular position of the marker, and the axial position of the marker allowing for rapidly detecting and localizing external markers placed on a patient in projection images. |
| US08180126B2 |
Detecting meniscal tears in non-invasive scans
Techniques for automatically detecting meniscus include receiving pixels from a scanning device directed to a knee of a subject. Also received is a region of interest that includes pixels that correspond to at least a portion of a meniscus of the knee. Without human intervention, a meniscus extraction threshold is determined based on pixel intensities in the region of interest. A meniscus object portion of the scan data is further determined without human intervention based on the meniscus extraction threshold and a geometrical constraint. Other techniques for automatically detecting meniscal tears includes receiving a meniscus object portion of scan data from a scanning device and receiving threshold data that indicates a meniscus extraction threshold. Without human intervention, a propensity for meniscal tears is determined based on the threshold data and the meniscus object portion of the scan data. |
| US08180125B2 |
Medical data processing and visualization technique
A data processing technique is provided. In one embodiment, a computer-implemented method includes accessing patient image and non-image deviation scores derived through respective comparisons of patient image and non-image data to standardized image and non-image data. The method may also include processing the image and non-image deviation scores to generate a visual output indicative of differences between the patient image and non-image data, and the standardized image and non-image data, respectively. Further, the method may include displaying the visual output. Additional methods, systems, and manufactures are also disclosed. |
| US08180124B2 |
Registration method for projections in dual energy
A method is disclosed for resolving misregistration errors resulting from dual energy double-shot projection radiographic image acquisition. The method involves an iterative multi-scale, multi-resolution registration process that corrects misregistration errors progressively at scales ranging from bulk anatomical drift down to smaller scale motion such as that of fine pulmonary vasculature. The method may be incorporated as part of a dual energy image processing chain to create dual energy images with improved image quality and diagnostic performance. |
| US08180122B2 |
Ergonomic finger guide for biometric finger scanner
A finger guide device for a biometric fingerprint scanner, the device including a raised portion, a channel formed into the raised portion and extending from about a front side of the raised portion to about a rear side thereof, an aperture formed through the device at the channel, finger selection contours configured to visually indicate to a user to place an index finger in the channel, and finger direction contours configured to direct a finger placed in the channel toward the aperture. |
| US08180120B2 |
Finger sensor using polarized light and associated methods
A multi-biometric finger sensor may include an integrated circuit (IC) substrate for receiving a user's finger. The multi-biometric finger sensor may also include an optical source for projecting light of a known polarization angle onto the user's finger and at least one optical sensing pixel on the IC substrate for detecting a relative depolarization angle of the light reflected from the user's finger. The multi-biometric finger sensor may also include at least one other biometric finger sensing pixel on the IC substrate for sensing at least one other biometric characteristic from the user's finger. |
| US08180118B2 |
Finger sensing device with spoof reduction features and associated methods
A finger sensing device may include a finger sensing area, at least one processing stage coupled to the finger sensing area and having at least one adaptively determined processing parameter, and a controller for spoof reduction. More particularly, the controller may determine a spoof attempt based upon a change in the at least one adaptively determined processing parameter. For example, the at least one adaptively determined processing parameter may include a feedback determined processing parameter. Accordingly, the finger sensing device has enhanced spoof reduction, since different materials, for example, will cause a change in an adaptive processing parameter and thereby indicate the attempted spoof. |
| US08180117B2 |
Individual identification data register for storing components and projection matrices
The individual identification data register of the present invention includes: a storage device storing projection matrix data showing a projection matrix generated from plural image data showing plural persons' faces and individual identification data showing a component value indicating a registered person's facial feature; and an arithmetic processing device executing the processing of calculating a component value showing the person's facial feature based on image data showing the person's face obtained by a camera and the projection matrix data stored in the storage device, determining whether or not individual identification data showing a component value generating an error smaller than a predetermined threshold value when compared with the calculated component value is stored in the storage device, and storing component value data showing the calculated component value into the storage device, as individual identification data, when determining that the individual identification data is not stored in the storage device. |
| US08180116B2 |
Image pickup apparatus and system for specifying an individual
Disclosed is an electronic imaging apparatus which has different drive modes of an image pickup device for image shooting between an image for detecting the face of a subject and an image for detecting a feature value for specifying an individual based on the detected face area. For example, the image for detecting the face of the subject can be shot in a drive mode for a low-resolution image and an image for detecting a feature value can be shot in a drive mode for a high-resolution image. For example, the drive mode for a low-resolution image can be a drive mode for live view display, while the drive mode for a high-resolution image can be a drive mode for shooting a still image. |
| US08180110B2 |
Road lane marker detection apparatus and road lane marker detection method
A road lane marker detection apparatus includes an imaging portion that captures an image of the road surface such that a first road lane marker and a second road lane marker are captured in the image; a feature point obtaining portion that obtains feature points of the road lane markers; a storing portion that stores the feature points obtained; and a lane marker detecting portion that detects the road lane markers. The storing portion includes a first storage area in which the feature points of the first road lane marker are stored and a second storage area in which the feature points of the second road lane marker are stored. The number of feature points able to be stored in the first storage area and the number of feature points able to be stored in the second storage area are set independently of one another. |
| US08180109B2 |
Image display apparatus and image display system for vehicle
If a display mode is set to a narrow angle enlargement image mode, an enlargement image area is inputted via a touch panel. A transformation is made to compress an image of a not-enlargement image area other than the enlargement image area, and a narrow angle enlargement image is generated to enable simultaneously displaying, as a narrow angle enlargement image, (i) the enlarged image in the enlargement image area and (ii) the compressed image in the not-enlargement image area. When a warning target is detected, a corresponding image area is enlarged. An audio alarm is outputted via a speaker. Further, a new narrow angle enlargement image is generated so as to merge the initial narrow angle enlargement image with an image of enlarging the image area of the warning target. A display window including the new narrow angle enlargement image is then displayed in a display device. |
| US08180103B2 |
Image determining method, image determining apparatus, and recording medium having recorded therein program for causing computer to execute image determining method
In an image determining apparatus, a subject-shape presuming unit extracts a shape of a specified subject to be determined based on subject-area position information and structure/surface-height map information, a subject-feature-point extracting unit extracts a feature point based on the shape of the subject to be determined. Further, an otherobject-influence determining unit generates number information based on camera data, the feature point, and the height of a group of surrounding objects, an other-object-influence index calculator calculates an other-object-influence index based on the number information, and a display processor displays video picture data based on the other-object-influence index on a display device. |
| US08180100B2 |
Plane detector and detecting method
A rotation matrix and a translation vector between a basic camera and a reference camera are read out from a parameter storage section. At a projection conversion matrix calculating section, a projection conversion matrix capable of overlapping the road plane area included in images picked up by the basic camera and the reference camera is calculated by using the rotation matrix and the translation vector. |
| US08180098B2 |
Method of extracting a watermark
A monitoring station for monitoring distribution of media content, on basis of a watermark, comprises: receiving means for receiving an information signal representing the media content to which the watermark is added; extracting means for extracting perceptual features, identifying the information signal; first retrieving means for retrieving a supporting signal on basis of the perceptual features; second retrieving means for retrieving the watermark on basis of the supporting signal; and comparing means for comparing the watermark with predetermined information. |
| US08180096B2 |
Loudspeaker
