David C Warthen

US Patent:

6897984, May 24, 2005

Filed:

Apr 11, 2002

Appl. No.:

10/119950

Inventors:

David Warthen - Orinda CA, US

Assignee:

GlobalStreams, Inc. - St. Louis MO

International Classification:

G06K015/00

US Classification:

358 21, 382132, 2903272, 358296

Abstract:

A method of chromakey recording, which includes providing, in a scene, a chromakey material which is capable of continued luminance without activating light. The chromakey material is activated and the scene is recorded without activating light while the chromakey material is luminescing. The chromakey material may be an electroluminescent material that is activated by applying electrical energy to the chromakey material. The chromakey material may also be a phosphorescent material, which is activated by applying light to the phosphorescent material. The light is removed from the phosphorescent material during recording.

US Patent:

6584464, Jun 24, 2003

Filed:

Mar 19, 1999

Appl. No.:

09/272717

Inventors:

David Warthen - Albany CA

Assignee:

Ask Jeeves, Inc. - Berkeley CA

International Classification:

G06F 1730

US Classification:

707 4, 707 5, 707 10

Abstract:

An information server directs users of the information server to desired sources of information where the desired sources of information are determined, at least in part, based on user input. The information server includes a query input processor, a question processor and an answer processor. The query input processor is used for accepting an initial user query. The question processor processes the initial user query to identify a set of possible well-formed questions selected from the question database, where a well-formed question is a question in the database that is coupled to at least one answer reference. The answer reference is typically either an answer or a pointer to a possible location of an answer. In a specific embodiment, the information server is coupled to the Internet so that users can pose questions using a Web browser from any Internet-connected device. In some systems, the question processor includes a tokenizer for tokenizing the initial user query into a list of words, a parser for generating a syntactic structure from the list of words, a normalizer for reducing the syntactic structure to a canonical syntactic structure, and a matcher for matching the canonical syntactic structure against a semantic network to obtain a weighted list of well-formed questions representative of possible semantic meanings for the initial user query.