ALEXANDRIA, Va., July 3 -- United States Patent no. 12,346,951, issued on July 1, was assigned to Tata Consultancy Services Ltd. (Mumbai, India).

"Method, system, and non-transitory machine-readable information storage medium for personalized substitute product recommendation" was invented by Jayavardhana Rama Gubbi Lakshminarasimha (Bangalore, India), Gaurab Bhattacharya (Bangalore, India), Balamuralidhar Purushothaman (Bangalore, India), Bagyalakshmi Vasudevan (Chennai, India) and Nikhil Kilari (Bangalore, India).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "Product recommendation is a very important aspect of e-commerce applications. Traditional product recommendation systems recommend products similar to...