RFI AI for Design Patent Image Search Tool .pdf

REQUEST FOR INFORMATION:

Artificial Intelligence for Design Patent Applications

Supported by the Office of the Chief Financial Officer, Office of Procurement

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION & CONTEXT

SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTS

DATA REQUEST

Background:

Objectives:

DISCLAIMER AND NOTICE REGARDING CONTRACT AWARDS

INTRODUCTION & CONTEXT

The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is conducting market research to assess the maturity of Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities as they specifically relate to “image searching” during design patent application prosecution and to assess vendor/organization capabilities and interest. This Request for Information (RFI) will explore current built and matured solution, that is available on the commercial market place, that demonstrates actual measured and validated performance towards solving the problems and objectives outlined in this RFI. In addition to, the capacity to augment and integrate with current USPTO search capabilities with image searching.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a transformative technology that holds promise for tremendous societal and economic benefit. AI research and implementation can advance national priorities in intellectual property by contributing to ensuring strong, predictable, and consistent intellectual property (IP) rights. As part of the efforts to strengthen search capabilities, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is exploring AI and emerging technologies for a variety of potential use cases to enhance the suite of tools available to patent examiners. Such advanced technology solutions may offer unique opportunities to leapfrog forward in enhancing search capabilities and improve reliability in the patent system.

SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTS

Response Package:

General: The USPTO requests capability statements submitted in one PDF file from vendors who are able to provide products which meet the objectives described in the Data Request section below. If you have a product that addresses the elements in the Data Request section in part, please clearly state which capabilities exist and which capabilities do not yet exist in your product. If your product does not meet the objectives stated below please consider sharing barriers to achieving those objectives (i.e. technological hurdles, business considerations, etc.).

Please highlight planned development opportunities if you have active enhancements in progress that are not yet deployed.

There is a maximum page length of 15 pages total, you may include charts, diagrams, video links, and any other information that you wish in the response. Please do not invest time in preparing or submitting a generic capability statement. The USPTO technical teams will not review a generic statement that does not address the Data Request section.

Cover Page (1 page)

- Entity Information o Business/Organization: Name, Address, Website o Unique Entity Identification (UEI) o Name of Representative, Alternate, and other associated information (inclusive of telephone numbers and email addresses

- Company small business status (e.g. WOSB, SDVOSB, 8(a), HUBZone, etc.). If your company is an SBA-Certified 8(a) company, include the date of the SBA 8(a) expiration date. Please include “OTSB” if you are not a small business concern (see NAICS note below).

White Paper and Attachments (14 pages)

- Approach description, including how it differentiates from others and thought processes or methodologies utilized.

Submitted responses will need to follow the following format:

- Size: 11 point

- Font: Times New Roman

- Line Spacing: Single

- Margin: 1-inch all around

Table of Contents page will not be counted towards final page count.

Questions related to this RFI shall be submitted not later than November 7, 2022 at 10:00 a.m.

Eastern Time. When submitting questions in response to this RFI include the subject line “RFI

Questions – USPTO AI Design Patent Applications”. Questions shall be submitted by email only to the following:

Whitney Lee, Contract Specialist

Whitney.Lee@uspto.gov

Sherin Rabadi, Contracting Officer

Sherin.Rabadi@uspto.gov

The procurement teams will post both questions and responses as an amendment to the Sam.Gov posting that accompanies this document. Please do not ask questions that contain confidential data that you do not want released to the public.

Submission: Responses to this RFI shall be submitted by e-mail. When submitting a response include the following in the subject line “RFI Response – USPTO AI Design Patent Applications”

Please submit your responses to the following individuals by the date and time listed below:

Whitney Lee, Contract Specialist

Whitney.Lee@uspto.gov

Sherin Rabadi, Contracting Officer

Sherin.Rabadi@uspto.gov

Submission Date and Time:

November 11, 2022 no later than 23:00 Eastern Time mailto:Suzanne.Casey@uspto.gov mailto:Jonathan.Bettis@USPTO.gov mailto:Suzanne.Casey@uspto.gov mailto:Jonathan.Bettis@USPTO.gov

DATA REQUEST

Background:

The USPTO is seeking vendors with AI capabilities as they specifically relate to “image searching” during design patent application prosecution. This RFI will explore developed market interest-capacity to augment and integrate with current USPTO search capabilities with image searching.

As a federal agency, it is important for the USPTO to be able to explain all prosecution decisions made. Because of this, solution capabilities must be transparent to the USPTO and as well as to the general public. The USPTO will require an AI solution that is in compliance with EO13960, 1 deviat ions will not be accepted. The USPTO must be able to explain and generate a full and clear record to explain how prosecution decisions are made. In order to provide a complete, accurate, and uniform record of what has been searched and considered by the examiner for each application, the USPTO has established procedures for recording search data in the application file. Such a record is of importance to anyone evaluating the strength and validity of a patent, particularly if the patent is involved in litigation (MPEP 719.05).

Examination augmented by an automated decision process must therefore ensure full algorithmic transparency to ensure that any proposed algorithmic option is fully explainable, free of bias, and transparent to the public.

