Jerry Ma, director of emerging technology at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), said he is looking to streamline the deployment and procurement processes for advanced technology within the agency, Nextgov reported Wednesday.
Ma noted how USPTO employees are excelling in emerging technologies efforts of the institution but they are decentralized and act as an ad hoc to some extent.
“And so the next step on top of that is to bring in some central oversight, central expertise to be able to keep tabs of everything to make sure we're able to prioritize, that we're continually focusing on the maximum impact areas for emerging technology,” he told the publication in an interview.
He identified three main priorities in his leadership that include the assessment of active projects in the emerging tech portfolio, development of coherent deployment and procurement plans for modernized tools and reaching out to the larger intellectual property sector.
Since USPTO is one of the federal agencies that leverage artificial intelligence in dealing with business matters, Ma said he is hoping to ensure that “these projects realize maximum value for our agency, our staff and stakeholders.”
The agency released on July 1 two sets of data files known as the Artificial Intelligence Patent Dataset in a push to help researchers and policymakers examine how AI shapes invention.
The first data file from the Office of the Chief Economist showed patents issued from 1976 to 2020, including pre-grant publications that have AI technology elements.
USPTO said the second dataset consisted of patent files that were used to develop the machine learning prototypes, which generated the data from the first file.
