DETAILED ACTION
This non-final office action is in response to claims 1-20 filed September 26, 2024 for examination. Claims 1-20 are being examined and are pending.
Notice of Pre-AIA or AIA Status
The present application, filed on or after March 16, 2013, is being examined under the first inventor to file provisions of the AIA .
Information Disclosure Statement
The information disclosure statement filed 09/26/2024, 12/11/2024, 10/17/2025, and 04/04/2026 has been placed in the application file and the information referred to therein has been considered as to the merits.
Drawings
The drawings filed on 09/26/2024 have been accepted.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 102
In the event the determination of the status of the application as subject to AIA 35 U.S.C. 102 and 103 (or as subject to pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 102 and 103) is incorrect, any correction of the statutory basis (i.e., changing from AIA to pre-AIA ) for the rejection will not be considered a new ground of rejection if the prior art relied upon, and the rationale supporting the rejection, would be the same under either status.
The following is a quotation of the appropriate paragraphs of 35 U.S.C. 102 that form the basis for the rejections under this section made in this Office action:
A person shall be entitled to a patent unless –
(a)(1) the claimed invention was patented, described in a printed publication, or in public use, on sale, or otherwise available to the public before the effective filing date of the claimed invention.
Claims 1-2, 4, 7, 9, 11-12, 14, 17, and 20 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 102(a)(1) as being anticipated by J. Zhao, N. Cao, Z. Wen, Y. Song, Y. -R. Lin and C. Collins, “#FluxFlow: Visual Analysis of Anomalous Information Spreading on Social Media,” in IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, vol. 20, no. 12, pp. 1773-1782, 31 Dec. 2014, doi: 10.1109/TVCG.2014.2346922 hereinafter “Zhao”
Regarding claim 1, Zhao taught a method comprising: providing display on a user device of a graphical user interface (GUI) for a social media platform, the graphical user interface providing access to social media items posted to the social media platform (Section 1 Introduction, First para. Twitter and Facebook, has significantly advanced the way that people publish, acquire, and share news and information. Millions of messages are created, commented on, and disseminated by over one billion active social media users.); for each of a plurality of collections of social media items, determining a respective activity metric for underlying social media activity associated with the corresponding collection (Section 3: System Overview. First and Second Para. The FluxFlow system is designed for detecting, exploring and interpreting anomalous conversational threads in Twitter…In the analysis module, FluxFlow assigns an anomaly score for each retweeting thread and ranks them in a non-increasing order.); and for each of the plurality of collections of social media items, causing display of a respective user-selectable user interface element as part of the GUI, the user interface element having a visual attribute that is variable dependent on the activity metric, such that the visual attribute for at least two of the plurality of collections of social media items differ based on a difference between the corresponding activity metrics (Section 5.1 Design Rationale, last para. More specifically, two numerical scores of the thread, the tweet sentiment score and the thread anomaly score, are encoded with the colors of the inner and outer circles respectively, with two different color schemes selected from: red-green (where red is the most negative), and purple-yellow (where purple is the most abnormal. Section 3. Last Para. The visualization module displays anomalous threads and their contextual information with various views. As Fig. 5 shows, FluxFlow represents anomalous threads with interactive timelines, the hierarchical clustering of threads in a tree, and their feature-space distributions in a zoomable MDS view. Some other views, including the features view, states view, and raw tweets view are also provided to help analysts explore the data at a lower level. See Fig. 3).
Claims 11 and 20 recite similar limitations to claim 1, mutatis mutandis, the subject matter of claims 11 and 20, which is therefore, also considered to be taught by Zhao as above.
Regarding claim 2, Zhao further taught the method of claim 1, wherein each of the user interface elements is a collection icon representing the corresponding collection of social media items, the collection icon being user-selectable to trigger replay of the corresponding collection of social media items (Section 2. 2nd Para. CloudLines describes an incremental visualization to display dynamic event streams as a line of circles with different sizes and opacities governed by an importance function. Section 2, 5th Para. Using Riot Rumours, users can drag a time slider to see how rumors unfold using a dynamic circle packing layout. Section 1, last para. Our key contributions in this paper include: 1) a novel visualization system for the interactive exploration of anomalous retweeting threads with various visual representations and view perspectives).
Claim 12 recites similar limitations to claim 2, mutatis mutandis, the subject matter of claim 12, which is therefore, also considered to be taught by Zhao as above.
Regarding claim 4, Zhao further taught the method of claim 2, wherein the variable visual attribute of the collection icon comprises an on-screen display size of the collection icon (Section 2. 2nd Para. CloudLines describes an incremental visualization to display dynamic event streams as a line of circles with different sizes and opacities governed by an importance function.).
Claim 14 recites similar limitations to claim 4, mutatis mutandis, the subject matter of claim 14, which is therefore, also considered to be taught by Zhao as above.
Regarding claim 7, Zhao further taught the method of claim 1, wherein the activity metric comprises an anomality metric indicating a level of unusualness for the underlying social media activity (Zhao, Section 2.1, 2nd Para. In a general sense, this means discovering data that is different, unusual or unexpected. In other words, detecting anomalies. For example, Diakopoulos et al. proposed a message uniqueness metric to detect unusual and relevant news events on social media.).
Claim 17 recites similar limitations to claim 7, mutatis mutandis, the subject matter of claim 17, which is therefore, also considered to be taught by Zhao as above.
Regarding claim 9, Zhao further taught the method of claim 1, wherein the activity metric comprises a posting volume metric indicating a volume of social media items posted to a corresponding geographical area (Section 5.2. We also propose a novel visual representation for retweeting threads, the volume circle view (Fig. 3-d).).