“Design patent prosecution” refers to the series of interactions between inventors, practitioners, and Design Patent Examiners that can result in a design patent. When the Applicant submits their ornamental design for an article of manufacture, the USPTO assigns a Design Patent

Examiner to review the application disclosure and claim to determine whether to grant a design patent. One of the most important tasks of the Design Patent Examiner is to substantively review what is disclosed in the application and compare it to the already existing references called prior art. "Prior art" is defined as all information that has been made available to the public in any form before a given date that might be relevant to a design patent application's claim of novelty and non-obviousness. Design Patent Examiners are challenged with searching all of an ever increasingly complex and vast corpus of human knowledge in a limited amount of time.

They must read and understand the patent application, and perform an extensive prior art search, citing references to determine new contributions made or to explain the basis for rejecting the application. “Image Searching” has become an increasingly challenging aspect of design patent examination because:

1 In section 3 of the EO, the agency shall adhere to the principles under the federal use of AI systems:

(a) Lawful and respectful of our Nation's values.

(b) Purposeful and performance-driven.

(c) Accurate, reliable, and effective.

(d) Safe, secure, and resilient.

(e) Understandable.

(f) Responsible and traceable.

(g) Regularly monitored.

(h) Transparent.

(i) Accountable.

• Innovators, artists, and designers publish new designs every day. There is an exponential growth of information to be searched. While most internet searches are similar to a “seek and find” book, a prior art search for a disclosed design is more similar to looking for a needle that did not already exist in an ever-growing haystack.

• Appearance matters, and text searching does not cast the best net in catching the most relevant references. The appearance of a design is its own best description. While image search databases scour the internet for similar images, the examiner still needs to be able to find unique visual features within larger designs that are not readily available.

• Design Patent Examiners require a secure database and data exchange in order to upload sensitive, unpublished, proprietary data in order to retrieve results.

• Finally, because the Design Patent Examiner’s time is limited, they need better results, not more results. The components of a better prior art search result include the United States Patent Classification (USPC) design specific designation or CPC designation for non-design US patents or publications, ranking or relevancy of the results, combined with relevant visual features to help Design Patent Examiners make their determination of novelty and non-obviousness.

Please explain how your product or services satisfies the following objectives. Please crosswalk your responses to the numbered questions below:

Objectives:

The USPTO is seeking industry input and capabilities that can be integrated into a Design Patent Examiner’s search while evolving the search to a more efficient image search. The USPTO is looking for expertise-solutions that address the following objectives:

1) Use AI image search to retrieve similar images:

a. AI compares uploaded confidential images with available databases and yields results based on similarity and sortable by similarity. The image results do not need to be exact to the uploaded images, but need to be able to pull images with similar prominent visual features.

b. The publication dates associated with the image results must be reliable.

2) Provide database access to US design patents, foreign design patents or registrations, and images in US or foreign utility patents or publications.

3) Provide required security for non-public information/private data and ensure the

USPTO’s confidentiality requirements under 35 U.S.C. 122 are met2. Accordingly, the solution needs to demonstrate at least one of the following:

a. Be fully hosted as Software as a Service (SaaS solution) within the continental United States exclusively by US personnel; and

▪ Already have received a FedRAMP Authorization with a FIPS 199 impact of at least Moderate; or

▪ Already have obtained a FedRAMP Marketplace Designation -

Ready Status and are willing to commit in writing to obtain FedRAMP authorization with a FIPS 199 impact of at least Moderate within the next 12-24 months.

4) Incorporate passive and active user feedback to improve the AI search tool results.

5) Access a wide number of design patents or registrations and industrial design databases from many global Intellectual Property offices:

a. Access can be continually updated with verifiable data.

b. Databases can be increased with addition of new participating Offices.

c. Access to original source of image in order to obtain best possible quality of the image(s).

6) Access to non-patent literature images including appropriate criteria for assigning a reliable publication date.

7) Provide an ability to upload multiple image views to AI search tool with user-controlled weighting of visual features on user defined critical views:

a. Including an enhance selection, or partial selection, of an image tool to identify specific visual features or region(s) within a source image to search.

b. Ability for Design Patent Examiners to use features such as a photo-to-line

2 The cloud service provider will meet and maintain FedRAMP requirements found at Office of Management and

Budget (OMB) memo: Security Authorization of Information Systems in Cloud Computing Environments, dated

December 2019 www.fedramp.gov. It complies with the National Institute of Science and Technology's NIST SP 800- 37 Revision 2: Risk Mana gem ent Framew ork for Inform ation Systems and Organizat ions: A System Life Cycle

Approach for Security and Privacy.

https://www.fedramp.gov/jab-authorization/ https://www.fedramp.gov/jab-authorization/ http://www.fedramp.gov/ conversion tool to create line drawing images for use in an image arch.

8) Provide high-quality and large views of resulting images to see minute details including the ability to set personal viewing preferences and allowing the results to be viewed in a variety of sizes.