A loudspeaker includes a first bar magnet having a longitudinal direction, a second bar magnet having a longitudinal direction parallel to the longitudinal direction of the first bar magnet, a third bar magnet forming a second magnetic gap between the first bar magnet and the third bar magnet, a diaphragm arranged to vibrate in a vibrating direction, a case accommodating the first bar magnet, the second bar magnet, the third bar magnet, and the diaphragm , and the voice coil fixed to the diaphragm and located in the first and second magnetic gaps. The second bar magnet has a longitudinal direction parallel to the longitudinal direction of the first bar magnet, and has both ends in the longitudinal direction. The third bar magnet has a longitudinal direction parallel to the longitudinal direction of the first bar magnet, and has both ends in the longitudinal direction. The diaphragm is located between the first and second bar magnets and between the first and third bar magnents. The case is made of non-magnetic material and holds an outer periphery of the diaphragm. The case forms a first space surrounded by the case, one of the both ends of the second bar magnet, and one of the both ends of the third bar magnet. The case forms a second space surrounded by the case, another one of both ends of the second bar magnet, and another one of both ends of the third bar magnet. First and second sound holes are provided in the case and communicate with the first and second spaces, respectively. The loudspeaker is thin but outputs large sounds. |
| US08180095B2 |
Portable speaker device and portable audio device player
A portable speaker device that includes a frame configured to receive a portable audio device and at least two speakers that are slidably-connected to the frame. The speakers have a first position for providing a substantially extended configuration and a second position for providing a substantially retracted configuration. The portable speaker device also includes a flush hinged sub-assembly that includes a contoured element and arcuate arms extending from a support and rotatably coupled to the frame at the distal ends of the arcuate arms. |
| US08180094B2 |
Earpiece with acoustic vent for driver response optimization
An acoustically tuned earpiece is provided. Venting is performed by boring a control port, separate from the output port, into the driver. The diameter of the control port must be sufficiently small to restrict the flow of air into and out of the driver, thus isolating the acoustic performance of the driver from the volume and/or the sealing capabilities of the earpiece enclosure. The exact size of the venting port is selected to achieve the desired acoustic performance. In all cases, the control port has a cross-sectional area that is less than 25 percent of the cross-sectional area of the driver's output port. In order to optimize the size of the control port, an iterative process is preferably used in which the cross-sectional area of the control port is gradually increased while monitoring the performance of the driver compared to a target response. |
| US08180092B2 |
Converter system for an active noise compensation apparatus
There is provided a transducer system for an active noise compensation apparatus, which has a first end at the ear side and an electroacoustic transducer. The electroacoustic transducer has a diaphragm system and a magnet system, wherein the central region of the diaphragm system is curved towards the magnet system and is in the form of an inverted calotte. A sensor microphone is arranged in a volume between the first end and the region of the curvature of the diaphragm system. |
| US08180088B2 |
Hoisting mechanism
An elevatable microphone support for an audio or videoconferencing system, including: a hoisting mechanism, which includes a base section and a top/crown section, wherein the base section includes a first circular member and a second circular member, the first circular member and the second circular member are concentric with each other, and the first circular member is freely rotatable with respect to the second circular member or the second circular member is freely rotatable with respect to the first circular member, the top/crown section includes a third circular member, and the base and the top/crown section are joined by two or more pairs of links, a first half of said two or more pairs of links are connected to said first circular member, and a second half of said two or more pairs of said links are connected to said second circular member, and all said two or more pairs of links are connected to said third circular member, by revolving joints. |
| US08180087B2 |
Microphone having a three-pin socket and a USB socket
A microphone comprises a three-pin socket, a first USB socket and a USB adapter. The first USB socket is fixed within the three-pin socket. The three-pin socket comprises an inserted block and three pins. The three pins are fixed on the inserted block. The first USB socket is embedded in the inserted block. The USB adapter comprises a USB plug which matches the first USB socket and a second USB socket which has a different dimension from the first USB socket. The USB plug and the second USB socket are connected electrically. The microphone can be normally used at all occasions. The dimension of the finished product is reduced so as to save a very large space. The microphone can be electrically connected with a USB data line with a USB plug having a different dimension from the first USB socket. |
| US08180086B2 |
Speaker
A speaker includes a box-shaped enclosure, a speaker unit and a sounding board. A pair of side plates, a bottom plate, a top plate, a back plate and a baffle are assembled into the enclosure. The speaker unit is attached to an opening portion of the baffle. The sounding board is attached to the bottom plate, and includes a member having a fiber direction in a vibration direction of a vibrating plate, a member having a fiber direction in a direction which approaches the side plate (of the front side) as extending from a side of the back plate to a side of the baffle, and a member having a fiber direction in a direction which approaches the side plate (of the back side) as extending the side of the back plate to the side of the baffle. |
| US08180083B2 |
Protective cover for behind-the-ear hearing aid device
The present invention relates to a novel protective cover for over-the-ear or behind-the-ear hearing aid devices, wherein the protective cover is resistant to infiltration of moisture, corrosive elements, and/or dirt or debris. Furthermore, in at least one embodiment, the protective cover comprises a flexible material that offers a formed fit over the hearing aid device, and includes at least one slit within the flexible material such that the protective cover may be readily flipped up to allow access to portions of the over-the-ear or behind-the-ear hearing aid device upon which it is placed without significant effort by the user. |
| US08180081B2 |
System and method for eliminating feedback and noise in a hearing device
This invention relates to a system (100) and method for synthesizing an audio input signal of a hearing device. The system (100) comprises a microphone unit (102) for converting the audio input signal to an electric signal, a filter unit (110) for removing a selected frequency band of the electric signal and pass a filtered signal, a synthesizer unit (118) for synthesizing the selected frequency band of the electric signal based on the filtered signal thereby generating a synthesized signal, a combiner unit (120) for combining the filtered signal and the synthesized signal so as to generate a combined signal, and finally an output unit (122, 124, 126) for converting the combined signal to an audio output signal. |
| US08180078B2 |
Systems and methods employing multiple individual wireless earbuds for a common audio source
Multiple individual wireless earbuds provide audio from a common audio source. A user may thereby enjoy audio in both ears while also benefiting from an entirely wireless configuration. The individual wireless earbuds may each receive the audio signal from the common audio source and then produce audio accordingly. Each earbud may have a channel setting to define whether a given earbud will produce left channel or right channel audio for a multi-channel audio signal. The individual wireless earbuds may alternatively have a master-slave configuration where a master earbud receives a wireless audio signal from the common source, plays audio based on the audio signal, and transmits a wireless signal based on the wireless audio signal to the slave earbud. The slave earbud then plays audio based on the wireless signal from the master earbud. |
| US08180075B2 |
Arrangement for variable bass reflex cavities
A modified housing in a portable product (400, 500, 700, or 800) includes a housing detail (405, 506, 706 or 710 or 806) forming at least a portion of a loud speaker back cavity having a pipe inner diameter for a resonant pipe (408, 508, 708, or 808), and a modification to the housing detail altering a cross section area of the pipe inner diameter to compensate for changes to a loud speaker back cavity volume. The housing detail can include a battery door (404, 504, 704) for the portable product that forms at least one side of the resonant pipe. The battery door can define the loud speaker back cavity volume and further fills at least part of the resonant pipe in a manner that maintains the loud speaker back cavity volume and the cross sectional area of the pipe inner diameter at a predetermined ratio. |
| US08180073B1 |
System for creating and manipulating digital media
A system for creating and manipulating digital media integrates a graphics tablet, a touchpad, and a synthesizer chipset. The graphics tablet includes a tablet surface, a grid of wires located under the tablet surface, and a graphics tablet chipset. The graphics tablet chipset includes an interface operably connected to the grid of wires for sending power to a stylus when the stylus is positioned over the tablet surface and receiving a signal from the stylus used to determine a position of the stylus with respect to the tablet surface. The touchpad is positioned on the tablet surface such that the touchpad also detects the position of the stylus simultaneously with the graphics tablet. The synthesizer chipset creates digital sounds based on input from the touchpad. The position of the stylus is output to a graphics tablet chipset output, and the digital sounds are output to a synthesizer chipset sound output. |
| US08180072B2 |
Electronic volume device
Amplifiers amplify input first audio signals according to volume values set beforehand. Via output terminals, the amplifiers output second audio signals to externally connected power amplifiers. A comparison unit compares the second audio signals with a reference signal. Via the detection terminals, detection signals are output externally according to the comparison results obtained by the comparison unit. |
| US08180071B2 |
Pseudo deep bass generating device
