Posts Tagged: "IBM"

Today, we’re following up with our second part of our recent IBM coverage with a survey of the company’s recent patent grants from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. IBM is a patenting giant and in 2013 the company took the crown for the most U.S. patents obtained that year with 6,788, more than 2,000 patents greater than 2nd-place Samsung.…

Piggybacking on the success of IBM’s Watson system, we feature a trio of technologies in the field of question answering systems. The provisioning of computing resources for creating more efficient technologies is also explored. Other patent applications that we discuss in more detail include methods of measuring audience attention, developing panoramic images from multiple images captured by drones as well as a technology for interrupting presentations in order to deliver important messages.

Today, we’re picking the best inventions for which corporations from the Companies We Follow series have actually earned patent rights from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Alternative energies, drones, robots, seawater desalination and the Internet of Things all make an appearance in today’s profile of the best inventions from the past year.

Today’s column focuses solely on the inventions recently added to IBM’s patent portfolio; everything you see below represents a technology for which IBM has been issued a U.S. patent grant during September 2014. Telecommunications innovations are included among this, specifically systems for e-mail organization and telephone call filtering. We share a trio of patents protecting computer languages and networking technologies. Social networking analysis technologies and a couple of inventions related to accessibility programs for computer users with impairments are also featured. Television viewers may be intrigued as well to learn about the novel technique for blocking unwanted commercial content protected by another IBM patent that we explored today.

IBM’s technology for molecular profiling in cancer treatments is only one of many technologies for data analysis developed by the company with specific applications to medical fields. A few patent applications in this field caught our eyes today, including one directed at a technology serving to help uncover instances of health care fraud. Programs for the temporal analysis of electronic medical records in clinical settings have been described in the IBM’s filing of U.S. Patent Application No. 20140257847, entitled Hierarchical Exploration of Longitudinal Medical Events. The computer program product that would be protected by this patent application is designed to determine and group medical events which are co-occurring within a time period to minimize the number of sets of medical data and identify patterns within the medical events.

All of this can really be traced all the way back to the flash of creative genius test by the Supreme Court, which Congress specifically outlawed in the 1952 Patent Act. It is no doubt making a resurgence under slightly different terminology, but make no mistake — Judges are making subjective decisions about innovations in a way that is remarkable similar to how the flash of creative genius test was applied. But today the problem is not only all of the aforementioned, misguided beliefs, but rather we have a general problem with ignorance. It is self evident to anyone who cares to be honest and objective that it takes time and money to innovate; innovation does not simply fall out of the sky or invent itself.

We have thoroughly destroyed the manufacturing capabilities of the United States and in the process decimated middle class America. The Supreme Court is forcing an anti-patent agenda on the courts, which makes it increasingly difficult climate for those in the biotechnology and software industries, two industries that employ large number of Americans and provide extremely high paying jobs. Companies are also simultaneously fleeing the U.S. for corporate tax purposes and/or refusing to repatriate trillions of dollars earned over seas else it would be taxed once again by the IRS. In short, we are shooting ourselves in the foot over and over again, then taking the time to thoughtfully reload and recommence shooting in said foot. There is no real reason for optimism given the political climate in DC and the reality that innovative advances that are now stalled in the patent system have historically carried us out of recessions and onward to prosperity; something that just won’t happen given the current manufacturing, patent and tax policies and laws.