UF Planning Invention Awards

From the University of Florida, one of my schools:

Srinivasan and Nawari Awarded 2022 Invention of the Year Award by UF Innovate

More than 200 innovators and entrepreneurs gathered for UF Innovate | Tech Licensing’s fifth annual Standing InnOvation event to honor and celebrate innovators and their work at the University of Florida in fiscal year 2022.

Since its inception in 2018, Standing InnOvation gives a much-deserved “standing ovation” to the UF innovators who disclosed, licensed or optioned technologies in the fiscal year that ended June 30. This year, innovators disclosed 310 technologies, licensed 124 and started 10 companies.

Out of those 310 new technologies disclosed in FY22, each of UF’s six licensing teams chose one Invention of the Year that stood out to them as one with great potential.

One of those Inventions of the Year was Virtual Building Construction Inspection for Permitting by Ravi Srinivasan, director of Graduate Programs and Research in the M.E. Rinker, Sr. School of Construction Management, and Nawari Nawari, Professor in the School of Architecture and the college’s Diversity Officer.

The College of Design, Construction and Planning faculty members teamed up to develop AI-based software for automated zoning review, building plan review and virtual building inspection. It performs rapid, uniform, comprehensive and consistent code reviews, often missed by human plan reviewers.

The AI-based plan review is increasing the accuracy of code compliance, reducing errors and creating a more efficient process. One of the nation’s top homebuilders is using the invention for plan reviews in Florida.  

Srinivasan and Nawari are the first members of our college to receive the Invention of the Year Award from UF Innovate in the four years of its existence. ....  '

James Dyson Working on Home Robotics

I happen to be just reading  the (auto)? biography  ..... By   James Dyson,  Invention:  A Life  Likely to review later. 

Looking forward to see his take on home robotics,nice to see him continue to work the space. 

Dyson Working on Home Robotics  in the BBC 

Dyson is moving beyond vacuum cleaners and hand driers and will try to develop robots capable of helping with household chores.

The company has announced plans to create a major robotics centre at its facility at Hullavington Airfield, in Wiltshire, that will work on new types of domestic robot.   The site will be home to 250 robotics engineers.   Dyson already produces robotic vacuum cleaners.

Computer vision

Founded in the UK, the company is now headquartered in Singapore.

Dyson says it is investing heavily in developing new technology - and half of the 2,000 people to have joined the company this year are engineers, scientists or coders.

It is also hiring robotics engineers across disciplines including computer vision, machinelearning, sensors and "mechatronics".  The company revealed glimpses of some of its work, in a video at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation, in Philadelphia.

Robot arms are briefly seen picking up plates, a bottle of detergent and a soft toy - but what kind of commercial devices this work might lead to is not revealed.

Dyson has been attempting to broaden the range of products it offers.  It recently took a first step into wearable technology - but its over-ear headphones with an air-purifying mouth visor received mixed reviews online, with "odd-looking" and "dystopian" among the terms used to describe them.

And some attempts to move into other areas have proved commercially unviable, most notably in 2019 when the company abandoned an electric-car project.  .... ' 

Augmented AI for Creative Invention

Have we stopped getting return from  creative investment, and can AI change that? 

‘Augmented creativity’: How AI can accelerate human invention  By Adi Gaskell   in Venturebeat. 

In 2012, economist Robert Gordon published a controversial paper in which he argued that economic growth was largely over, due in no small part to our failure to maintain the engines of innovation in recent decades.

A study from the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research supported his general thesis and argued that while we’re spending even more money on creativity and innovation, our returns are flatlining. And this investment is not only in dollars, as the research revealed roughly 20 times as many people work in R&D today as did in 1930.

So what gives? Why has creating things become so difficult?  Researchers from Northwestern University attempt to answer this in a paper that shows a growing percentage of today’s creation is what’s known as recombination. Indeed, 40% of all patents in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office are not completely new works, but rather mishmashes of existing ideas bolted together.

Artificial help

Finding effective ways to combine existing ideas is by no means easy, not least because of the growing volume of published material being produced. During the first few months of the COVID-19 pandemic, for instance, around 23,000 papers had been published on the virus, with that number doubling every 20 days.

