USPTO Partners with NASA’s COECI to Modernize Tools for Patent Examination
27-Mar-2012
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WASHINGTON - Today the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), in cooperation with the Center of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation (COECI) and TopCoder launched PatentLabeling2, the second in a series of phased innovation competitions designed to modernize tools for patent examination, according to a press release by the USPTO.
Offering $10,000 in prizes for the top five winners, PatentLabeling2 will build upon the winning solutions from the previous round of competition by developing algorithms which can automatically identify and locate specific elements within millions of patent documents.
“This is a great opportunity for USPTO to enhance the quality of our patent examination,” said Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the USPTO David Kappos. “This initiative is the latest illustration of our desire to collaborate with the stakeholder community to improve the patent system.”
Software developers from around the world and the TopCoder community are invited to compete in the challenge series to develop specialized algorithms to help bring the seven million patents presently in the patent archive into the digital age. This new competition will challenge competitors to integrate and enhance the best original algorithms into a variety of mash-ups, hybrids, and novel solutions to address the problems of patent search and identification. Some advanced knowledge of text recognition, image analysis, and the construction of bounding boxes is recommended. Code submissions will automatically be scored based on their ability to enhance performance based on test data. $10,000 in prizes will be awarded to the top five winners.
Interested participants can now register at www.topcoder.com/uspto. The competition will close on April 16, 2012.
Created by NASA and Harvard Business School, and powered by TopCoder, the Center of Excellence provides assistance to federal agencies and departments to construct challenges and conduct tournaments to identify new approaches to the conceptualization, building and management of high quality digital solutions.
TopCoder is the world's largest Open Innovation Community of digital creators with nearly 400,000 members representing algorithmists, software developers and creative artists from over 200 countries. The TopCoder Open Innovation Community creates digital assets including analytics, software and creative designs and solutions for a wide-ranging client base through a competitive, rigorous, standards based methodology.