ALEXANDRIA, Va., June 16 -- United States Patent no. 12,307,264, issued on May 20, was assigned to MICROSOFT TECHNOLOGY LICENSING LLC (Redmond, Wash.).

"User engagement surfaced through an application programming interface (API)" was invented by Ugan Sivagnanenthirarajah (Seattle), Sathyanarayanan Karivaradaswamy (Sammamish, Wash.), Sanjeev Chandra Reddy (Redmond, Wash.), Sanjana Ramakrishnan Sunder (Redmond, Wash.), Sayak Chatterjee (Seattle), Sarah Anne Barnette (Seattle), Mark Lin (Taipei, Taiwan), Robert E. Harris Jr. (Woodinville, Wash.) and Mike Ajax (Redmond, Wash.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "User engagement is detected and used to control operation of a computing device. User engag...