IDENTIFYING AN IDEAL USER NETWORK
Granted: December 1, 2016
Application Number:
20160352530
A system, method, and apparatus are provided for identifying an ideal or target network of a member of a professional network or social network, or one or more characteristics of such a network. Based on a type of the member, one or more attributes of a profile of the member, and/or one or more goals of the member, characteristics may be identified that support achievement of those goals or that promote more effective use of the professional network or social network by the member. By…
BLENDING CONTENT POOLS INTO CONTENT FEEDS
Granted: December 1, 2016
Application Number:
20160350669
The disclosed embodiments provide a system for processing data. During operation, the system obtains a set of content pools for a user, wherein each content pool in the set of content pools includes a set of content items associated with user activity in a member segment of a social network. Next, the system calculates a set of probabilities of clicking the content items in the content pool. The system then uses the probabilities to order the content items with other content items from…
INFERRING A SOCIAL CONNECTION
Granted: December 1, 2016
Application Number:
20160350666
A system, method, and apparatus are provided for automatically establishing an inferred (‘follow’) relationship between a first member and a second member of a user community. Based on passive and/or active signals indicating affinity of the first member for the second member, the system determines whether an inferred connection from the first member to the second member would improve the first member's network within the user community. A potential improvement may be observed if the…
CONTENT EVENT NOTIFICATIONS
Granted: November 24, 2016
Application Number:
20160344800
A system, method, and apparatus are provided for issuing content event notifications to members of a user community that makes content available to its members. Events involving content items of interest to a given member (e.g., creation, upload, sharing) are recognized, particularly events that involve another member connected to the given member in the community, and the relevance of the items to the member or to content topics of interest to the member is determined. Time slots during…
ORDERING EVENTS WITH ALTERNATING EPOCHS OF EVENT IDENTIFIERS
Granted: November 17, 2016
Application Number:
20160337435
A system, method, and apparatus are provided for identifying and/or ordering events (or notifications of events) within a computing environment featuring a high rate of events (e.g., hundreds of millions per minute). New events are labeled based on multiple alternating epochs comprising sequences of event identifiers, wherein each epoch's identifiers are mutually exclusive of other epochs. Illustratively, each epoch may commence with a different initial identifier (e.g., 0, 1, 2) and…
AGGREGATING CONTENT ASSOCIATED WITH TOPICS IN A SOCIAL NETWORK
Granted: November 3, 2016
Application Number:
20160323232
In order to facilitate access to relevant information, a system may determine topics that are of interest based on skills of users in a social network of users and annotations associated with content in the social network. Then, the system may identify experts knowledgeable about the topics among the users in the social network. These experts may be invited to aggregate and edit the topic content. For a given topic, the system may provide, to a subset of the experts, documents with…
PROMOTING ACHIEVEMENT OF A GOAL IN A PROFESSIONAL COMMUNITY
Granted: November 3, 2016
Application Number:
20160321592
A system, method, and apparatus are provided for promoting achievement of a goal within a professional community, such as an online professional network. A member is selected as a candidate for assistance based on her level of usage of the community and/or other factors, and a goal of the member may be learned explicitly or implicitly. Based on her goal and her level of proficiency within the community, which may be determined based on the number of discrete tasks or metrics she has…
TECHNIQUE FOR CLIPPING AND AGGREGATING CONTENT ITEMS
Granted: November 3, 2016
Application Number:
20160321229
In order to facilitate access to and exchange of a given content item in a sequential set of content items (such as a slide in a presentation or a frame in a video), a system may create a clipped-content identifier in response to a clip selection of the content item by a user. This clipped-content identifier may include a pointer to a location in the system that stores the content item in the sequential set of content items, and metadata associated with the content item. Subsequently,…
FAST QUERYING OF SOCIAL NETWORK DATA
Granted: October 27, 2016
Application Number:
20160314220
The disclosed embodiments provide a system for processing data. During operation, the system obtains a graph of a social network, wherein the graph includes a set of nodes representing users in the social network and a set of edges representing relationships between pairs of the users. Next, the system stores, on a single computer system, a static representation of the graph, wherein the static representation includes a first set of fixed-size blocks representing the nodes and the edges…
IDENTIFYING ENTITIES TRENDING IN A PROFESSIONAL COMMUNITY
Granted: October 27, 2016
Application Number:
20160314477
A system, method, and apparatus are provided for identifying entities trending within a professional community, such as member of a professional social network. The system collects “share” activity and/or other types of activities conducted by members of the community in which they generate or disseminate (textual) content. From the collected share activity, trending terms are identified and ranked according to scores that reflect the change in frequency of usage of the terms over…
