Posts Tagged: "patent assignment"

After a patent application is filed with the USPTO, it gets assigned to an art unit and a patent examiner in that art unit who is responsible for reviewing the application, doing a prior art search, and determining whether to grant a patent…. In the past, this process was manual. People would review patent applications to assign classification codes, and then other people would determine the art unit and examiner to be assigned using the classification codes. More recently, the USPTO is automating the assignment process. The assignment process is a great candidate for automation using machine learning, because large amounts of training data are available to train a machine learning model. Automating the assignment process has several advantages: lower costs, faster processing, and more consistent and likely better assignments of applications to art units and examiners.