Smart contracts, (blockchains, distributed ledgers) and rights management broadly construed are the themes of today's Spotlight Patents. The first of today's Spotlight Patents addresses techniques for tracing edits to digital documents via distributed ledgers. The second patent addresses techniques comprising blockchains and smart contracts for hierarchical topic machine learning operations.
11632238, “Traceability of edits to digital documents via distributed ledgers,” assigned to Adobe.
Abstract
Embodiments provide traceability of edits to a document, i.e., a verifiable and immutable provenance chain for the document. Systems and methods enable traceability of edits, by encoding, for states of the document, a fingerprint (e.g., a cryptographic hash of the document's contents) and an edit history within a block written to a distributed ledger (e.g., a blockchain). The ledger is maintained via a self-organizing peer-to-peer distributed ledger network. Once added to the ledger, the contents of a block (e.g., the document's fingerprint and edit history) are immutable and the integrity of the edit history encoded in the ledger is secure. The algorithm that generates the fingerprint is sensitive to edits of the document. The non-corruptible fingerprint encoded in the ledger is employable to detect any edits that are not included in the encoded edit history and/or inconsistent with a currently available version of the document.
11631016, “Hierarchical topic machine learning operation,” assigned to Tecnotree Technologies, Inc.
Abstract
A method, system and computer readable medium for generating a cognitive insight comprising: receiving training data, the training data being based upon interactions between a user and a cognitive learning and inference system; performing a hierarchical topic machine learning operation on the training data; generating a cognitive profile based upon the information generated by performing the hierarchical topic machine learning operation; and, generating a cognitive insight based upon the cognitive profile generated using the hierarchical topic machine learning operation.