AmberBlog

 AmberScope is a new patent searching engine developed by Ambercite, in close cooperation with patent attorneys Griffith Hack, and able to find patents that may be missed by existing patent search processes. AmberScope is introduced in the video found here, but how well does AmberScope work in practice?

Earlier this year Google acquired three patents owned by Motion Research Technologies, and covering a pair of glasses for augmented vision. These patents included US7631968, filed in 2007, and which disclose a pair of glasses looking similar to this:

The claims of the patent cover the concept of the displayed image being controlled by the movement of the glasses. The granted patent includes a list of prior art documents, but did the examiner for this patent find all of the relevant prior art?

This is where AmberScope can be very helpful. The image below shows what happens if we run a search for this patent US7631968 ('968) in AmberScope.

Each dot represents a patent, with the dot surrounded by the red circle being '968, which was the 'focus' patent of this patent network. All of the patents connected to the '968 patent are shown, and these are represented in a light grey colour. Some other features are:

• Blue lines show backward citations, and green lines forward citations.
• The size of the dots represent its AmberScore rating. AmberScore is a proprietary algorithm that considers the influence of the patent in the network. In the image above, the '968 patent is shown with an AmberScore value of 0.24. This is lower than average – the average granted US patent over the last 20 years has an AmberScore value of 1.
• Thicker lines show stronger connections between two patents.
• The question mark in the patent box shows that the patent has not yet been rated by the user. AmberScope includes the facilities to capture 'personal ratings' on any patent, and this can be very handy for future referral. Currently, patents can be rated from 0 to 2.
• The image also shows some of the highly rated patents that are connected to the patents that are connected to the '968 patent. These indirectly connected patents could be regarded as influential 'friends of friends'. We refer to these patents as 'ghost' patents, and they are mostly shown as greyed out in this case. Ghost patents can easily be identified as patents with connection lines overlying them

     as opposed to the connection lines hidden behind the dots, which shows a directly connected patent  

Ghost patents can be very valuable, as these can disclose inventions that were not considered by the patent examiner (otherwise they would be listed in the search report) but still may be relevant.

But are these connected patents relevant to the '968 patent? 'Personal ratings' are just that, and so I went though and rated all of the connected patents, Figure 2. This also changed the colour of the dots, and the details of each patent rated are moved across to the table to the right after they have been rated.

In this figure, green patents are not thought to be relevant, blue patents are potentially relevant patents that are directly connected, and purple patents are potentially relevant ghost patents.

What do these patents disclose? The different patents all disclose different inventions, but one of the more interesting connected patents is US6349001, shown below, and which discloses: 

An eyeglass interface system is provided which integrates interface systems within eyewear. The system includes a display assembly and one or more audio and/or video assemblies mounted to an eyeglass frame

This is a relatively influential patent, with an AmberScore of 13, in other words 13 times as influential as the average granted US patent.

So already, AmberScope has shown its potential to find potentially relevant patents, even if in this case the examiner had also identified this patent as relevant prior art (hence the direct citation connection). But AmberScope includes another feature that can also assist in finding relevant prior art, namely the ability to 'walk the net', or refocus the patent network on any patent. This can be done as easily as selecting the 'more' button in the patent box as shown below. In this particular case, the button reads "178 more", which means that besides the connection between the '9001 patent and the '968 patent we started with, there are 178 other citation connections to this '9001 patent.

Selecting this 'more' button refocuses the patent network to be recentered on US6349001, allowing you to see it 178 direct connections, as well as its ghost patent connections.

Note that some of these patents are already coloured in yellow (the patent has been viewed), blue or purple This is because these patents were also seen in the network focused on the '968 patent, and AmberScope that remembered your previous ratings for these patents and transferred these ratings across. Practically, this means that you do not have to review these patents again, and instead can focus on the 'new' patents, which are coloured in grey.

But are any of these patents relevant to the Google glasses patent? To do this, we need to review the individual patent nodes - luckily this does not take that long within the AmberScope interface. As we do this, one of the more interesting patents we find is US5585871, which discloses:

A display apparatus secured to a temple or bridge contacting portion of an eyewear, the apparatus including means for monitoring the wearer's heart rate, lap position, laps completed, time elapsed, etc. An image of the collected data is transmitted into the wearer's field of view by means of a fiber optic element and projected at a focal point within the focusing range of the wearer's eyes.