A multiplier 3 multiplies a square wave signal A(ω,t) by a low frequency component signal L(ω,t) to generate an even-order harmonic component signal B(ω,t). A multiplier 4 multiplies the even-order harmonic component signal B(ω,t) by the low frequency component signal L(ω,t) to generate an odd-order harmonic component signal C(ω,t). An adder 5 adds the even-order harmonic component signal B(ω,t) and the odd-order harmonic component signal C(ω,t) to generate the harmonic component signal D(ω,t). |
| US08180070B2 |
Howling suppressing apparatus
A howling suppressing apparatus includes: a detecting unit configured to detect howling of input audio signals; a plurality of filters configured to apply a filter process sequentially to the audio signals to be output; and a setting unit configured to set a filter coefficient for suppressing the howling detected by the detecting unit for a filter among the plurality of filters, in which filter no filter coefficient for suppressing howling is set, and set a filter coefficient for suppressing the howling detected by the detecting unit for any one of the plurality of filters, if filter coefficients for suppressing howling are set in all of the plurality of filters, based on the detection result from the detecting unit. |
| US08180068B2 |
Noise eliminating apparatus
A noise eliminating apparatus includes a first microphone, a second microphone and a signal processing unit, the signal processing unit includes a linear prediction filter and a noise resynthesis filter, the linear prediction filter receives an output signal of the first microphone, predicts the output signal of the first microphone by linear prediction and generates a prediction signal, and the noise resynthesis filter is an adaptive filter which receives, as a main input signal, a first difference signal obtained by subtracting one of the output signal of the first microphone and the prediction signal from the other, receives, as an error signal, a second difference signal obtained by subtracting one of an output signal of the second microphone and an output signal of the noise resynthesis filter itself from the other, and updates a filter coefficient so that the error signal is minimized. |
| US08180064B1 |
System and method for providing voice equalization
Systems and methods for providing voice equalization are provided. In exemplary embodiments, acoustic signals are received from both a near-end and a far-end environment. A power spectrum estimate for the far-end signal and a noise estimate based on the near-end signal are determined. A voice equalization mask based on the power spectrum estimate of the far-end signal and the noise estimate based on the near-end signal is generated and applied to the far-end signal to obtain a modified signal. The modified signal may then be dynamically processed to obtain an enhanced audio signal. The enhanced audio signal is then output. |
| US08180057B1 |
Chaotic signal enabled low probability intercept communication
A circuit for generating chaotic signals implemented using heterojunction bipolar transistors (HBTs) and utilized in low probability intercept communications. The HBT chaotic circuit generates truly random analog signals in the GHz range that are non-repeating and deterministic and may not be replicated by preloading a predetermined sequence. A fully differential autonomous chaotic circuit outputs two pairs of chaotic signals to be used in a communication system. As it is impossible to generate identical chaotic signals at the transmitter and receiver sites, the receiver itself sends the chaotic signal to be used for encoding to the transmitter. The receiver includes a chaotic signal generator and digitizes, upconverts, and transmits the generated chaotic signal to the transmitter. The transmitter uses the received chaotic signal to code data to be transmitted. The receiver decodes the transmitted data that is encoded by the chaotic signal to retrieve the transmitted data. |
| US08180053B1 |
Secure communications system with assured synchronization for data exchanged among system ports
A secure communications system has at least one processor and a control bus. A number of ports, each having a different fixed address, are coupled to the control bus. The processor assigns each port the address of another port whose data the port is permitted to receive when placed on a system data bus by the other port. A time slot generator outputs each fixed port address sequentially during corresponding time slots in a recurring manner, and a time slot bus is coupled to the time slot generator and to each of the ports. The ports are configured so that (a) when a given port detects its fixed address on the time slot bus, it writes desired outbound data on the data bus, and (b) when the given port detects its assigned port address on the time slot bus, the given port reads data off the data bus. |
| US08180048B2 |
Method and system for computational transformation
The invention generally relates to computational transformation process, which has applications in cryptography, random number generation, hash code generation etc. The computational transformation module uses a keyset, which is designed using a two dimensional array. Since the process of forward transformation used in the invention is a symmetric encryption process and if used to send data securely over a communications network, the same keyset needs to be present at the sending computer to encrypt the data and the receiving computer to go through a reverse transformation and decrypt the data. When the first ‘n’ bit block of input-data is transformed into the first ‘m’ bit block of output-data, the keyset is transformed into a different keyset based on a nonlinear or one-way transformation on the keyset. The next input block is encrypted using a transformed keyset, hence satisfying Shanons theory of perfect secrecy. It uses the same logic with additional parameters and operations to create random numbers and unique hash codes. The computational transformation process is a one-way process which is based on a principle where given the input value ‘x’, it is easy to transform ‘x’ to ‘y’ using a function ‘F’ i.e. F(x)=y. However, given ‘y’ in the range of F, it is hard to find an x such that F(x)=y. In this system, the same transformation function and same keyset is used for both encryption as well as decryption with only a change in the constant value. |
| US08180047B2 |
Trapdoor pairings
Systems and methods are described for trapdoor pairing. In one implementation, a trapdoor pairing is a cryptographic primitive generated by determining a bilinear pairing between an elliptic curve group and another group and selecting a parameter of the bilinear pairing, such as a group order or an isogeny between curves, to be a key for generating and evaluating the bilinear pairing. Trapdoor pairing allows construction of a group in which the Decisional Diffie-Hellman (DDH) problem is computationally infeasible given only the description of the group, but is easy given the secret key. Exemplary trapdoor pairing constructions have general applicability to cryptography and also lend themselves more specifically to certain special practical implementations, such as public key cryptography and certificate authority infrastructures. |
| US08180043B2 |
Method and apparatus for customer key routing
In one embodiment, a method is provided for routing calls within an automatic contact distribution system comprising assessing at least two evaluators programmed to collect information about identified sets of attributes associated with a call. The system then initiates the collection of information to enable the evaluators to assign a value to those attributed for which information exists. A comparison is then performed of the values assigned to the attributes in each evaluator. The call is then routed to the agent selected by the comparison. |
| US08180040B2 |
Corporation switchboard platform and call processing method
The present invention discloses a corporation switchboard platform and a call processing method. The corporation switchboard platform comprises a corporation switchboard service control point, a corporation switchboard service switching point and an intelligent peripheral, wherein the corporation switchboard service control point comprises: a basic call processing module for determining whether the capability of an existing network switching device can support a call triggered by a service switching point of a switching network and sending the call to an enhanced service capability module when determining that the capability of the existing network switching device cannot support the call; and an enhanced service capability module for controlling the intelligent peripheral and the corporation switchboard service switching point to complete a service related to the call. Compared with a corporation switchboard system based on an intelligent platform technology, the technical solution of the present invention provides a higher system capacity and an improved system capability and reduces the rerouting overhead of network. |
| US08180037B1 |
Automated registration for mobile device reminders
A system allows automated registration for reminders to be sent to a mobile device, such as a mobile telephone. A telephone number to use to register for an automated reminder is displayed in conjunction with an advertisement for an upcoming event. A user who views the advertisement and wishes to be reminded of the program may dial the number to register for a reminder. The telephone call is received by a reminder system, which identifies the caller and determines the relevant event. The system schedules a reminder corresponding to the event, and it sends the reminder to the caller at the scheduled time. The reminder may be sent to the caller's SMS address. |
| US08180035B2 |
Dialing plan removal
A request to delete a dialing plan is received. A list is generated of switching modules that are connected to a central processor of a telephone switch. Each switching module is queried to determine if the switching module includes a copy of the dialing plan. It is determined whether the dialing plan is in use by querying switching modules that include a copy of the dialing plan. If the dialing plan is not in use, then the dialing plan is deleted from at least one switching module identified as including a copy of the dialing plan. |
| US08180034B2 |
Apparatus, and associated method, for a CTI-enabled SIP-phone
A CTI-enabled SIP-Phone, and an associated method, is provided for a telephonic call center. Responsive to a call operation indication, such as delivery to the phone of a SIP invite message, or of a CTI-formatted call instruction, the embedded functionality of the SIP-Phone provides interfacing operations, such as CTI-to-SIP or SIP-to-CTI conversions, to facilitate communications of the phone at the call center. |
