IBM Watson To Battle Patent Trolls 93
MrSeb writes "IBM's Watson is made of many parts: speech recognition, natural language processing, machine learning, and data mining. All of these factors were perfectly combined to beat Ken Jennings in Jeopardy, and now each of these components are slowly finding their way into other applications. Health plan company WellPoint, for example, is using Watson to investigate patient records to improve diagnosis, and in a self-referential, possibly universe-destroying twist, IBM itself is using Watson to help sell Watson (and other IBM products) to other companies. Now, using Watson's data mining and natural language talents, IBM has created the Strategic IP Insight Platform, or SIIP, a tool that has already scanned millions of medical patents and journals for the sake of improving drug discovery — and in the future, it's easy to see how the same tool could be used to battle patent trolling, too."
Provided their own training material (Score:5, Interesting)
A scary proposition (Score:5, Interesting)
One of these machines falls into the wrong hands and patent trolls use it with a small bit of programming to create patent applications for them; and by that I mean... machine generated patents
In other words... entirely nonsensical patents for technology that has never been actually used, and might not actually work, but an extremely massive number of eloquently written machine-generated patents covering every conceivable problem with weird vague claims, with problem sets, and concepts for machine-generated patent claims obtained from automatic mining of past patent language, weblogs, etc...
The invention might not be real by any stretch of the imagination, but the awarded nonsensical patent might be vague enough to actually sue over a technology actually invented in the future
In other words... the ultimate patent troll is a computer AI that generates convincing applications in massive numbers without actually inventing anything.
Re:I'm afraid I can't let you do that (Score:3, Interesting)