545 results about "Community based" patented technology

The invention generally concerns systems and methods for monitoring and controlling the power consumption of a power-consuming device. The system and method may connect to a power source and a power-consuming device, connecting the power-consuming device to the power source. The power usage of the power-consuming device may then be measured and monitored. This monitoring data may then be stored and optionally sent to a controlling device on a data network. The location of the power-consuming device may also be determined, recorded, and sent to a controlling device. The system may also control the power usage of the power-consuming device. In some cases, a remote server may connect multiple energy monitoring systems in order to gain additional efficiencies and foster a community-based social network.

A method and apparatus for providing vicinity-based community services at a wireless access location by a public network service provider. The method includes the steps of receiving over a public network, at least one request for vicinity-based community services from at least one end-user accessing the wireless access point, grouping end-users accessing common wireless access points, and providing the vicinity-based community services in real time to end-users accessing the public network service provider from the wireless access point. The apparatus includes devices for carrying out the method described above.

A consumer-centric service for matching local consumers with local service providers. A matching is performed between consumer needs and local vendor capabilities and the results are presented back to the consumer so that the choice of which vendors to be contacted is left to the consumer. Mechanisms are provided for immediately and automatically contacting the chosen vendor in one or more of a plurality of communication media and offering the chosen vendor the details of the consumer's request, including the preferred method of contact information, for a fee. Also, the system immediately informs the consumer about the status of the vendor contacts, including whether or not the vendor has accepted the lead. Once a chosen vendor accepts the lead, the consumer is contacted by the vendor, in the manner requested by the consumer. Thus, the invention enables consumers to maintain control over the selection and contact process with matched vendors. The system of the invention is particularly advantageous for providing community based services such as babysitting, cleaning, painting, software support, typing, and in obtaining professional services from professionals such as electricians, carpenters, gardeners, accountants, lawyers, and the like.

A computer-implemented system and method provides authoritative answers, developed within a community-based question answering service to users of a general network information search. This community-based question answering service receives a question from a first user, and receives answers from community members regarding this question. The authority of the answer is then determined by members of the community and if the authority is of an acceptable level, the question together with its authoritative answer is added to a database which includes all authoritatively answered questions. The answering service has an interface that exposes the contents of this database to queries from users of the network who are not necessarily members of the answering service. In one embodiment, results from queries of the community-based database are integrated with queries of a second database of general network information. An improved general information search service is also provided that includes query results from the authoritative answers generated by the community-based answering service.

The present invention provides a system for collecting, anonymizing, and communicating information collected from medical pumps without the need for additional effort by medical care professionals. The pump/multi-pump derived information can be aggregated between hospitals and across healthcare institutions to provide global overviews of pump performance and drug use information. This information can assist with the delivery of healthcare by providing automatic guidance warnings, for example, deviating from established ranges for common delivery rates; trend monitoring to anticipate needs of the health care community based upon global health trends; and allocation of healthcare equipment by monitoring the total operating time and lifecycles of the pumps. Knowledge derived from this pump/multi-pump derived information can be used in an administrative capacity and to develop evolving advisory protocols for users of pumps comparing real-time pump protocols to those appropriate for a given drug.

A system receives item data corresponding to an item list from a user. The item list may include one or more items. The system communicates the item list to a community group associated with the user and the system then receives member data from one or more members of the community group, wherein the member data is associated with the one or more items on the item list.

An online knowledge verification system, method and software system product provides self-generating community-based knowledge certification. The system can be web-based and includes an infrastructure that allows users to identify and import into the system information descriptive of virtually unlimited content media for which knowledge certification can be established. The system includes a Question Preparation Engine by which questions and answers for an identified content medium are prepared for supporting the certification process. A Question Judgment Engine permits users to provide endorsement scores for the value of questions provided by other users for each content medium. Testing Engines are provided for testing the knowledge of users, using the prepared questions and answers having sufficient endorsement from the community and providing certificates for users who pass the tests for that particular content medium. The system permits users to share those certificates with other users of the community, as well as contacts on social media websites.

Methods and systems for providing directory services for peer-to-peer systems and applications are provided. Example embodiments provide a Peer-to-Peer Directory System (“PPDS”), which enables applications, especially those using peer-to-peer technology that desire to communicate directly with one another on different peer computer systems, to automatically discover working (current) network addresses for each other even when the network addresses of their respective computer systems change dynamically. The PPDS provides a community-based tracking system, a portion of which is implemented on each computer system that is a member of the community, to mutually track and store the network addresses of the other computer systems to which it has an associated relationship. The PPDS also provides a query mechanism that takes advantage of the relationship paths between the various computer systems to search for a current network address of a designated computer system.

A Web based system provides informational services for assisting customers in selecting products or other types of items from an electronic catalog of a merchant. Users of the system can create and join user communities, such as communities based on user hobbies, localities, professions, and organizations. The system also supports implicit membership communities that are based on email addresses (e.g., all users having a “nasa.com” email address), shipping/billing addresses, and other known user information. Using purchase history data collected for online users, the system automatically identifies and generates lists of the most popular items (and/or items that are becoming popular) within particular communities, and makes such information available to users for viewing. For example, in the context of an online book store users of the nasa.com community may automatically be presented a Web page which lists the bestselling book titles among nasa.com users, or may be sent email notifications of purchase events or hotselling books within the community. Another feature involves automatically notifying users interested in particular products of other users (preferably other members of the same community) that have purchased the same or similar products. For example, in one embodiment, when a user accesses a book detail page, the detail page is customized to include the names and email addresses of other members of the user's community that recently purchased the same book.