| US08180031B2 |
Data communication apparatus and data communication method
When data communication is performed by using a call control protocol, a data communication apparatus receives a call connection request message from an external apparatus and transmits a response message in reply to the call connection request message. At that time, when the call connection request message is received, it is determined whether a call connection process for communication with another external apparatus differing from the external apparatus is under execution. Transmission of the response message is controlled based on a result of the determination. |
| US08180029B2 |
Telecommunication and multimedia management method and apparatus
A telecommunication and multimedia management apparatus and method that supports voice and other media communications and that enables users to: (i) participate in multiple conversation modes, including live phone calls, conference calls, instant voice messaging or tactical communications; (ii) review the messages of conversations in either a live mode or a time-shifted mode and to seamlessly transition back and forth between the two modes; (iii) participate in multiple conversations either concurrently or simultaneously; (iv) archive the messages of conversations for later review or processing; and (v) persistently store media either created or received on the communication devices of users. The latter feature enables users to generate or review media when either disconnected from the network or network conditions are poor and to optimize the delivery of media over the network based on network conditions and the intention of the users participating in conversations. |
| US08180026B2 |
Method and apparatus for managing a call
According to embodiments described in the specification, a method and apparatus for managing a call to a user associated with a destination communications device, the call initiated by a caller at an originating communications device, is described. An indication of the call is received, the indication of the call comprising data associated with the user. A state of the user is determined by processing the data associated with the user and consulting a record of the state of the user. The call is parked if the state of the user comprises a delayed answer state, the delayed answer state comprising the user being available to receive the call, but requiring additional time to retrieve the call using the destination communications device, and a notification of the call is triggered at the destination communications device by transmitting a signal to the address of the communications device. |
| US08180024B2 |
Method and system of call completion based on caller selected call treatment
In the present invention, a caller is presented with the state of the call as detected by the network, along with a number of potential options, such as: request sequential or parallel call notification to one or more other stations; end the call but leave a voicemail for the caller even if the called party does not subscribe to voicemail; end the call but leave a text message for the caller if the station is capable of receiving the text message; send a text or voice message as e-mail to the called party, if the called party permits such a service; request the network to leave a missed call notification along with a number to dial back; request to notify the caller when the original called party is idle or willing to accept a call; or any number of other options the service provider is capable of supporting. |
| US08180021B2 |
Orthovoltage radiotherapy
A radiosurgery system is described that delivers a therapeutic dose of radiation to a target structure in a patient. In some embodiments, inflammatory ocular disorders are treated, specifically macular degeneration. In some embodiments, ocular structures are placed in a global coordinate system, based on ocular imaging, which leads to direction of an automated positioning system. In some embodiments, the position of an ocular structure is tracked and related to a radiosurgery system. In some embodiments, a treatment plan is utilized for a specific disease to be treated and/or structures to be avoided. In some embodiments, a fiducial aids in positioning the system. In some embodiments, a reflection off the eye is used to aid in positioning. In some embodiments, radiodynamic therapy is described in which radiosurgery is used in combination with other treatments and can be delivered concomitant with, prior to, or following other treatments. |
| US08180020B2 |
Sequential optimizations for treatment planning
A method and apparatus for radiation treatment planning are described. The method includes receiving a plurality of radiation treatment-planning parameters, and sequentially optimizing the plurality of radiation treatment-planning parameters. |
| US08180019B2 |
Methods and systems for computer tomography of nuclear isotopes using nuclear resonance fluorescence
The transmission of photons through a target produces “holes” in the transmitted energy spectrum that are characteristic of the NRF energies of the nuclear isotopes in the target. Measuring the absorption via the transmission of these photons through a target allows the production of tomographic images that are associated with specific nuclear isotopes. Thus three-dimensional density patterns are generated for the elements in a container. The process is very much like standard X-ray tomography but it identifies specific nuclear isotopes as well as their densities. |
| US08180018B2 |
Tomographic image capturing apparatus and tomographic image capturing method
A tomographic image capturing apparatus includes a radiation source for applying radiation to a subject at a plurality of different angles with respect to the subject, a radiation detector for detecting the radiation which has passed through the subject at each of the different angles and converting the detected radiation into image data, a tomographic image reconstructing unit for processing the image data into a reconstructed tomographic image, and an image capturing sequence setting section for establishing an image capturing sequence of a tomosynthesis image capturing process and a simple image capturing process based on ordering information which represents the tomosynthesis image capturing process for acquiring the reconstructed tomographic image and the simple image capturing process for acquiring a simple captured image. |
| US08180015B2 |
Counting device for counting nested articles and method for counting nested articles
A counting device for counting rimmed articles arranged in a nested configuration to define a series of stacked rims defining a stacked direction is disclosed. The counting device has a gear with a plurality of teeth adapted to engage the article rims such that advancement of the articles along the stacked direction adjacent the gear rotates the gear. An indicator wheel is provided configured to rotate with rotation of the gear. The indicator wheel has a plurality of indicia thereon for monitoring rotation of the gear. At least one sensor is positioned to detect the indicia and to generate an output signal as the indicator wheel rotates to bring the indicia into alignment with a detection axis. The sensor is in communication with a counter which produces in response to the output signal of the sensor a usable output representing a quantity of articles having engaged the gear. |
| US08180014B2 |
Tiered tie plates and fuel bundles using the same
Example embodiments are directed to tiered tie plates and fuel bundles that use tiered tie plates. Example embodiment tie plates may include upper and lower tiered tie plates. Example embodiment tiered tie plates may have a plurality of bosses divided into groups, or tiers, having differing vertical (axial) displacement. Example embodiment fuel bundles may use tiered tie plates such that fuel rods in example bundles may originate and terminate at different vertical displacements, based upon the vertical displacement of the bosses receiving the fuel rods into the tiered tie plates. Optionally, shanks may be used to further vary fuel rod axial displacement and diameter. |
| US08180010B2 |
Method for receiving frames of a digital stream
A receiving method for a digital stream, the stream including frames having each a body composed of a variable number c of symbols and preceded by a header including d symbols, a field composed of a fixed number e of symbols unknown to the receiver and defining the number c. A locking phase of the receiving method includes receiving a series of e symbols of the stream; performing a correlation computation for pairs of symbols received, the correlation computation being used to verify a predefined relationship if the e symbols form the unknown field; determining a correlation level and determining whether the e symbols form the unknown field on the basis of the correlation level; repeating the steps until it is determined that the e symbols form the unknown field. |
| US08180009B2 |
Techniques for signaling reference signal parameters in a wireless communication system
A technique for operating a wireless communication device includes assigning a reference signal bandwidth to a reference signal. Cyclic shift control bits (associated with the reference signal) are then allocated based on the assigned reference signal bandwidth. The allocated cyclic shift control bits specify a cyclic shift associated with the reference signal. |
| US08180007B2 |
Method for clock and data recovery
An input bit stream including a clock signal and data bits is oversampled to obtain one or more sets of data samples. One or more sets of non-transitioning phases corresponding to data samples that do not switch between zero and one are then identified. Center phases corresponding to the one or more sets of non-transitioning phases are identified and then a final center phase that accurately represents the bits belonging to the input bit stream is selected. The data samples corresponding to the final center phase are extracted, thereby recovering the clock signal and data bits from the input bit stream. |
| US08180006B2 |
Spread-spectrum generator
A spread-spectrum generator is provided. The spread-spectrum generator includes a delay module and a control module. The delay module is controlled by a first control signal to delay an input signal by a delay time, and thereby generate a delay signal. The control module is coupled to the delay module for detecting a first edge of the delay signal, and thereby generating the first control signal. Accordingly, the spread-spectrum generator can spread the frequency of the input signal by delaying the input signal by various delay time, and the spread-spectrum generator can also reduce electromagnetic interference (EMI). |