This is not exactly the same as the Google glasses patent, but does include the element of augmented vision. Hence we have identified a second means of finding patents relevant to a starting patent.

Which is also potentially relevant.

But so are many of the 'ghost' patents that were shown when the network was focused on the  '968 patent, for example US6091546, which discloses

An eyeglass interface system is provided which integrates interface systems within eyewear. The system includes a display assembly and one or more audio and/or video assemblies mounted to an eyeglass frame. The display assembly is mounted to one temple and provides an image which can be viewed by the user

 This is an influential patent, with an AmberScore of 17 and 189 further connections. This is a third way of identifying relevant patents.

Ghost patents can also be used to refocus the network, which is what we have done below:

And when we do so, some of the new patents that we find when browsing this network may also be relevant to the '946 patent, for example US5719588, which discloses:

A viewing device for receiving video signals and generating corresponding images for viewing comprising a frame or support, adapted to be worn on the user's head, for example, a frame similar to a spectacle frame

So we have a fourth way of finding potentially relevant prior art, namely finding patents connected to ghost patents. And of course, we could make any of the patent in the new graph a focus patent, and continue to 'walk the net', and search for more relevant patents.

 Summary

In this short discussion, we have shown how it is possible to find potentially relevant prior art, some of it missed by the patent examiner, simply by starting with the patent number you are concerned about. This potentially relevant prior art could be

• directly connected patents (US6349001 in this example)
• patents connected to directly connected patents (US5585871)
• ghost patents (US6091546)
• patents connected to ghost patents ('friends of friends of friends', or  US5719588 in this example)

These different mechanisms are summarised in the diagram below.

And if you don't have a suitable starting patent, you could conduct a simple search for a start patent by running a simple conventional patent search for a starting patent which is close, but not close enough, to what you are looking for.

It is also worth considering what we have not done in this search:

• We have not looked at any keywords or semantic terms. Different patent applicants can use different keywords for the same concepts, and this can cause errors when searching for patents using keywords.
• We have not looked at any IPC or USPTO patent codes, which can be imprecise or incorrect
• We have not spent hours and hours looking long lists of patents, many of them irrelevant. Instead we have relied on the power of citation networks to quickly identify relevant prior art, some of which appear to have been missed by the original patent examiner.

And yet in this short demonstration we are only using part of the capability of AmberScope. Future blog posts will discuss these other capabilities and how they can assist you in finding relevant patents.

Postscript - comparison of keyword and patent codes in the patents found to the starting patent 

This is a good demonstration of how searching using keywords and patent codes could give you misleading results.

March 2013 update - some of the images shown above feature quite crowded patent landscapes. Thanks to an update in AmberScope introduced in February 2013, the same search would show a less crowded landscape which would be easier to navigate and faster to load - but still produce the same outcomes. 

English: United States Patent Cover from a real patent issued (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Network Patent Analysis (NPA) and other citation based patent analysis methods are using lists of prior art documents, either prepared by patent examiners, or submitted by patent applicants.

One sometimes cited issue with this is that any patent examiner and even applicants are only human, like the rest of us, and can easily miss relevant patents due to inconsistent use of keywords or patent classification terms. But does mean that the results from citation analysis methods are flawed?

It depends on what citation analysis method you are using. In the case of NPA, not at all. The reason why is that rather than relying on any single examination report, NPA combines the search reports of every examiner that has examined a patent, and then distills down these combined search reports to identify the highest ranked (most connected) patents and the strongest connections. 

Practically, this means that if a patent examiner or applicant does miss a relevant prior art document, you should still find it, as it is very unlikely that all patent examiners and applicants will miss it. And as long as at least one patent examiner or applicant can find the connection, you should still be in a position to find the patent.

So the answer to the question of how to be smarter than a patent examiner? Combine the search reports of many patent examiners  - or in other words, exploit their collective intelligence. And if this leads to a surplus of data, use techniques such as NPA to deal with this surplus of data.

The approach we take even considers indirect citation relationships. So in case that all examiners and applicants may miss a prior art invention, our algorithms may suggest relevant patents worth considering. 

Australia may be better known as a land of beaches, kangaroos, and more recently coal and iron ore mines. But it is also the home of two of the top three patent filing inventors worldwide.  This is the surprising outcome from a list of leading patent global filers compiled on Wikipedia, which provides a list of all inventors known to have filed more than 300 patent families. 

