Patent Document ID: 9639827
Application ID: 14975604
Patent Flag: 1

Claim One:
1. A computer-implemented method for automatically augmenting digitally stored member profiles with skills the members have not explicitly added to their member profiles, the method comprising: obtaining a plurality of member profiles in a social networking service, each member profile identifying a member and listing one or more skills the corresponding member has explicitly added to the member profile, the one or more skills indicating a proficiency by the member in the corresponding skill; forming a members-skills matrix with members on one axis of the matrix and skills on another axis of the matrix, wherein each cell in the matrix is assigned a first value if the corresponding member explicitly lists the corresponding skill in the corresponding member profile and a second value if the corresponding member does not explicitly list the corresponding skill in the corresponding member profile; factorizing the members-skills matrix into a members matrix and a skills matrix in k-dimensional latent space; computing the dot product of the members matrix and the skills matrix; using the dot product to identify one or more latent skills of a first member of the social networking service; augmenting a first digitally stored member profile for the first member with the one or more latent skills by combining the one or more latent skills with explicit skills listed in the first digitally stored member profile for purposes of one or more searches that utilize member skills as an input variable; and returning results from the one or more searches, the results based on the explicit skills listed in the first digitally stored member profile and the one or more latent skills of the first member.