Watson as an IP and Patent Advisor

Could have used this in the enterprise and with US Government work some time ago ... talked this and Watson Discovery with IBM, seemed to lay fallow for some time.   Demos?

IBMAnnounces Demonstration Project with U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to Help Make Patent Research Insights More Accessible and Usable

NEWS PROVIDED BY  IBM 

Oct 31, 2022, 09:00 ET

WASHINGTON, Oct. 31, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announces a demonstration project with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) to test an artificial intelligence (AI) driven intellectual property (IP) analysis tool, the IBM IP Advisor with Watson® Demonstration System. Leveraging conversational AI technology with IBM Watson Assistant, and content insight mining and guided navigation solutions with IBM Watson Discovery, the system is designed to help users more efficiently uncover and analyze relevant patent data, allowing more time for strategic, value-added tasks.

Information known publicly before the actual filing date of a U.S. patent application, such as currently held and similar U.S. patents and published patent applications, is called prior art. When an inventor has an idea for a new product, a prior art study can be helpful in understanding the landscape of the field of invention by assessing not only prior art, but also competitors and opportunities for innovation in the field. However, with the continued rise in the number of patent applications being filed and the increasing volume of patent data, finding relevant, accurate information and analyzing prior art can be difficult and time consuming – especially for new inventors, 'Main Street' retailers and consumers not steeped in patent law. IBM aims to help address this challenge and promote greater participation in the innovation process with the IBM IP Advisor with Watson® Demonstration System.

By enabling natural language processing of queries with IBM Watson Discovery technology, the Demonstration System can help users locate relevant information using their own terminology, without the need to use specific terms and complex methods. And leveraging IBM Watson Assistant conversational AI technology as a guide, users can ask questions of embedded virtual agents to further inform and optimize their patent analysis.

The IBM IP Advisor with Watson® Demonstration System uses a subset of publicly obtainable U.S. patent data and is available for public testing and feedback on the USPTO's Open Data Portal through November 30, 2022.

"Prior art research and analysis is the foundation of a successful product or service launch, but the growth of prior art coupled with the need for appropriate keywords and the right patent classifications can be a barrier to entry for the every-day inventor," said Steve LaFleche, general manager, U.S. public and federal market for IBM. "I'm proud of our work with the USPTO in support of their objective to not just deploy smarter technology, but to build a better, more accessible IP system."  ... 

Watson Discovery

We took an early look at Watson Discovery, but it did not meet our needs.   It has been updated in how it can be used.  The below article shows how it can be used with data scraping to ingest online knowledge.   The below article is instructive, you can a free IBM Cloud subscription for testing.

Scraping and Querying Hacker News with IBM’s Watson Discovery
By Brandon Walker in TowardsDataScience

Watson was originally an AI system designed by IBM to win Jeopardy! the tv show. To be successful, Watson had to query a massive knowledge base to answer the questions (or question the answers) on the show. This knowledge base included DBPedia, WordNet and Yago. After the show was over, Watson was spun off into multiple products including Watson Discovery, Watson Text to Speech, Watson Speech to Text, Watson Assistant, and Watson Knowledge Studio, among others. Watson Discovery can be used to query documents to find relevant passages/articles/paragraphs that answer a question you may have. 

In this article I will be showing you how to use Watson Discovery to get information out of Y Combinator’s Hacker News, which will help answer questions about topics covered on Hacker News, but you may desire to re-purpose it for other documents you want to query.
If you’re familiar with scraping, you probably realize that even when it isn’t difficult, it can be very time consuming. Watson Discovery can take care of this task for you, whether your documents are PDF, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, PNG, TIFF, JPG, JSON, or HTML. Discovery can save a lot time when it scrapes a website, since it will scrape that site’s main page, as well as its other pages and links to external websites. This makes applying it to Hacker News an easy task.  ... " 

Engineered AI Still Matters for Question Answering

Upcoming CGI Meeting on a crucial area of AI application.

Via Karolyn Schalk, Manager
Executive and Technical Expertise, Cloud, AI and IT Operations

Sept. 13 10:30 AM ET Engineered AI Still Matters for Question Answering, By J. William Murdock, IBM

Zoom meeting Link: https://zoom.us/j/7371462221
Slides and recording will end up here:  http://cognitive-science.info/community/weekly-update/

Description: Many question-answering systems rely on a significant amount of engineering effort. They often require both knowledge bases and rules, which can be very expensive to create. Even when there is significant statistical machine learning involved in these systems, there is also an enormous amount of effort spent on identifying what features are useful for the machine learning and implementing capabilities (often using knowledge bases and rules) to assign values to those features. However, in recent years an alternative approach has been growing in popularity: single-strategy systems in which one statistical model is used to address the entire task. In this presentation, I will describe work in which we pursue both approaches and also integrate the two together. I describe results across two different data sets and show that purely statistical approaches are an excellent fit for some data, but that engineered knowledge and rules remain useful for more realistic and open-ended tasks. For additional details, see our paper at http://www.cogsys.org/papers/ACSvol6/article06.pdf

Bio: J. William Murdock is a researcher at IBM's Watson Research Center and a development manager for the IBM Watson Discovery product. In 2001, he received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Georgia Tech, where he was a member of Ashok Goel's Design & Intelligence Laboratory. He worked as a post-doc with David Aha at the United States Naval Research Laboratory. Dr. Murdock has been working on the IBM Watson question answering system since the project began in 2007. He was the guest editor of the 2012 special issue of the IBM Journal of Research and Development entitled "This is Watson." His research interests include question answering, natural-language semantics, analogical reasoning, knowledge-based planning, machine learning, and self-aware artificial intelligence.  ... " 

Build a Retail Chatbot

Brought to my attention ...

Technical, for the development savvy. But perusing this could give you an idea of how to design and understand the possibilities.  Then you will likely need a coder to get something started.   Like the use of Watson Discovery.

Create a “cognitive” retail chatbot  

Build a configurable, retail-ready chatbot ... 

Description

As a Python developer, you can use this pattern to learn how to add features such as a shopping cart, context store, and custom inventory search into your chatbot. When you’ve completed the pattern, you will understand how to create a chatbot dialog using Watson Conversation, a Cloudant NoSQL database, Watson Discovery, and a Slack group.  ... 

Overview:
Chatbots are a hot topic in the retail industry, but so far the execution has mostly amounted to little more than a novelty experience for customers. Interested in adding a chatbot? In this developer code pattern, learn how you can create an easily configurable, retail-ready Watson Conversation-based chatbot that lets a user find items to purchase and then add and remove items from their cart. .... " 

Watson Discovery Tutorial

Just mentioned I had taken another look at Watson Discovery,  a means to find leverage-able patterns in the kind of data that many corporations have lots of.   Was one of our first interests. Including both internal proprietary documents and links to external information.   Here a link to a tutorial, with developer guide and information.   See also the slides from this weeks talk and recording with demo.

Watson Discovery Demo

At today's talk by Niall Cargill of IBM on Artificial Intelligence - How Developers Benefit Today. ... 

Recording and slides of talk here:  http://cognitive-science.info/community/weekly-update/  Join us for future talks, inquire about giving your own talk to our group.

Was reminded of Watson Discovery and saw an excellent quick demo.

You can play with this for free, up to 2000 docs or 200 MB per month.  On the IBM Cloud.  I am exploring now and will report on this soon.  Note how this might be most useful when working against a mix of proprietary and public knowledge.  More information and demo below:

Watson Discovery
Unlock hidden value in data to find answers, monitor trends, and surface patterns with the world’s most advanced cloud-native insight engine.   .... "