9) Allow users to set personal preference on visualization display of result set.

10) Capture and export search history with appropriate detail for providing the public with a full disclosure of completed search as required by MPEP 719.05.

11) Support internal collaboration tools for Design Patent Examiners such as an enhanced ability to share searches and search histories between users as well as modify and categorize data for the purpose of sharing.

12) Provide options to filter results at least by classification, text, publication date, drawing view, country, and source.

13) Ability to provide the United States Patent Classification (USPC), Locarno classification, design specific designation, and suggested Cooperative Patent

Classification (CPC) based on images.

In addition to the objectives listed above, the solution response to this RFI should take into consideration the ability to scale and adapt to the following capabilities 3:

• Design Patent Examiners review and scroll through a large number of images at a fraction of a second:

o Options for viewing search results such as thumbnail or flipping provides the examiner with the quick ability to load and easily review images.

• Design Patent Examiners focus on the claim that is shown in varying views to clearly recognize what is claimed and look for enhanced capability to distinguish between claimed and unclaimed portions of images.

• Ability to tag and categorize an extremely large amount of result documents.

• Ability to modify the AI’s ranking feature of most relevant art as feedback for purpose of improving the AI.

• Ability to group multiple different, but similar, designs and perform a “batch search” and categorize results specific to the individual designs.

• Future use for auto-USPC design designation based on images combined with important textual data such as title and feature descriptions.

• Ability to interface with the IT solution to provide the results programmatically, for example, through an API (Application Programming Interface).

In addition to the technical information above, please include as much information as possible about the procurement considerations noted below:

1) Other relevant ordering vehicles where your company offers this product, if applicable. If your product is available through another agency vehicle that does not permit inter- agency ordering please explain.

2) Points of contact for questions.

3 Parties may write to these points separately in a section labeled “Other Considerations” or they may incorporate these considerations into their responses to the questions above.

3) Confirmation of registration in SAM.gov (or an acknowledgement that you are not registered in SAM.gov).

4) If your firm is a small business, please identify any barriers to competition that would prohibit you from competing in this space.

5) Please identify the NAICS code that most closely aligns to your proposed solution and use this NAICS to define your small business size status as requested above. We acknowledge that NAICS 511210 may be appropriate for pure software solutions, but if your solution is related to or integrated to a broader IT services program or a patent search/literature search business, please propose an alternate NAICS.

6) If your product is not available on a GSA Schedule or other ordering vehicle, would you consider partnering with a reseller on NASA SEWP or GSA or another Government-wide ordering vehicle to streamline a potential order?

7) Is the product 508-compliant? If not, what steps are necessary in order to become

508-compliant?

8) Please identify which objectives can be met by your company alone or if you require teaming/subcontracting with a partner. If teaming/subcontracting is required, please identify which objectives are satisfied by that teaming/subcontractor partnership.

DISCLAIMER AND NOTICE REGARDING CONTRACT AWARDS

This Special Notice is issued for market research, information and planning purposes. This document is not a Request for Proposal (RFP) or Request for Quotation (RFQ), or a promise to issue an RFP or RFQ in the future. There is no USPTO commitment or implied agreement or understanding as a result of Government action or inaction taken in response to the RFI or the accompanying documents or attachments. This RFI does not commit the Government to contract for any supply or service whatsoever. The information provided in the RFI is subject to change and is not binding on the Government.

Participation in this process is strictly voluntary. No entitlement to payment will arise as a result of the submission of a response to the RFI or the response to any questions that the USPTO may ask as a result of the submission. The UPSTO will not incur or reimburse any costs for the submission of responses or activities associated with the preparation or response to this RFI, including responses to any follow-up information or action requested by the Government. Responders are advised that the USPTO is not liable for and will not pay for any information or direct, indirect, or administrative costs incurred in responding to this RFI. The USPTO has not made a commitment to procure any of the items discussed, and release of this RFI should not be construed as such a commitment or as authorization to incur cost for which reimbursement would be required or sought. All submissions become

Government property and will not be returned but will be handled in accordance with applicable proprietary markings.

The USPTO may use the results obtained from this RFI to support one or more future procurements. Moreover, if a procurement is warranted, then the response to this RFI will be used for the purpose of determining whether a competitive or sole source procurement is appropriate (see Special Procurement Authority Notice below). Additionally, the USPTO may use the results obtained from this RFI to make a small business set-aside determination. This means that if you are a small business and you are able to provide the content described below, your response may be critical in determining whether to set aside any future requirement in part or in total for small businesses. Any small business provider of the content described in this document is strongly encouraged to respond to this RFI.

Special Procurement Authority Notice: if the results of this market research result in the USPTO initiating a procurement action, the USPTO may use its Special Procurement Authority in accordance with the Patent and Trademark Office Efficiency Act (35 U.S.C. 2(b)(4)(A) and the Patent and Trademark Office Acquisition Guidelines

(PTAG).

Finally, note also that the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is not at this time seeking proposals and will not accept unsolicited proposals for the work described in the attached RFI or any attached documents.