Developing a Virtual Reality Tool for the US Patent Office

Providing a strategic platform for streamlining the examination process of patents using Virtual Reality.

Team: Saurabh Parikh (BIOE), Prithiv Natarajan (BIOE)
Advisors: Lee Fleming (IEOR), Andrew Toole (USPTO), Nicholas Pairolero (USPTO), and James Forman (USPTO)

The established routing process to a patent’s approval from its issuance, at the USPTO (United States Patent and Trademark Office), is cumbersome and time consuming. What makes the process arduous is the involvement of many supervisors between its initial and final stage. We intend to use our technology to make this routing process more efficient by providing a Virtual Reality platform to allow a seamless transition in the life of a patent from its issuance to its approval for the examiners at the patent office.

Our virtual reality platform provides an accurate visual representation of a patent under consideration surrounded by patents addressing similar technologies and allows for exhaustive analysis of documents using Natural Language Processing.

We intend to assist the examiners by suggesting patents pertaining to topics they specialise in by considering information and data gathered through years by the USPTO.

Class Prediction

Classifying the patent and validating against the existing CPCs would assist in assigning the appropriate examiners. We have employed N-gram models to predict keywords and map it to the CPCs in order to classify patents accurately.

Technology Evolution

We sorted the patents based on when they were granted and visualised the evolution of technology through time, allowing us to trace the history of the technology. The sudden rise in the number of patents after 1994 suggests an increasing interest from the industry. By closely reading the patents the examiner also gets an idea of how the innovation process evolved.

Citation Networks

The citation patterns included links between patents that were citing other patents or have been cited in the past. The patent which was most cited was larger in size as compared to the ones less cited. The key insight that can be drawn from such a plot was how important a particular patent is to that industry.