Invitation to Participate in Patent Claim Scope Research Project (ClaimScopr)
Are you an experienced patent professional with expertise in evaluating patent claims? Researchers at the University of Melbourne Law School are seeking volunteers for a groundbreaking research project aimed at developing AI models to assess patent claim scope.
Project Overview
This research is being conducted by Dr Mark Summerfield as part of his PhD studies at the Melbourne Law School, under the supervision of Professor Andrew Christie (Melbourne Law School) and Professor Tim Baldwin (Computing and Information Systems). The project investigates how the scope of granted patents has changed over time and how it compares between different jurisdictions. This research will contribute to our understanding of patent system performance and the impact of different legal and regulatory regimes on granted patent scope.
Who Can Participate?
We're looking for experienced patent practitioners and other professionals with:
- experience in reading, comprehending, and evaluating patent claims in mechanical, electrical, electronic, and related fields; and
- familiarity with claim drafting practices in major English-language jurisdictions.
Formal qualification and/or registration as a patent practitioner in Australia, New Zealand, the US, Canada, UK, or Europe is preferred. However, people who have acquired the above essential skills and experience in other roles (e.g. as IP managers, inventors or patent examiners) are welcome to participate.
What's Involved?
Participation is entirely web-based and involves:
- registering on our secure website;
- completing a brief profile about your expertise; and
- using our online application to evaluate pairs of patent claims for relative scope.
You may contribute as many, or as few, evaluations as you wish, at your convenience.
Your evaluations will help build a novel dataset for training and validating AI models capable of comparing and ranking patent claim scope.
Benefits of Participating
By contributing your expertise, you'll be:
- advancing research on patent system performance;
- supporting the development of innovative AI tools for patent analysis; and
- contributing to a dataset that will be made available to the wider research community.
Time Commitment and Flexibility
A minimum time commitment of 1-2 hours would be appreciated, to ensure that we are able to gather a sufficiently large number of expert evaluations for our training dataset. Other than that, however, you can contribute as much or as little as you like during the data collection period. The web-based nature of the project allows you to participate at times that suit you.
Data Privacy and Security
Your personal information will be kept confidential and secure. The final published dataset will comprise only claim scope evaluation data, and will not contain any identifying information of participants.
How to Get Involved
To learn more about the project, and what is involved in participating, you should read the Plain Language Statement of the project.
To take the next step, you can register to participate here.
If you have any questions, contact Dr Mark Summerfield at m.summerfield@student.unimelb.edu.au.
Join us in shaping the future of patent analysis and contribute to this important research project today!