The data science community at Kaggle pulled together to provide an AI-powered literature review in an effort to make sense of the deluge of new material. Data points were harvested from a subset of papers and grouped into 17 categories, with papers then listed for each category. It may not be the most polished approach, but that’s due to the time constraints imposed by the pandemic.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon developed an alternate method: an AI-based approach to mining the patent and research databases for ideas that could be combined to form interesting solutions to specific problems. Their system uses analogies to help connect work from two seemingly distinct areas, which they believe makes innovation faster and a lot cheaper.  ... " 

Augmented creativity

What we’re witnessing is the emergence of something called “augmented creativity,” in which humans use AI to help them understand the deluge of data. Early prototypes highlight the important role humans can, and should, play in making sense of the suggestions proposed by the AI.

OpenAI attempted to replicate this approach with the release of a music-making tool called Jukebox. While the achievement is significant from a technological perspective, the results are unlikely to threaten the livelihoods of human musicians.

Various projects have also attempted to produce new and enticing recipes by using AI to mine food composition databases and concoct interesting combinations. For instance, Google researcher Sara Robinson recently showcased her system that produced a cake-cookie hybrid. Accenture researchers prototyped a similar recipe creation tool at their Dock facility in Dublin, but with stomach-churning results.

Digital Instruments as Invention Machines

 Regarding 'Knowledge Spillovers', admit I hadn't heard of that, but the term makes quick sense.   Now can you optimize them for invention?   Good article. 

Digital Instruments as Invention Machines

By Pantelis Koutroumpis, Aija Leiponen, Llewellyn D. W. Thomas   Communications of the ACM, January 2021, Vol. 64 No. 1, Pages 70-78

10.1145/3377476

The history of invention is a history of knowledge spillovers. There is persistent evidence of knowledge flowing from one firm, industry, sector or region to another, either by accident or by design, enabling other inventions to be developed.1,6,9,13 For example, Thomas Edison's invention of the "electronic indicator" (US patent 307,031: 1884) spurred the development by John Fleming and Lee De Forest in early 20th century of early vacuum tubes which eventually enabled not just long-distance telecommunication but also early computers (for example, Guarnier10). Edison, in turn, learned from his contemporaries including Frederick Guthrie.11 It appears that little of this mutual learning and knowledge exchange was paid for and can thus be called a "spillover," that is, an unintended flow of valuable knowledge, an example of a positive externality. ...  

Doing Old Things Better Vs. Doing Brand New Things

Old Conundrum ....  But I think good to consider the positives and negatives of both independently.  'Doing things' vs investing also quite different, gets you different kinds of money, which depends upon the current economy.     And aso who you get to pay attention.   Very new things entice creators,  clever widgets inspire engineers.   

Doing Old Things Better Vs. Doing Brand New Things   by Chris Dixon in Andreessen

AI, machine & deep learning  cloud computing  cryptocurrencies & blockchains how innovation happens

New technologies enable activities that fall into one of two categories: 1) doing things you could already do but can now do better because they are faster, cheaper, easier, higher quality, etc. 2) doing brand new things that you simply couldn’t do before. Early in the development of new technologies, the first category tends to get more attention, but it’s the second that ends up having more impact on the world.... " 

US Patent Office Says AI Cannot be an Inventor

Relates to some work underway.

US patent office rules that artificial intelligence cannot be a legal inventor

Only ‘natural persons’ need apply     By Jon Porter@JonPorty in TheVerge

The US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has ruled that artificial intelligence systems cannot be credited as an inventor in a patent, the agency announced earlier this week. The decision came in response to two patents — one for a food container and the other for a flashing light — that were created by an AI system called DABUS.

Among the USPTO’s arguments is the fact that US patent law repeatedly refers to inventors using humanlike terms such as “whoever” and pronouns like “himself” and “herself.” The group behind the applications had argued that the law’s references to an inventor as an “individual” could be applied to a machine, but the USPTO said this interpretation was too broad. “Under current law, only natural persons may be named as an inventor in a patent application,” the agency concluded. .... " 

Artificial Inventor Project: http://artificialinventor.com/patent-applications/
DABUS/Creativity Machine: http://imagination-engines.com/iei_dabus.php