Mechanism to Enable Participants to End Virtual Meetings Early

Virtual meetings sometimes stretch to the time initially allocated to them even though many or all participants would prefer to end the meeting early. However, due to social convention, no participant may be in a position to indicate that they would prefer to end the meeting earlier than scheduled. This disclosure describes a mechanism that can be included in virtual meeting software that enables meeting participants to indicate, during an ongoing meeting, that they would prefer to end the meeting early, e.g., any time starting from the provision of the indication. Upon receipt of such indications from a threshold number of participants, the meeting can be terminated automatically, or participants may be provided a message that they may leave the meeting

Automatic correction of timestamp and location information in digital images

Image storage and sharing services permit users to store and share images. Such applications typically organize images chronologically. However, chronological organization fails if the timestamp or location information stored in the image metadata (e.g., EXIF) is incorrect. Incorrect information is a common problem, e.g., when images are shared via messaging or social media, the shared image may have the time of sharing, not the time of capture. In another example, geolocation data may be deleted when an image is shared. Further, image timestamps can be inaccurate when multiple users contribute images to a single shared album from cameras that are not time synchronized. This disclosure describes techniques to determine the time and/or location of image capture by evaluating the image in the context of other images. Images with trustworthy time information are identified. Images with less trustworthy information are analyzed for content, and a determination is made as to whether they are ahead or behind a trustworthy image. In this manner, techniques of this disclosure enable chronological ordering of images

Surfacing Biased Portions of Multimedia Content Using Machine Learning

Multimedia enables content creators to communicate information by adding nuance which is difficult to convey through written language via voice tone, camera angle, content highlighting, etc. However, it can be difficult for content consumers to discern biased opinions included within multimedia content. This disclosure describes techniques to automatically detect and surface such biased opinions within multimedia content. The process involves examining publicly available multimedia and/or text content related to a given piece of multimedia content to identify and flag biased portions. The identified biased portions are surfaced to the user via a suitable user interface mechanism

User interface with automatic highlighting of content updates

Users that visit websites or other content at different times often see content with minor updates. For example, a shopping website may display a list of items and corresponding prices, and the prices may change between multiple user visits. While some websites include built-in functionality to notify users of such changes, no general purpose solution is available to alert users. This disclosure describes techniques to detect the context of a user visit to a website or other content, and determine changes to the webpage since a prior visit. With user permission, the UI of the website is modified to highlight the differences or the changes are indicated to the user, e.g., via a notification. Data from user visits is obtained and stored with user permission in order to determine changes

Automated Application Permissions Setting

Operating systems of computing devices include permission management features to grant software applications (apps) access to various hardware and software components. Permissions may be configured using permission sets that each specify different levels of access. A user can specify the level of access to an app by selecting a permission set. A conventional permission set either grants or restricts access to a component. Techniques are described that provide selective access to a component by automatically inferring fine-grained permissions from various user-specific and other available signals

Transferring Application Software from One User Equipment (UE) to Another

An operating system (OS) of a user equipment (UE), such as a smartphone, supports various first-party and third-party application software. Many application software offer personalized user experience (UX) depending on user settings. A user may spend a considerable amount of time and effort downloading the application software and configuring their settings. The user, however, periodically replaces the smartphone, and often they download and configure the settings of various application software again on the new UE, same as they had done on the previous UE. This leads to a lengthy process of migrating from one UE to another. This publication describes methods the operating system (OS) uses to aid the user transfer various application software and their settings from one user equipment (UE) to another. As described herein, transferring may refer to copying or moving. To transfer the user’s application software and their settings from one UE to another, the OS enables application software developers to implement a system-level application programming interface (API). In the case when an application software developer does not implement or support the OS’s system-level API, the OS uses a machine-learning model that aids the user to configure the settings of a non-initialized application software in the new UE, the same way they had done using the previous UE

Smart Layout For Printing

A printing system that adjusts the print layout for content to be printed based on the content itself in order to improve the print results. For example, the printing system may include a printing adjustor that intelligently suggests one or more print layouts for content to be printed by changing the size of the content so that it fits on a single page, arranging the content with two columns instead of one, and/or removing unimportant parts from the content such as a lengthy disclaimer, for example. As a result, the printing system can print content in a more efficient manner by generating a printing output that better matches what the user expects

Smart Button Actions On Mobile Devices

A system and method are disclosed that trigger a smart response to a button action when two or more running applications have applicable actions on a mobile device. The system includes a machine learning algorithm (MLA) built into the operating system that analyzes and learns from user actions. When the system detects a hardware button press, it retrieves possible actions/events that may be triggered for the current app and other running apps and processes. The actions are evaluated by computing a combination of scores involving machine-learned, rule-based scores provided by the apps and real-time signals such as location, time, user activity, etc. The system then triggers an action that has the highest score surpassing a predetermined threshold. The disclosed method would provide improved user experience, and also new, useful button actions that previously were not available to the user