| US08179997B2 |
Real-time digital quadrature demodulation method and device for ultrasonic imaging system
A real-time digital quadrature demodulation method and device for the ultrasonic imaging system are disclosed in this invention. In addition to a multiplying step and a filtering step, the method further comprises a sine and cosine table generating step for generating the sine and cosine table in real time, and a filter parameter generating step for generating corresponding filter parameters in real time to filter signals from the multipliers. The device comprises two multipliers, two filters, a sine and cosine table generating module, a filter parameter generating module, and two parameter memories. The real-time digital quadrature demodulation method and device for the ultrasonic imaging system according to the invention are capable of effectively saving the storage resource, and are easily controllable. |
| US08179996B2 |
Method and device for decoding a signal
A method and a circuit for determining the frame header of a signal that can be applied to standard DVBS2. |
| US08179994B2 |
Phase error de-glitching circuit and method of operating
A system including a phase comparator to compare a first signal and a second signal to generate a phase error signal, and a controller to generate an adjusted phase error signal from the phase error signal in response to an amplitude of at least one of the first signal and the second signal. |
| US08179990B2 |
Coding for large antenna arrays in MIMO networks
A method transmits a sequence of symbols in a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) network including a transmitter having a set of transmit antennas and a receiver having a set of receive antennas. The sequence of symbols is represented by a vector S=[S1 S2 S3 S4]T of individual symbols, where T is a transpose operator. The individual symbols are transmitted as a transmit matrix S = [ S 1 - S 2 * S 1 - S 2 * S 2 S 1 * S 2 S 1 * S 3 - S 4 * - S 3 S 4 * S 4 S 3 * - S 4 - S 3 * ] , where * is a complex conjugate, and wherein each column of the matrix S represents the symbols transmitted at each transmission interval, and subscripts index the set of transmit antennas. |
| US08179989B2 |
Transmission apparatus and transmission method
An transmission apparatus includes a pseudo data addition section configured to add pseudo data into transmission data for a free subcarrier of a radio frequency, an OFDM modulator subjecting the transmission data added with the pseudo data to OFDM modulation, a power amplifier amplifying power of a transmission signal of the radio frequency, the transmission signal based on an OFDM signal subjected to the OFDM modulation, an antenna radiating the amplified transmission signal by using the radio frequency; and a distortion compensation circuit compensating for a distortion characteristic of the power amplifier by correcting the OFDM signal with a distortion compensation coefficient accumulated corresponding to the power value of the OFDM signal, outputting the corrected signal for the power amplifier, and monitoring the output of the power amplifier to update the distortion compensation coefficient. |
| US08179988B2 |
Cyclic redundancy in ODFM systems
Method, communication system, receiver, baseband processor and computer program for recovering data from a received OFDM-signal containing recurrent redundant information where part of the recurrent redundant information is used to maximize the SINR (Signal to Interference plus Noise Ratio) of the received OFDM-signal. |
| US08179981B2 |
Method and apparatus for determining bit allocation for groups of pixel blocks in a picture according to attention importance level
Optimised bit allocation is important in video compression to increase the coding efficiency, i.e. to make optimum use of the available data rate. In view of the human visual system, a human usually pays more attention to some part of a picture rather than to other parts of that picture. Therefore the bit allocation should be optimised for different-attention picture areas (GOBi). The inventive distortion-driven bit allocation scheme allocates the coding/decoding error distortion to picture areas consistently with the human visual system, and satisfies the constraint of bit rate as well. The invention uses a distortion/bitrate/rhoquantization parameter histogram analysis. Based on corresponding tables (DGOBi[QPn], RGOBi[QPn] and ρGOBi[QPn]), the relationships between quantization parameter, rate, distortion and percentage of non-zero coefficients for the different-attention areas are determined (PREALUTI, DISALL, RALL). Thereafter a rho-domain bit rate control is used (RDBALL) for calculating the bit allocation inside each group of macroblocks. |
| US08179977B2 |
Method of apparatus for processing a signal
The present invention relates to a method and apparatus for processing a signal. An object of the present invention devised to solve the problem lies on a method and apparatus for processing a signal, which allows a signal having optimized signal transmission efficiency to be transmitted/received. According to an aspect of the present invention, there is provided a method for processing a signal, the method including receiving a broadcasting signal including audio data coded using a pilot reference value and a pilot difference value, demodulating the broadcasting signal in consideration of a scattered pilot which varies over time and a continual pilot which is fixed over time in a frame of the received broadcasting signal and decoding the demodulated signal to obtain a broadcasting transmission stream, demultiplexing the broadcasting transmission stream to obtain coded audio data in an Internet protocol (IP) packet and audio data coding identification information, decoding data according to a data coding scheme indicated by the audio data coding identification information, wherein the data coding scheme includes at least a pilot coding scheme, the pilot coding scheme decodes the data using the pilot reference value corresponding to a plurality of data and the pilot difference value, and the pilot difference value is generated using the data and the pilot reference value. |
| US08179975B2 |
Method of decoding a macroblock based on a macroblock level of the macroblock
In one embodiment, the method includes obtaining a first reference frame picture list and a second reference frame picture list including multiple reference frame pictures respectively. A reference frame picture index is determined based on display order information for the multiple reference frame pictures. The method further includes obtaining first motion vector information and second motion vector information for the macroblock and obtaining a first reference field picture index and a second reference field picture index associated with the macroblock. First and second reference frame pictures are determined. First and second reference field pictures are selected. The macroblock is decoded based on the first and second motion vector information and the selected first and second reference field pictures. |
| US08179972B2 |
Image encoding device, image decoding device, and integrated circuit used therein
An image decoding device and an encoding device include an arithmetic unit for performing arithmetic processing, an arithmetic data storage unit for storing an arithmetic result by the arithmetic unit, an input selection unit for selecting whether to read pixel data that is to be inputted to the arithmetic unit from compressed image data or from pixel data stored in the arithmetic data storage unit, and inputting the read pixel data to the arithmetic unit, and an arithmetic control unit for controlling, based on a transform mode used and the number of arithmetic operations in the arithmetic unit, a destination from which the pixel data that is to be inputted to the arithmetic unit by the input selection unit is read as well as a combination of pieces of pixel data targeted for the arithmetic processing by the arithmetic unit and multiplier coefficients for the arithmetic processing. |
| US08179969B2 |
Method and apparatus for encoding or decoding frames of different views in multiview video using global disparity
The present invention relates to a method and apparatus for encoding a multi-view video and a method and apparatus for decoding a multi-view video, and more particularly, to a method and apparatus for encoding a multi-view video and a method and apparatus for decoding a multi-view video that can perform encoding and decoding in consideration of global disparity between pictures captured at two different viewpoints to remove spatial redundancy. An embodiment of the invention provides an encoder for compressing data for pictures captured at different viewpoints using global disparity in a multi-view video. The encoder includes: an input unit that receives pictures captured at two or more viewpoints; a reference picture generating unit that generates a new reference picture on the basis of the global disparity between a target picture and a reference picture; and a motion predicting unit that calculates motion vectors of the target picture on the basis of the reference picture. |
| US08179968B2 |
Motion vector coding and decoding methods
A motion vector coding method and apparatus that improves efficiency of coding motion vectors when a current block is coded using a plurality of motion vectors. The apparatus includes a motion vector coding unit that codes a motion vector inputted from a motion vector detecting unit. A motion vector for each current block is coded based on a difference between the motion vector and a predicted vector obtained from motion vectors for previously coded neighboring blocks. The predicted vector is generated by one of the following processes: (A) the motion vectors which refer to the same picture are selected from among the motion vectors for the neighboring blocks so as to generate the predicted vector; (B) the motion vectors for the respective neighboring blocks are ordered in the predetermined order, and the motion vectors of the same order rank are selected from the ordered motion vectors so as to generate the predicted vector; and (C) the predicted vector for the second motion vector of the current block shall be the first motion vector, and if the second motion vector and the first motion vector refer to different pictures, the first motion vector is scaled according to the temporal distance between the pictures so as to generate the predicted vector. |
