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

Empathy: shared circuits and their dysfunctions

Observing another individual acting upon an object triggers cerebral activity well beyond the visual cortex of the observer in areas directly involved in planning and executing actions. This we will call action simulation. Importantly, the brain does not solely simulate the actions of others but also the sensations they feel, and their emotional responses. These simulation mechanisms are most active in individuals who report being very empathic. Simulation may indeed be instrumental for our understanding of the emotional and mental state of people in our sight, and may contribute heavily to the social interactions with our peers by providing a first-person perspective on their inner feelings. Simulation mechanisms are at work at an early stage of social development and might be defective in young individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). However, the results to date regarding ASD are not clearcut, and an equal number of studies report positive and negative findings

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