The top ten inventors on this list are:

1) Heading the list of leading inventors is Australian Kia Silverbrook (1958 - ) , who led the development of the Memjet printer. Memjet claims to be the world's fastest printer, using 70,400 jets per printhead to shoot millions of drops per second from a full width printing head to full print colour pages at a rate of up to 60 pages per minute. As of 3 September 2012, Kia Silverbrook was listed as the inventor for 9,727 individual patents or patent applications (Espacenet), 4,457 being granted US patents. 757 of these patents were granted in 2011 alone.

According to Patentbuddy, the patent filed by Kia Silverbrook with the most forward citations is US6439908, Power supply for a four color modular printhead (filed in 2002), with 248 forward citations.

2) In second position is Shunpei Yamazaki (1942 - ) from Japan, who heads the research company Semiconductor Energy Laboratory , which is mainly focused on new display, solar cell and energy storage technologies. Yamazaki has a total of 11,399 patents or patent applications listed in Espacenet, with 2933 of these being granted US patents, including 163 patents granted in 2011. 

The patent filed by Semiconductor Energy Laboratory with the highest forward citation counts is US5,643,826  Method for manufacturing a semiconductor device (1994), with 1098 forward citations.

3)  Third in the list is another Australian, Paul Lapstun (19?? - ). Paul is a colleague of the prolific Kia Silverbrook, and has 3123 patents to his name worldwide, 1200 of these being granted US patents (268 granted in 2011).  The patent listing Paul Lapstun as an inventor with the highest forward citation count is  US6,720,985  Method and system for object selection (2004), with 140 forward citations. 

4) In fourth position is the famed American inventor Thomas Edison (1847-1931). Edison has been credited with 2,332 patents worldwide, 1093 patents in the US. Citation data in electronic form is not easily available, but among his famous of his patents is US223,898 Electric Lamp (1880) , which includes the following claim for an invention that has underpinned incandesent light bulbs every since:

2. The combination of carbon filaments with a receiver made entirely of glass and conductors passing through the glass, and from which receiver the air is exhausted, for the purposes set forth.

5)  In fifth position is the Canadian George Albert Lyon (1882-1961). George Lyon is credited with 993 patents, including the automobile bumper which is disclosed in US1325728 Automobile-buster (1917).

6) Closely behind (#6) is the fellow Canadian Leonard Forbes (1940 - ), with 999 granted US patents out of 1338 total patents, mainly in the semi-conductor area. Among these is US6150687 Memory cell having a vertical transistor with buried source/drain and dual gates (1997), with 245 forward citations.

7) Next on the list is the US florist Donald Weder (1947 - ). Weder has filed 1940 patents worldwide, of which 975 are granted US patents. These include US4733521 Cover forming apparatus (1986). This patent describes a method of forming covers for flowerpots, and has 709 forward citations.

8) Fellow American John F. O'Connor (1864 - 19??)  is in eighth position. In contrast to floral suppliers, O'Connor specialised in railway components, and filed 949 US patents during his lifetime. These include US982086 Fastening mechanism for refrigerator car doors (1910), which looks remarkably similar to closing mechanism still used on truck doors today.

9) In ninth position is the Indian born/US resident Gurtej Sandhu (1960 - ), who has 1568 patents worldwide, including 953 granted US patents. Sandhu works in the areas of semi-conductors, including US patent 5240552 Chemical mechanical planarization (CMP) of a semiconductor wafer using acoustical waves for in-situ end point detection (1993), with 316 forward citations.

10)  Rounding out the top ten is the American  Melvin De Groote (1896 - 1963), who filed 925 US patents in the area of chemical demulsifers. These include US patent 1844883 Process for preventing accumulation of solid matter from oil wells (1927), which has just one  claim: 

A process for preventing the accumulation of solid matter in an oil well or pipe line, which consists in introducing a minute quantity of carbon bisulphide into a substantially clean well or oil line that is producing or which contains non-cutting oil for the purpose of preventing the solid material in the liquid flowing through the well casing or oil line from adhering to and collecting on same.

So in total, this list of the ten leading inventors comprises four Americans, two inventors each from Australia and Canada, one Japanese and one Indian. The technologies that these inventors have worked on have ranged from simple to very advanced. Some of the inventors are from an earlier era, and some are still actively inventing today. Some of the older patented technologies are still in use today, such as the incandescent light bulb and railway doors.

Even the ten placed person on this list has almost 1000 patents to their name, and the rest have patent filing counts in their thousands. By any measure these are remarkable achievements, and should be recognised as such.