| US08179966B2 |
Moving picture coding method and moving picture decoding method
A moving picture coding apparatus 1 includes a counter unit 102 which counts the number of pictures following an intra coded picture; and a motion estimation unit 101 which compares respectively only reference pictures which are the intra coded picture or the following pictures, selected from among a reference picture Ref1, a reference picture Ref2 and a reference picture Ref3 stored in memories 408˜410, with a picture signal Vin, and determines the reference picture whose inter picture differential value is smallest. |
| US08179961B2 |
Method and apparatus for adapting a default encoding of a digital video signal during a scene change period
The frame following a scene cut is usually coded as an I picture. In CBR encoding, the encoder will try to keep the bit rate constant, which will often cause serious picture quality degradation at scene changes. In VBR encoding, more bits will be allocated to the first frame of the new scene and the bit rate will increase significantly for a short time. Therefore subsequent frames must be coded in ‘skipped’ mode, which will often cause jerk artifacts. According to the invention, in each frame belonging to a scene change period, areas are determined that have different human attention levels. In the frames (n−1, n−2, n−3) located prior to the first new scene frame, to the areas having a lower attention level less bits are assigned than in the default encoding, and in the frames (n, n+1, n+2) located at and after the scene cut the thus saved bits are additionally assigned to the areas having a higher attention level. |
| US08179950B2 |
Startup protocol for high throughput communications systems
A startup protocol is provided for use in a communications system having a plurality of transceivers, one transceiver acting as a master and another transceiver acting as slave, each transceiver having a noise reduction system, a timing recovery system and at least one equalizer. The operation of the startup protocol is partitioned into three stages. During the first stage the timing recovery system and the equalizer of the slave are trained and the noise reduction system of the master is trained. During the second stage the timing recovery system of the master is trained in both frequency and phase, the equalizer of the master is trained and the noise reduction system of the slave is trained. During the third stage the noise reduction system of the master is retrained, the timing recovery system of the master is retrained in phase and the timing recovery system of the slave is retrained in both frequency and phase. The protocol then enters a fourth stage in which the master transceiver and the slave transceiver are ready to communicate with each other. |
| US08179948B2 |
Radio signal demodulating device
It is an object of the present invention to provide a radio signal demodulating device in which fluctuation follow ability of transmission channel environment is improved. The radio signal demodulating device according to the present invention receives the amplitude of an information signal in which known pilot signals are multiplexed, as a radio signal modulated in proportion to the time change of frequency of a carrier wave The radio signal demodulating device according to the present invention includes a frequency converting unit, a signal combining unit, a first pilot signal extracting unit, a second pilot signal extracting unit, a first pilot orthogonal signal generating unit, a second pilot orthogonal signal generating unit, a first error signal generating unit, a first weight factor updating unit for calculating a weight factor to be used in the signal combining unit, by using a first pilot orthogonal signal and a first error signal obtained by the first error signal generating unit. |
| US08179947B2 |
Radio communication apparatus and reference signal generating method
A wireless communication apparatus capable of minimizing the degradation in separation characteristic of a code multiplexed response signal. In this apparatus, a control part (209) controls both a AC sequence to be used in a primary spreading in a spreading part (214) and a Walsh sequence to be used in a secondary spreading in a spreading part (217) so as to allow a very small circular shift interval of the ZC sequence to absorb the interference components remaining in the response signal; the spreading part (214) uses the ZC sequence set by the control part (209) to primary spread the response signal; and the spreading part (217) uses the Walsh sequence set by the control part (209) to secondary spread the response signal to which CP has been added. |
| US08179946B2 |
Systems and methods for control of advanced receivers
A controller for advanced receivers configures a plurality of advanced receiver modules based on figures of merit computed on the input signal. The controller also selects the appropriate output signal based on figures of merit of either the input or the output signals. The controller decisions can also be made in a bursty manner, where only a subset of the decisions to be made are made at a given time, thereby limiting the processing load of the control processor. |
| US08179945B2 |
Radio transmitter device
Transmitter device which includes at least: a) one delay line designed to output M signals which are delayed in relation to each other, where M is an integer greater than 1; b) a memory, designed to store at least M digital samples of a waveform, where each digital sample contains N bits, and to output each of the M digital samples successively on N output lines respectively under the control of one of the M delayed signals; and c) a digital-analog converter which includes N inputs linked to N output lines, designed to convert the M digital samples received as input from the N output lines of the memory and to successively output, on an output of the digital-analog converter, each of the M analog converted digital samples which together form an analog signal which is representative of the waveform. |
| US08179942B2 |
Semiconductor optical element
A semiconductor optical element has an active layer including quantum dots. The density of quantum dots in the resonator direction in a portion of the active layer in which the density of photons is relatively high is increased relative to the density of quantum dots in a portion of the active layer in which the density of photons is relatively low. |
| US08179940B2 |
Semiconductor laser and method for producing the semiconductor laser
A semiconductor laser is embodied as a surface emitting thin-film semiconductor laser (2) with a semiconductor body (4). The semiconductor body (4) comprises a first and a second planar surface (12, 14). The semiconductor body (4) comprises between the planar surfaces at least one active layer (10) for generating radiation. The semiconductor body (4) has, for coupling out the radiation from the active layer (10) toward the first planar surface (12), at least one first mirror area (26) inclined with respect to the active layer (10). |
| US08179936B2 |
Gas-cooled laser device
A gas-cooled laser device includes heat dissipative components, and housing walls made of a heat conducting material, in which one or more of the housing walls are provided with ventilation channels. At least one heat dissipative component is mounted on a plate of a heat conducting material, and the heat conducting plate is connected in a thermally conducting manner with the at least one housing wall that is provided with ventilation channels. The heat dissipative components can include heat dissipative optical components and heat dissipative non-optical components that are respectively arranged on different sides of the plate or are respectively arranged in different compartments on one side of the plate. |
| US08179932B2 |
Pulse laser apparatus, terahertz measuring apparatus, and terahertz tomographic apparatus
A pulse laser apparatus includes a laser configured to generate a pulse of a laser beam, a fiber amplifier, and a pulse compressor. The fiber amplifier includes a rare-earth doped fiber that exhibits normal dispersion at a wavelength of the laser beam generated from the laser. The pulse laser apparatus further includes a unit configured to give a loss to energy portions in a wavelength region corresponding to a zero-dispersion wavelength of the rare-earth doped fiber and/or a wavelength region longer than the zero-dispersion wavelength within a wavelength spectrum of the laser beam having been chirped in the fiber amplifier. |
| US08179931B2 |
Wavelength tunable filter and wavelength tunable laser module
A wavelength tunable filter and a wavelength tunable laser module are a codirectional coupler type whose characteristics do not vary significantly with a process error. They are structured so as to include a semiconductor substrate which has a first optical waveguide and a second optical waveguide. The first and the second optical waveguides are extended from a first side of the semiconductor substrate to an opposing second side thereof. The first optical waveguide includes a first core layer, which has a planar layout having periodic convexes and concaves, and a pair of electrodes, which vertically sandwich the first core layer. The second optical waveguide includes a second core layer, which has a lower refractive index than the first core layer. Further, a layer having the same composition and film thickness as the second core layer is placed under the first core layer. |
| US08179927B2 |
Method, system and gateway for negotiating the capability of data signal detector
Methods and systems for negotiating the capability of a data signal detector include a sender gateway sending a first signaling containing data signal detector support capability message during voice band data transmission (301); a receiver gateway determining, according to the received first signaling, whether the sender gateway sends the data in a manner of containing a data signal detector, and determining whether to enable a non-voice decoder to decode mute packets (302). The sender gateway sends data in a manner of not containing a data signal detector according to the received second signaling (304). Embodiments of the present invention are applicable to a fax service in a packet-based network. Data signal detector capability negotiation may be implemented during voice band transmission. Embodiments of the present invention further disclose a sender gateway and a receiver gateway with ability for negotiating the capability of a data signal detector. |
| US08179925B2 |