ATTRIBUTE-BASED CONTEXTS FOR SENTIMENT-TOPIC PAIRS
Granted: October 27, 2016
Application Number:
20160314200
The disclosed embodiments provide a system for processing data. During operation, the system obtains a set of content items and a set of topics in the set of content items. For each topic in the set of topics, the system automatically extracts a set of attributes that provides a context for the topic from a subset of the content items containing the topic. The system then displays the set of attributes in the context of the topic to improve understanding of the set of content items by…
DETECTING AND COMBINING SYNONYMOUS TOPICS
Granted: October 27, 2016
Application Number:
20160314195
The disclosed embodiments provide a system for processing data. During operation, the system obtains a set of topics associated with a set of content items. Next, the system obtains a first set of attributes associated with a first topic in the set of topics and a second set of attributes associated with a second topic in the set of topics. Next, the system calculates a similarity between the first and second sets of attributes and applies a threshold to the similarity to identify the…
TOPIC EXTRACTION USING CLAUSE SEGMENTATION AND HIGH-FREQUENCY WORDS
Granted: October 27, 2016
Application Number:
20160314191
The disclosed embodiments provide a system for processing data. During operation, the system obtains a set of clauses in a first set of content items comprising unstructured data. Next, the system obtains a set of stop words comprising high-frequency words that occur in a second set of content items. The system then automatically extracts a set of topics from the set of clauses by generating a set of n-grams from the set of clauses and excluding a first n-gram in the set of n-grams from…
INFERRING PROFESSIONAL REPUTATIONS OF SOCIAL NETWORK MEMBERS
Granted: October 6, 2016
Application Number:
20160292643
Techniques for inferring a professional reputation for a member of an online social networking service are described. A recommendation graph is generated from professional recommendations submitted by members of the online social networking service for other members of the online social networking service. Using the generated recommendation graph, a reputation model is trained to learn a respective importance for each respective feature of a set of features of electronic profiles on the…
ASSIGNING CONTENT OBJECTS TO DELIVERY NETWORKS
Granted: September 29, 2016
Application Number:
20160283480
A system, method, and apparatus are provided for assigning or allocating multiple content objects, within a content page (e.g., web page) or other content collection (e.g., a set of pages), to different content delivery networks for delivery in response to a content request. The objects are ranked by importance (e.g., importance in rendering or presenting the page), and the networks are ranked by performance (e.g., throughput). In order of importance, the objects are assigned to the…
PACING THE SERVING OF A CONTENT ITEM
Granted: September 22, 2016
Application Number:
20160275571
A system, method, and apparatus are provided for pacing the serving of a sponsored content item. The rate of depletion of the sponsored content item, or the current rate at which it wins auctions to be served in response to compatible content requests is used to forecast the state of the item's periodic budget at the end of a current period. If the budget is not forecast to be depleted close to the end of the period, within a threshold measure of value or time, a new win rate that will…
EXPANDING AN AUDIENCE FOR AN ADVERTISING CAMPAIGN
Granted: September 15, 2016
Application Number:
20160267522
In order to expand the audience for an advertising campaign, a system identifies an expanded audience for the advertising campaign based on characteristics of individuals in the expanded audience and a target audience of the advertising campaign. Then, the system compares a historical cumulative advertising performance metric at a current time for the target audience with a current cumulative advertising performance metric at the current time for the target audience in the advertising…
SAMPLING OF USERS IN NETWORK A/B TESTING
Granted: September 1, 2016
Application Number:
20160253683
The disclosed embodiments provide a system for performing network A/B testing. During operation, the system obtains a graph of a social network and calculates a set of equally sized clusters of users in the social network by iteratively switching memberships of the nodes among the equally sized clusters to increase a number of edges in each of the equally sized clusters. Next, the system randomly selects a subset of the equally sized clusters for exposure to a treatment version of a…
APPLICATION-LAYER MANAGED MEMORY CACHE
Granted: August 18, 2016
Application Number:
20160239432
In order to prevent data thrashing and the resulting performance degradation, a computer system may maintain an application-layer cache space to more effectively use physical memory and, thus, significantly improve an application-memory hit ratio and reduce disk input-output operations. In particular, the computer system may maintain a managed memory cache that is separate from an operating systems' default page cache. The managed memory cache may be managed according to predefined…
CAPACITY PLANNING FOR DATABASE REPLICATION LATENCY
Granted: July 21, 2016
Application Number:
20160210341
A system, methods, and apparatus are provided for performing capacity planning within a system that experiences high volumes of data having high velocity and high variability. Based on historical traffic, a forecast is generated for one or more relatively coarse time periods (e.g., weeks, days), and is decomposed to yield finer-grained forecasts (e.g., for hours, minutes) by applying a distribution index also generated from historical traffic. Estimated replication latency for the…
