Artificial Intelligence and Trends in Patenting

Upon an analysis of patent filing trends worldwide, it has been found that IBM leads the portfolio of AI patents where the focus of patents is natural language processing and the second top most company is Microsoft, followed by companies such as Samsung, Toshiba and NEC

Artificial Intelligence, a fuel for almost every industry today, has shown a paradigm shift in technology over a period of time and has become a part of our daily lives. From improvements in weather forecasting, boosted crop yields, enhancement of detection of cancer, prediction of an epidemic to autonomous vehicles to medical diagnosis and advanced manufacturing, AI is almost everywhere. It has brought about a revolutionary effect in the global marketplace.

Introduction

The term "artificial intelligence" is not something new, as it emerged in the 1950s, and innovators and researchers have filed patent applications for nearly 3,40,000 AI-related inventions and published over 1.6 million scientific publications till date. (Source: wipo)

It is to be understood that artificial intelligence does not stand alone; rather it is a blend of four primary techniques as depicted in the following diagram:

Source: educba.com

Out of the above said techniques, Machine Learning has been the most applied technique in inventions going in for patenting. Nearly 70 per cent of inventions recite an AI technique, application or field working in correlation with one another. The commonly used combinations in patent applications are deep learning with computer vision, computer vision with transportation, telecommunication and security; ontology engineering with natural language processing (NLP), and machine learning with life and medical sciences. These combinations suggest areas to watch for rapid developments in AI in the near future.

Some of the functional applications of AI include computer vision which is by far the most popular with image recognition as its subset, and the other functional areas being natural language processing (NLP), and speech processing. Recent trends have shown a maximum growth rate in patent filings in the area of computer vision in 2016.

Trend study

The objective of this study is to showcase the trends in AI technology in order to discover which companies/key players and what institutions are leading AI development, and the target locations of future growth markets in this domain.

Upon an analysis of patent filing trends worldwide, it has been found that IBM leads the portfolio of AI patents where the focus of patents is natural language processing and the second top most company is Microsoft, followed by companies such as Samsung, Toshiba and NEC. It is a clear indication that these top five applicants own the maximum amount of data, as artificial intelligence is all about data.

In terms of top institutions/organizations, however, China ranks first in the list. 17 out of 20 Chinese organizations lead in AI patenting as well as 10 out of the top 20 in AI-related scientific publications. They are particularly strong in the emerging technique of deep learning. The top most applicant is the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) with over 2,500 patent families and over 20,000 scientific papers published on AI. Moreover, CAS possesses the largest deep learning portfolio as well.

Another study is the country comparison of patent filings in the US, Europe and India.

As illustrated below, the number of patent filings and patents granted in the last two years 2018-2019 has almost doubled in US and EP where major filers such as IBM and Microsoft have put across their applications before respective patent offices.

US

Year 2018

Year 2019

Europe

Year 2018

Year 2019

The above given trends show the extent to which this technology of AI is spreading worldwide and patent filing is being encouraged amongst individuals, startups, innovators, as a result of performing more and more research using AI as the base and moving on to filing patents.

India

2015--2019

The graph shows that in the last five years, there has been a 500% increase in filings in India and hence, there is an immediate need to protect the new generation of technology. India has been considered as an emerging market for new areas and with the talent pool increasing rapidly, the corporates and other research institutes are focussing on developing new products based on new technology.

Conclusion

There has been an enormous increase in filing of such applications in India, US and Europe which is estimated to grow further with the increase in demand for such technology.

Precisely, India needs to develop a clear set of guidelines for examining applications based on AI and related technologies. Although, US, EP have provided insights on prosecuting such applications while rejecting the applications, which created a discussion on examination of such applications.

Another update is that recently, USPTO has invited comments from different stakeholders on such technology related prosecution process.

WIPO has initiated a project where the development in such applications in different regions is being collected and over 250 stakeholders have provided comments.

We have a long way to go for developing and interpreting IP law in and around the technology based on Artificial intelligence.