Sink device for a wireless local area network
The invention discloses a sink device and a signal receiving method thereof, applicable to wireless local area network. The sink device receives a plurality of beacon signals, synchronizes the beacon output signal generated by itself with the operating clock of the source device according to the above-mentioned timing synchronization data. And the sink device receives the plurality of beacon signals according to this calibrated synchronization clock. |
| US08179921B2 |
Method and apparatus for processing padding buffer status reports
A method and system for processing buffer status reports (BSRs) such that when BSR triggering is performed, the size(s) of the necessary sub-header(s) are also to be considered together in addition to the BSR size. The steps of checking whether any padding region is available in a MAC PDU that was constructed, comparing the number of padding bits with the size of the BSR plus its sub-header, and if the number of padding bits is larger than the size of the BSR plus its sub-header, triggering BSR are performed. Doing so allows the sub-header(s) to be inserted or included into the MAC PDU or transport block (TB) or other type of data unit. |
| US08179918B2 |
Relay connection unit for vehicle
A relay connection unit which is connected to a first communication line of a first communication protocol for communicating a first message via time-divided slots and a second communication line of a second communication protocol for communicating a second message with the ID and converts the communication protocols to relay the first message and the second message. The relay connection unit is characterized by converting a first storage table in which the ID of the second message is assigned for each time-divided slot for the communication of the first message and the second message into the first message and having processing section for transmitting the converted first message to the first communication line via the time slots assigned in the first storage table. |
| US08179917B2 |
System and method for repeater in a power line network
System and method for repeater in a power line network. According to an embodiment, the present invention provides a method for power line communication network. The method includes providing a virtual local area network (VLAN), which VLAN includes at least a repeater, a client, and a gateway. The VLAN is associated with a network encryption key. The repeater is associated with a first identification. The client is associated with a second identification. The gateway is associated with a third identification. The first identification and the third identification are a service identification type. The second identification is a client identification type. The method also includes providing a power line network that is configured to transmit data through OFDM signaling. The method includes sending a first data packet in first format from the client through the power line network. The method additionally includes receiving the first data packet by the repeater through the power line network at through a first network interface. |
| US08179915B2 |
System and method for transmitting and retransmitting data
A method of transmitting data includes storing a first set of transmission data and a first set of retransmission data. A first ratio of transmission data to retransmission data is determined. A plurality of transmission data units is generated with each data unit including a portion of transmission data from the first set of transmission data and a portion of retransmission data from the first set of retransmission data in accordance with the first ratio. The plurality of transmission data units is transmitted. |
| US08179909B2 |
Method and system for harmonizing QoS in home networks
Packet in a multimedia stream has and associated standard priority level specified by standard protocols. The standard priority level in input packets received by a home gateway is converted to a harmonized priority level. Then, the input packets are processed in the home gateway according to the harmonized priority level, and converted from the harmonized priority level to the standard priority level in corresponding output packets after the processing. |
| US08179908B2 |
Packet network system with session changing function and implementation method and device thereof
The present invention provides a method for session changing. The method for session changing is designed for session changing during interworking between a first UE and a second UE in a packet network, and includes: reserving, during setup of an initial session between the first UE and the second UE, an interworking control function for logically controlling the interworking on a path of the initial session; and performing, when the interworking control function receives a subsequent session change request, the corresponding session changing operation according to contents of the subsequent session change request. The invention further provides a device for session changing and a packet network system with session changing function. |
| US08179906B1 |
Communication network elements with application stacking
A communication network element comprises an I/O interface, memory, processing circuitry, and bus structure. The I/O interface receives and transfers a user packet. The memory stores the user packet, management software, and communication applications. The processing circuitry executes the management software to provide a manager and executes the communication applications to provide service functions. The service functions retrieve the user packet from the memory based on memory pointers, process the user packet, and store the processed user packet in the memory. The manager transfers the memory pointers between the service functions. The bus structure couples the I/O interface, the memory, and the processing circuitry. |
| US08179902B2 |
Method and system for automatic generation of route distinguishers for virtual private networks
A method and system for automatically generating a route distinguisher for a virtual private network are disclosed. The method includes receiving a virtual private network name and rejecting the virtual private network name if the name comprises a number of bytes greater than a predefined limit. If the virtual private network name is less than the predefined limit, an algorithm is applied to automatically convert the virtual private network name to a route distinguisher for the virtual private network. |
| US08179901B2 |
System and method for squelching a recovered clock in an ethernet network
A system and method for squelching a recovered clock in an Ethernet network. In one embodiment the invention provides a method for squelching a recovered clock in an Ethernet network comprising a local node coupled to a remote node by a link, the method including receiving a descrambler status signal, receiving a remote receiver status signal, receiving a link status signal, and squelching the recovered clock signal based on the descrambler status signal, the remote receiver status signal, and the link status signal. |
| US08179900B2 |
Edge node redundant system in label switching network
In a label switching network, in normal times, packet transfer is performed using a protection-target label switching path set between a primary edge node device and a remote edge node device. Then, when a failure occurs in the primary edge node device, a secondary edge node device takes over the label switching path session from the primary edge node device and operates as the start-point node or the end-point node of the protection-target label switching path, to continue packet transfer using a backup label switching path. |
| US08179895B2 |
Methods, systems, and computer program products for monitoring tunneled internet protocol (IP) traffic on a high bandwidth IP network
Methods, systems, and computer program products for monitoring tunneled Internet protocol (IP) traffic on a high bandwidth IP network are disclosed. According to one method, a copy of a tunneled IP packet traversing an IP communications network is generated. The packet may include a payload having tunneled protocol address information. The tunneled protocol address information and the payload portion of the copied IP packet is read. The packet is distributed, using the tunneled protocol address information, to a function for providing at least one of packet classification and network monitoring service for the packet. |
| US08179892B2 |
System and method for managing communication links
A system and method for managing a communication link between a consumer electronic device adapted for two-way, wireless communications with at least one peripheral. The communication link is managed using a controller that is associated with the consumer electronic device that functions to assign communication slots to the peripheral to facilitate communications between the peripheral and the consumer electronic device. |
| US08179881B2 |
Method for allocating time and frequency resource for resource request indicator, method for transmitting resource request indicator and device thereof
A method for allocating a time and frequency resource of a resource request indicator (RRI), a method for transmitting an RRI, and a device thereof are provided, which relate to a wireless communication technique and reduce the overhead of the time and frequency resource. The method for allocating a time and frequency resource of an RRI includes: allocating codes for an RRI and other uplink control signaling; and multiplexing the RRI and other uplink control signaling in the same time and frequency resource in a code division manner. |
| US08179879B2 |
Robust ranging method
In a communication system in which data is transferred by packets, a ranging method in which a receiver, in a given ranging window, periodically compares received data with expected data to find a match. The periodic comparison includes searching for known preamble and/or delimiter sequences of ranging packets and involves timeouts for each search period. In case a match between the known sequences and received sequences is not found and the respective timeout is exceeded, the search and comparison process is restarted and continues until a global timeout is exceeded. |
| US08179878B2 |
Method for performing synchronisation for multicast broadcast services in a wireless access communication network, corresponding multicast broadcast server and base station