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 103
In the event the determination of the status of the application as subject to AIA 35 U.S.C. 102 and 103 (or as subject to pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 102 and 103) is incorrect, any correction of the statutory basis (i.e., changing from AIA to pre-AIA ) for the rejection will not be considered a new ground of rejection if the prior art relied upon, and the rationale supporting the rejection, would be the same under either status.
The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 103 which forms the basis for all obviousness rejections set forth in this Office action:
A patent for a claimed invention may not be obtained, notwithstanding that the claimed invention is not identically disclosed as set forth in section 102, if the differences between the claimed invention and the prior art are such that the claimed invention as a whole would have been obvious before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to a person having ordinary skill in the art to which the claimed invention pertains. Patentability shall not be negated by the manner in which the invention was made.
The factual inquiries for establishing a background for determining obviousness under 35 U.S.C. 103 are summarized as follows:
1. Determining the scope and contents of the prior art.
2. Ascertaining the differences between the prior art and the claims at issue.
3. Resolving the level of ordinary skill in the pertinent art.
4. Considering objective evidence present in the application indicating obviousness or non-obviousness.
Claims 3, 5-6, 13, and 15-16 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Zhao in view of US 20150046842 A1 to Barr et al. (“Barr”).
Regarding claim 3, Zhao taught the method of claim 2, Zhao did not but the analogous art Barr (US 20150046842 A1) taught wherein each collection icon comprises a respective thumbnail image selected from visual media content forming part of one of the corresponding collection of social media items (Para. 0028. The user may select and drag any item (e.g., thumbnail) corresponding to an item of social media content shown in the array to rearrange the order in which the items of social media content will be presented in the social media compilation. The interface 1803 includes a two-dimensional array of items (e.g., thumbnails) of social media content, each of which is selectable by the user to cause the corresponding item of social media content to be included in the social media compilation. In one example, the two-dimensional array may include one or more thumbnail images corresponding to one or more photographic items of social media content).
Therefore, it would have been obvious to one having ordinary skill in the art before the applicant(s) invention was filed to modify the invention of Zhao by including the idea of each collection icon comprises a respective thumbnail image selected from visual media content forming part of one of the corresponding collection of social media items as taught by Barr for the advantage of generating a social media compilation based on the compilation configuration information and the items of social media content (Barr, Abstract).
Claim 13 recites similar limitations to claim 3, mutatis mutandis, the subject matter of claim 13, which is therefore, also considered to be taught by Zhao-Barr combination as above.
Regarding claim 5, Zhao-Barr combination further taught the method of claim 1, wherein the underlying social media activity comprises a set of geo-tagged social media items that are associated with the corresponding user interface element based at least in part on respective geographical locations indicated by geo-tag information of the social media items (Barr, 0076. [0076] In another example aspect, the compilation configuration information includes geographical information, such as an indication of a geographical area (e.g., a state, a territory, a county, or a custom defined geographical region) for the items of social media content to be aggregated (at block 402, described below) for the social media compilation. The geographical information may be inputted by interacting with a GUI element (e.g., a drop down box, a map, and/or the like) to select a geographical area such as a state, territory, and/or the like. In another example, the geographical information may be inputted by dragging a border around a map to define a custom geographical region. See Para. 0075, 0081).
Claim 15 recites similar limitations to claim 5, mutatis mutandis, the subject matter of claim 15, which is therefore, also considered to be taught by Zhao-Barr combination as above.
Regarding claim 6, Zhao-Barr combination further taught the method of claim 5, wherein location-based association between the set of geo-tagged social media items and the corresponding user interface element comprises that the geographical location of each of the set of social media items falls within a predefined geographical area associated with the user interface element (Barr, Para. 0075. (2) a location identifier, which identifies a geographical location associated with the social media compilation; 0076. The geographical information may be inputted by interacting with a GUI element (e.g., a drop-down box, a map, and/or the like) to select a geographical area such as a state, territory, and/or the like.).
Claim 16 recites similar limitations to claim 6, mutatis mutandis, the subject matter of claim 16, which is therefore, also considered to be taught by Zhao-Barr combination as above.
Allowable Subject Matter
Claims 8, 10, 18, and 19 are objected to as being dependent upon a rejected base claim, but would be allowable if rewritten in independent form including all of the limitations of the base claim (claims 1, 11) and any intervening claims (claims 7, 17).
The following is a statement of reasons for the indication of allowable subject matter:
For claims 8, 18: None of the prior arts on the record anticipates or makes obvious the following limitation in combination with claim limitation in dependent claims 7, 17 and independent claims 1, 11: “wherein the anomality metric provides a quantified indication of geospatial unusualness of the underlying social media activity.”
For claims 10, 19: None of the prior arts on the record anticipates or makes obvious the following limitation in combination with claim limitations in independent claims 1, 11: “wherein the GUI is a map-based GUI that includes an interactive map displaying a part of the Earth’s surface, each of the plurality of user interface elements for the collections of social media items being a geo-anchored element displayed at a corresponding fixed geographical location.”
Conclusion
The prior art made of record and not relied upon is considered pertinent to applicant's disclosure.
US 20180063666 A1 (Broodney et al.): Claim 7. The indication is selected from the group consisting of: a geo-spatial location; a time of day; a barcode; a Quick Response (QR) Code; a Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tag; a character sequence; an image; a physical quantity; and any combination thereof.
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/Shawnchoy Rahman/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2438