On June 25, 2021, West Virginia College of Law Professor Sean Tu hosted AI and Patents Workshop @ ICAIL 2021 with co-hosts Dean Alderucci and Jerry Ma. The workshop was offered as part of the program at the 18th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law 2021. Professor Tu moderated the programs offered in track two of the workshop on the subject of patenting AI technology.
Videos from the workshop are available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwQLYuVxtUfWqyN1htHmqFg
From the conference website:
The workshop is intended to popularize (a) new methods for addressing longstanding problems in the automating processing of patents, and also (b) the issues at the intersection of AI technologies and the patent systems of the world. Our objective is to build a stronger community of researchers, to find synergies among related approaches and alternatives, and to promote opportunities for collaboration.
The world’s patent offices must process large volumes of patent applications every day. Moreover, patents are increasingly of interest to numerous industries beyond traditional technology sectors. Many companies, universities, and government entities own portfolios of hundreds or thousands of patents. Extensive amounts of patent data must be assessed when the jurisdiction’s patent office examines pending patent applications, when judges preside over patent litigation, when companies decide what types of R&D they want to invest in, when companies decide what types of technology they want to license, when patent owners determine whether to sue competitors for patent infringement, and when companies assess how to avoid infringing patents.
There are millions of existing patents documents, and each year 300,000 new patents are granted in the U.S. alone. There are a wide variety of patent tasks that remain primarily manual, requiring patent attorneys and patent examiners to filter and analyze huge amounts of data, thereby consuming valuable time, money, and other resources. Artificial intelligence (AI) has tremendous potential to facilitate the processing of patent documents and related patent data. The proposed workshop addresses the use of AI techniques for patents. This includes the use of Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing in patent examination, extracting meaning and information from the text of patents, evaluating patent portfolios, patent litigation analytics, patent citation analysis, and evaluating patent licenses.