The present invention relates to a method for performing data synchronization in a wireless access communication network. The method includes data to be synchronized coming from an access network gateway and being sent to at least two base stations, and the data being further sent from the base stations to user terminals over an air interface in downlink frames. The method also includes sending a signaling message to the at least two base stations with the signaling message having a set of parameters defining unambiguously the position and size of the data in the downlink frame and the structure of the data. |
| US08179877B2 |
Method and apparatus for creating an enhanced medium access control packet data unit for enhanced transport format combination selection in wireless communications
Efficient enhanced transport format combination (E-TFC) selection methods and apparatus support flexible radio link control (RLC) packet data unit (PDU) size and medium access control (MAC) layer segmentation. Methods for filling an enhanced medium access control (MAC-e) packet data unit (PDU) with data from logical channels as part of E-TFC selection are provided. In one embodiment, the E-TFC selection algorithm employs a single request from the MAC layer to the RLC layer to request the number of bits it is allowed to send for a logical channel to create enhanced MAC-e PDUs. In another embodiment, the MAC entity performs multiple requests to the RLC entity. In another embodiment, the MAC entity makes a single request to the RLC entity to create one or more enhanced MAC-e PDUs of a set size. A technique is also provided for maintaining a guaranteed bit rate (GBR) for non-scheduled data flows with variable-length headers. |
| US08179875B2 |
Provisioning of non real time services in accordance with network resources availability
A method is described for the provisioning of latency-tolerant services in an access network. The method comprises the steps of: setting a demand to provide a service to a user; determining the network resources required to provide this service; establishing based upon the resources required to provide that service, the available network resources and/or the network's service provisioning policy, whether the provisioning of this service shall be immediately effected or be postponed to a later stage. If it has been established that the service will be provided at a later stage, it will be provided at a time when the available resources and/or the network's service provisioning policy match that of the resources required for the provisioning of the service. |
| US08179874B2 |
Automatic tunnel configuration method using router advertisement message
An automatic tunnel configuration method using a router advertisement message is provided, including: periodically receiving a router advertisement message containing a tunnel end-point address option from an access router of an internet protocol version 6 (IPv6) network when a mobile node moves from a home network to other IPv6 networks; automatically configuring a tunnel using an address allocated from the access router of the IPv6 network to which the mobile node connects, and the tunnel end-point address option included in the router advertisement message when the network to which the mobile node moves to connect is an internet protocol version 4 (IPv4) network; and communicating with a correspondent node via the configured tunnel using a mobile internet protocol (MIP6). |
| US08179873B2 |
Method to quite consecutive narrow band channels
A method and apparatus for quieting multiple channels is provided herein. During operation, transmission activity on each channel is analyzed and a best band is identified. Once the band is chosen, a wideband transmitter is utilized to transmit simultaneous reservation messages on consecutive channels simultaneously. Because a wideband transmitter is used to transmit simultaneous reservation messages on multiple consecutive channels, the above procedure quickly quiets multiple channels while minimizing the reservation duration of all channels as a result of quieting the channels. |
| US08179869B2 |
Redundant multicast service in wireless network
In a wireless network in which the base station has full duplex capability (can transmit on the downlink channel and simultaneously receive on the uplink channel), but the mobile stations have only half duplex capability (each can transmit on the uplink channel and receive on the downlink channel, but not simultaneously), the base station may transmit duplicate copies of multicast data in two or more frames. Some of the addressed mobile station may be scheduled to receive the first frame and transmit during the second frame, while the other addressed mobile stations may be scheduled to transmit during the first frame and receive the second frame. |
| US08179862B2 |
Method for preventing co-channel operation with radar systems
A method for preventing co-channel operation with a radar system includes the steps of setting a state of a first communication channel to active, connecting to a first wireless access point on the first communication channel, passively scanning at least a second communication channel for communication from a second wireless access point, setting a state of the second channel to active if frames are received on the second channel, determining whether an elapsed time since frames were received on at least one of the first channel and the second channel has exceed a predefined value, and in response to the predefined value being exceeded for at least one of the first channel and the second channel, setting the state of a corresponding one of the first channel and the second channel to passive. |
| US08179861B2 |
Femtocell originating domain selection
A system and methodology that facilitates same-domain handovers between a femtocell and a surrounding macro cell is provided. In particular, the system can determine a domain of the surrounding macro cell and select a preferred domain for user equipment (UE) communication based in part on the determined domain. Moreover, a preferred domain selection component can be employed to determine the preferred domain based in part on various factors including a probability that a handover will occur, geographical location of femtocell and/or UE, motion of UE, communication history, user and/or service provider preferences and/or policies, service requirements, UE behavior patterns, etc. Further, the selected preferred domain can be utilized during communication with the UE, for example, while initiating voice calls. |
| US08179860B2 |
Systems and method for performing handovers, or key management while performing handovers in a wireless communication system
Example embodiments provide a method for performing handovers and key management while performing handovers. The method includes communicating a random handover seed key protected by a secure protocol from a core component of a network to a user equipment. The secure protocol prevents the random handover seed key from being learned by base stations supported by the core component of the network. The secure protocol may be non-access stratum signaling of an evolved packet system environment for wireless communications. |
| US08179848B2 |
Video multicast using relay devices defined by a channel quality parameter hierarchy
Improved distribution of video information in an infrastructure-based wireless network is provided. A wireless channel condition between the video server node and each of the plurality of receiver nodes is determined. Receiver nodes are assigned into one of a first group and a second group using the measured wireless channel conditions, wherein receiver nodes assigned to the first group have, on average, a better measured wireless channel condition than that of receiver nodes assigned to the second group. At least some of the receiver nodes of the first group of nodes are selected to serve as relay nodes. Video information is then transmitted wirelessly from the video server node to the receiver nodes assigned to the first group. Each of the selected relay nodes then transmits at least a part of the video information to the receiver nodes of the second group. |
| US08179847B2 |
Interactive white list prompting to share content and services associated with a femtocell
System(s) and method(s) provide access management to femtocell service through access control list(s) (e.g., white list(s)). A white list(s) includes a set of subscriber station(s) identifier numbers, codes or tokens, and also can include additional fields for femtocell access management based on desired complexity. Various example aspects such as white list(s) management, maintenance and dissemination; pre-configuration; and inclusion of wireless device(s) or subscriber(s) are also provided. An access management component can facilitate interactive and automatic prompting of detected communication devices to facilitate granting access to content and/or services associated with the femtocell to a desired communication device(s) and adding a desired communication device(s) to the white list(s) associated with a femtocell, and to facilitate modifying or terminating access of the femtocell by a communication device(s) based in part on monitored activity of the communication device(s) with regard to femtocell access. |
| US08179846B2 |
DPI-driven bearer termination for short-lived applications
Based on application information received from a DPI device, a downstream device, such as a Radio Network Controller (RNC), optimally implements a dormancy timer policy for short-lived applications, such as email and MMS. In particular, the RNC may initially use a large value for the dormancy timer for these applications. When the RNC receives an indication of the end of the application from the DPI device, the RNC may terminate the connection, thereby immediately freeing up resources. Alternatively, should the DPI device fail to recognize the end of the application, the initial dormancy timer serves as a fail-safe, such that the radio network resources are still released for allocation to another device in the radio network. |
| US08179839B2 |
Method for controlling the data rate of a circuit switched voice application in an evolved wireless system
An apparatus and method of transmitting a circuit switched (CS) voice application via an enhanced dedicated channel (E-DCH), implemented in a wireless transmit/receive unit (WTRU). The method includes receiving a grant; performing an E-TFC selection procedure based on the grant, wherein a number of bits that may be transmitted over an enhanced dedicated channel (E-DCH) is determined, determining an adaptive multi-rate (AMR) codec bit-rate based on the number of bits that may be transmitted over the E-DCH, generating AMR voice packets based on the determined AMR codec bit rate, and submitting the AMR voice packets to lower layers for transmission over the E-DCH. |