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Ed Flinchem

Ed Flinchem is the Chief Data Scientist at TurboPatent. Ed leads the big data and analytics efforts at TurboPatent, focusing on delivering value by turning the unstructured and partly structured data of the patent system into actionable information and predictions. He is also a co-inventor of the predictive text input method, T9, a product based on big data and machine learning, which became one of the most widely distributed pieces of software in history. Prior to developing T9, he served in academic and government labs developing innovative software to advance research and teaching in physical oceanography and geophysics, acquiring expertise in large scale data analysis, statistics, geographical information systems, satellite remote sensing, fluid dynamics, and digital signal processing. Ed earned his BA in Physics at Brown University. An expert in wireless technology, he also cofounded Melodeo where he guided development of the world’s first mobile music and podcast download services and developed a large portfolio of patents. 

Recent Articles by Ed Flinchem

40 Years of Patent Trends

To uncover and visualize underlying trends in the subject matter of patents, we analyzed four decades of data from the USPTO PAIR database, from 1977 through 2016, inclusive. Extracting the title of each granted patent or application and the date it was filed yields 493 megabytes of data, comprising 7.7 million records and 59.8 million words… The pronounced shift from blue words to orange words in the animated visualization suggests a major trend in the last 40 years away from patents related to materials and machines (as signified by words such as “compounds,” “machine,” and “valve”) and toward patents related to information (as signified by words such as “display,” “image,” and “processing”).

Examining Examiners: The Top and Bottom 10 of TC 2800

From all cases filed in the last 10 years, we filtered for all final dispositions in all of 2015 and 2016. Taking this data, we examine TC-2800 at three levels of detail: the overall statistics; a breakdown of the allowance rate by stage of prosecution; and finally, all the way down to the extremes of variation exhibited by individual examiners. The deepest investigation exposes a range of patterns unobserved in a focus on allowance rates alone. Relatively small changes in allowance rates, for example +/-15%, correlate to a 2x change in the effort and cost of an allowance.