A large amount of data is generated on an everyday basis. Be it is related to software or a human mind – there is too much information to comprehend. Even the global patent system faces a similar challenge in today’s world, where the volume of data generated is rapidly growing.
In June 2018, the publication of the US patent number was 10,000,000 alone! Getting a patent issued for novel work in the field of innovation was a challenging task earlier.
However, sharp young minds have also entered the competition, and the number of patents issued annually is gradually increasing. This has created several issues for the global patent system, including – a large amount of data generation, lack of language translations as 62% of the total patents issued in 2017 were in Korean, Chinese, and Japanese languages with no English equivalent, and lack of highly specialized and complex knowledge to understand these novel discoveries in the field of Research & development.
Innovative technology is needed to deal with these issues, which is equivalent and even better than the human mind, and the answer to this is Artificial Intelligence! AI has evolved over the past few years and has numerous applications across various fields. Let us understand what AI is and how it can help the global patent system crisis.
What is Artificial Intelligence?
Even though Artificial Intelligence sounds new and advanced, the term is not new. It was first introduced in 1956 when a group of researchers – John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude Shannon- led an AI and Machine Learning project.
This led to AI’s innovation and the fact that it can train computers to learn a language perform several tasks to make our lives easier. Hence, AI can be defined as a machine’s ability to perform tasks and functions similar to the ones conducted by humans, such as reasoning, learning, speech, vision, and solving problems.
This technology provides simple solutions to complex problems with high accuracy, robustness, and precision. As discussed above, AI can be enabled utilizing machine learning.
ML is described as the capability to study algorithms and learn from experiences and examples. Just like a human learns from his mistakes, ML enables the machine to learn from its errors and become efficient over time to perform the particular task accurately.
It is essential to understand that the terms AI and ML are different. ML is a subset of AI that trains the machine to perform a task, whereas AI is the science of training such machines.
Applications of AI in Intellectual property
AI has widespread applications in numerous fields, including healthcare, robotics, gaming, automobiles, analytics, Human Resources, Navigation, E-commerce.
There is no doubt that it has made our lives much easier and less complex by performing complicated tasks for us and giving the desired output. A foreign language can be given to a machine to provide us with a translation, and it will do so precisely.
However, what is interesting to note here is that by performing this simple task, the machine is giving an example of its intelligence and learning capabilities.
This is very useful for the patent system as most of the patents are available in foreign languages and to translate them humanly is not possible. Hence, specialist machine translation engines are currently in use by the global patent system.
Another helpful area where AI is used is semantic search, where a natural language text can be utilized to search against the available data set and return the ranked results.
This can be achieved by several fundamental approaches such as Deep learning, latent semantic analysis, artificial neural networks, and Bayesian networks. This can show similarity patterns between a set of documents that can be mapped into a multidimensional space for better understanding, also referred to as the vector space model representation.
In addition to this, the patent offices are looking forward to inculcating AI in their future design workflow and trademark policies.
Future aspects of AI
Innovations lead to unlimited booming ideas in curious minds. Since AI development, it has been rapidly utilized to perform unimaginable yet practical tasks to better human life.
AI can be used for automated patent drafting, the automatic invention of patents, patenting application process, and much more in the upcoming future. With the hope and commitment to manage such vast amounts of data efficiently, AI will soon play a significant role in the global patent system.
Conclusion
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