Posts Tagged: "mit"

One of the first and most widely-used public key systems for cryptography is known as RSA cryptography, named for the trio of inventors who developed the system at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the late 1970s: Ronald Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman. These three inventors have each been inducted as part of the 2018 class of the National Inventors Hall of Fame and this Thursday, September 20th, marks the 35th anniversary of the issue of the seminal patent in the field of RSA cryptography. With this important date upon us, we return to our Evolution of Technology series to explore the development of this encryption system which has been incorporated as a fundamental aspect of many transaction systems and secure communications protocols.

The University of California (“UC”) and The Broad Institute, Inc. (“Broad”) are among the leaders in the development of CRISPR technology.  Both UC and Broad filed patent applications for claims broadly drawn to CRISPR-Cas9 systems and methods of DNA editing.  These parties are currently engaged in litigation over patents concerning the potentially most lucrative application of CRISPR technology – the use of CRISPR-Cas9 in plant and animal (eukaryotic) cells.  The outcome of this litigation will affect control of the CRISPR platform and development of the technology.

December 28 marks the anniversary of the issuance of a patent covering a bandage technology commonly known as the Band-Aid®, invented at Johnson & Johnson… In order to speed up the process of tending to his wife’s cuts and nicks, Dickson came to the idea of preparing a length of adhesive tape with sections of gauze, allowing Josephine to snip off a strip of tape and quickly apply the adhesive bandage. When the couple considered how useful such a product might be in households across the country, Earle brought the idea to his boss James Wood Johnson, another one of the three co-founding brothers of J&J. Band-Aid® brand adhesive bandages first hit the consumer market in 1920.

Patenting activities in the quantum computing sector have rapidly increased in recent years, with the U.S. by far the preferred jurisdiction for applicants… One interesting finding from the Patinformatics report is that, although Northrop Grumman doesn’t have the largest portfolio in the field, it is well-situated to compete with the biggest players. “One of our main assertions is that, if there’s an organization interested in being competitive with IBM, they may want to contemplate a partnership or acquisition of Northrop Grumman,” Trippe said. Both Northrop and IBM have made significant investments into super-conducting loop qubit technologies and Northrop actually edges IBM in logic gate hardware.

A few months ago, a judge ordered Apple to pay the University of Wisconsin $506 million for infringing one of its tech patents. Last year, Carnegie-Mellon University won $750 million in a patent infringement lawsuit against Marvell Technology Group. With such big-money patent cases in the news, you might think that owning a patent can create a major windfall of profit for universities. While this has proven true for a handful of institutions, the truth is that most universities actually make little or no money from licensing the inventions they produce.  

In late September, an official blog post published by Menlo Park, CA-based social media giant Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) and penned by Adam Wolff, the company’s engineering director, announced that the company would be adopting a software license agreement known as the MIT License for many of the company’s open source projects. This includes Facebook’s React platform, a Javascript library for building front-end user interfaces on hardware products. The use of the MIT License moves Facebook away from a prior software license known as the BSD + Patents License that included language which put patent owners using the React platform at a serious disadvantage.

Perhaps the most important component to any Iron Man suit is the arc reactor core, which provides the energy required to power the suit’s repulsors and other equipment. Although there is no true real world equivalent to the arc reactor, it’s been speculated based on cinematic depictions of the unit that it functions as a multi-isotope radio decay cell for nuclear energy generation using a palladium core. It’s also assumed that the reactor could not be a hot-fusion reactor as it sits within Tony Stark’s chest and would char him from the inside out… Last August, reports on a breakthrough in nuclear fusion reactor design from researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) could indicate that commercially viable tokamak reactors could be running within five to ten years. MIT’s reactor design, based on essentially the same physics behind ITER and other tokamaks, incorporates the use of superconductors composed of rare-earth barium copper oxide (REBCO) superconducting tapes, which have become commercially available only in recent years. The new superconducting materials enable stronger magnetic fields for even more plasma control, allowing smaller reactors to increase fusion power by a factor of 10. This would allow MIT to build a reactor half the size of ITER which would produce about the same amount of energy at a much lower cost. One working ARC reactor, which is what MIT calls its nuclear reactor design, could produce 200 megawatts (MW) of power delivered to the electric grid from a 50 MW input.

The team devised an equation incorporating a patent set’s average forward citation and average publication date, and calculated the rate of improvement for each technology domain. Their results matched closely with the rates determined through the more labor-intensive approach of finding numerous historical performance data points for each technology. Among the 28 domains analyzed, the researchers found the fastest-developing technologies include optical and wireless communications, 3-D printing, and MRI technology, while domains such as batteries, wind turbines, and combustion engines appear to be improving at slower rates.

When considering what makes an autonomous vehicle truly autonomous, it’s important to note that there are different shades of autonomy leading up to the fully self-driving car. One of the organizations which maintains a rubric helping to define autonomous vehicles is the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), which recognizes five different levels of autonomy for vehicles, starting with Level 0, the most basic tier in which the driver controls all operations, as is the case for conventional vehicles today. Level 1 function-specific automation is reached when a single control function is automated, such as when electronic stability control systems help drivers maintain vehicle control, without completely replacing the need for driver vigilance. Level 2 combined function automation occurs when two primary control functions are designed to work together to relieve a driver…

This speech by Director Lee is exceptionally important for two reasons. First, the strong and explicit recognition that abuse can and does happen on both sides of a patent dispute, which can and does lead to large companies taking advantage of smaller innovators. Second, the explicit appreciation of the fundamental purpose of the patent system, to create strong property rights that require others to design around as they seek follow-on innovation.

The most common form of dementia is Alzheimer’s disease, a progressive disorder of the human brain which over time reduces a person’s cognitive abilities to the point that they cannot carry out the most basic tasks. This terrible disease was thrust back into the national conscious as the result of the death of Nancy Reagan. With this in mind we thought we might take a moment to review what scientists know about Alzheimer’s disease and what treatments and cures are currently being pursued.

A trademark is the simplest and often the most effective IP protection. A trademark is a broad term that applies to any word, name, symbol or device that manufacturers and merchants use to identify and distinguish goods and services. Trademarks do not have to be registered to use them, but a patent and trademark attorney should register them as soon as possible in all the important market countries as a business expands overseas.

A few of the patents that have been issued to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in recent weeks protect inventions developed to address major public health and environmental safety concerns. A novel technique for remediating oil spills in open waterways is disclosed and protected by U.S. Patent No. 8945393, which is titled Magnetic Colloid Petroleum Oil Spill Clean-Up of Ocean Surface, Depth, and Shore Regions. The patent claims a method of removing oil from water by mixing a magnetizable material with water to form a magnetorheological fluid and magnetically attracting that water to separate the oil and water phases. This innovation allows for the magnetization of oil to remove oil from water sources and transfer the oil to storage while releasing water back into the ocean.