AI and Written Description: When Does an AI Patent Claim Cross the Line?

Attorney: Sameer Gokhale
June 28, 2021

Following Ed Garlepp’s great discussion on AI disclosure issues[1][2], I want to describe a related problem with AI and issues arising under the written description requirement that I often bring up when presenting on this topic. I started raising this topic following an episode of HBO’s Silicon Valley.  One of the characters who lives in the incubator depicted in the show, Jian Yang, pitches an app to venture capitalists called “See Food” which is described as a “Shazam for food.” The user takes a picture of food, and then the app returns an identification of the food.    Eventually Jian Yang does come up with an app that can identify food. The problem: it can only identify “hot dog” and “not hot dog.”  When asked why he only created an app that only recognizes one type of food, Jian Yang explains that identifying more foods will require scraping significantly more images of food from the Internet to use as training data for a computational model.<... Read more

Application of AI in Legal Services

June 11, 2021

written by: Kasumi Kanetaka

A question that is often asked is why there are so many lawyers? The question is often paired with questions about why lawyers spend so much time on seemingly insignificant tasks and why they are always busy and have a poor work-life balance.<... Read more

Protecting the Data that Fuels AI

Attorney: Sameer Gokhale
May 28, 2021

Recently, I had the privilege of participating in a couple of virtual conferences as a panelist on issues related to artificial intelligence (AI) and intellectual property (IP). Normally when I participate as a speaker at a conference I speak on many of the issues you may have read in our previous blog posts. I tend to focus heavily on patent prosecution issues in obtaining an AI patent, whether in the U.S. or around the globe. However, these two recent panels had a particular focus on how to protect data as an asset. While the issue of protecting data (or information in general) has long been a grey area issue in the realm of IP, this issue has risen to the forefront due to AI and the rise of “Big Data.” <... Read more

Disclosing AI Inventions - Part II: Describing and Enabling AI Inventions

Attorney: Edwin D. Garlepp
April 30, 2021

In Part I of this series on Disclosing AI Inventions, we discussed the basics of machine learning and the unique disclosure challenges presented by the “black box” nature of trained machine learning models. Nevertheless, current U.S. patent laws are generally viewed as sufficient to ensure adequate disclosure of machine learning inventions to the public, and it will be left to the courts to shape the details of disclosure requirements through interpretation of existing patent laws.  In this Part II, we discuss techniques for disclosing machine learning inventions in compliance with the written description and enablement requirements of 35 U.S.C. 112(a).<... Read more

Drafting Claims for Supervised Machine-Learning Systems

Attorney: Kurt M. Berger, Ph.D.
April 16, 2021

        Supervised machine-learning models are at the heart of some of the biggest advances in artificial intelligence (AI) that have emerged in the past decade. This post revisits the nuts and bolts of drafting claims in this area, and includes two different industry examples of implementing supervised machine learning: medical imaging and speech detection.<... Read more