A “Community-Based Mobile Search Cache” provides various techniques for maximizing the number of query results served from a local “query cache”, thereby significantly limiting the need to connect to the Internet or cloud using 3G or other wireless links to service search queries. The query cache is constructed remotely and downloaded to mobile devices. Contents of the query cache are determined by mining popular queries from mobile search logs, either globally or based on queries of one or more groups or subgroups of users. In various embodiments, searching and browsing behaviors of individual users are evaluated to customize the query cache for particular users or user groups. The content of web pages related to popular queries may also be included in the query cache. This allows cached web pages to be displayed without first displaying cached search results when a corresponding search result has a sufficiently high click-through probability.

Systems and methods for providing a mobile desktop user interface for accessing and using community-based contact management, communication tools, websites and application pods in a convenient and integrated fashion via an online operating system. In one aspect, the mobile desktop application is accessed via a user's browser and provides access to the aforementioned community-based services in a convenient, integrated manner. The mobile desktop application can link social content, e.g., social networking sites, content, e.g., widgets made available on social networking sites, and billing mechanisms, all while maintaining seamless interoperability with desktop applications.

The invention relates to a community-based author and academic paper recommending system and a recommending method. A double-layer quotation network consisting of an author layer and an academic paper layer is formed by utilizing a quotation relation between an author and the academic paper and the community information, then a user interesting model is established according to a historic behavior record of the user and the academic paper set read by the user, finally the user demand is analyzed according to the obtained double-layer quotation network and the user interesting model, and the author and academic paper thereof can be recommended to the user. The system is provided with an academic paper capturing module, an academic paper preprocessing module, a double-layer quotation network establishing module, a user interesting model establishing module and an individualized academic paper recommending module as well as a database. By adopting the recommending system and recommending method, not only can the correlation of the study content among users be used for establishing an author community through a subjective model, but also multiple attribute values of the to-be-recommended author and academic paper inside the community can be calculated, and the weakness that the calculation of the existing recommending algorithm is large can be improved; and meanwhile, multiple attribute values of the author and academic paper can be simultaneously calculated, so that the recommend result is more diversified, and the user requirement can be better met.

A wagering game community environment is described herein. In some embodiments, the environment includes a community server to provide services for a wagering game community. In some embodiments, the community server comprises a communications controller configured to receive communications from community terminals and to send the communications to wagering game machines. In some embodiments, the community server also includes a promotions controller configured to award promotional material to members of the virtual gaming community based on their use of the community terminals, the promotional material being for use in wagering games available on the wagering game machines.

Systems and methods for providing a desktop user interface for accessing and using community-based contact management, communication tools, websites and application pods in a convenient and integrated fashion, in an always-on mode. The desktop user interface resides on the user's desktop as an application and provides access to the aforementioned community-based services in a convenient, integrated manner without the need to open a browser in order to access the community-based services.

Systems and methods for social graph data analytics to determine the connectivity between nodes within a community are provided. A user may assign user connectivity values to other members of the community, or connectivity values may be automatically harvested, calculated, or assigned from third parties or based on the frequency of interactions between members of the community. Connectivity values may represent such factors as alignment, reputation, status, and/or influence within a social graph within the network community, or the degree of trust. Social graph data analytics may be used to determine a network connectivity value from all or a subset of all of the retrieved paths and/or one or more connectivity statistics value associated with the first node and/or the second node. A parallel computational framework may operate in connection with a key-value store to perform some or all of the computations related to the connectivity determinations.

The present invention is directed to community based managed health kiosks and prescription drug dispensing systems, and more particularly to facilitating automated drug dispensement by a kiosk system following authorization by a remotely located health care professional monitoring a patient via the kiosk system.

The aesthetic quality of a picture is automatically inferred using visual content as a machine learning problem using, for example, a peer-rated, on-line photo sharing Website as data source. Certain visual features of images are extracted based on the intuition that they can discriminate between aesthetically pleasing and displeasing images. A one-dimensional support vector machine is used to identify features that have noticeable correlation with the community-based aesthetics ratings. Automated classifiers are constructed using the support vector machines and classification trees, with a simple feature selection heuristic being applied to eliminate irrelevant features. Linear regression on polynomial terms of the features is also applied to infer numerical aesthetics ratings.

A patient-centric, community-based system and method that professionally and effectively manages and services all patient-pay receivables associated with an individual's healthcare. The system permits patients to charge all out-of-pocket expenses for medical goods or services from different providers to one convenient, Patient Account, thereby reducing patient/responsible party confusion and permitting a single monthly payment. The Patient Accounts are “owned” pro rata by the healthcare providers in accordance with the respective amounts owed to each. The system employs a method for applying payments from the patient/responsible party and/or other payors to providers based on specific contractual arrangements, and real-time reporting of Patient Accounts status/activity via secure, proprietary Internet access. By centralizing account management functions, each of the providers is spared the costs of establishing his/her/its own discrete, separate and redundant patient account, the periodic mailing of invoices, the processing of payments, the dunning of past due accounts, and the application to Medicare and Medicaid for reimbursement.