Special Dispatch — Ukraine
A Few Words on Ukrainian Innovation
Hello from FedInvent,
We pulled 124 taxpayer-funded patents from the 7,205 patents issued today. We haven't started analyzing them yet.
Watching the events in Ukraine has taken up most of the last couple of days. Jumping back and forth between news outlets and newspapers — digital and analog paper versions, and the social media disinformation machine is amplifying that things are getting pretty perilous for the Ukrainian people. Their president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, restores our belief that people seeking freedom and democracy are a force to be reckoned with.
We are also getting messages from people we know in Lviv and Kyiv. These arrive via email daily. We, in turn, share them with our contacts — family and friends. There is something surreal about getting emails from the middle of a war from the same people on mailing lists we use to receive genealogy and cultural news. It is also amazing that the internet is still running, allowing messages and powerful smartphone videos that help quash the Russian propaganda (disinformation?) machine. Thank you, Elon Musk.
Here is the latest news. No names.
Kyiv, 12:45 Kyiv time, [10:45 GMT, February 28]
Our pessimistic forecasts did not come true, and the night passed relatively calmly. There were several air raid alerts, but no gunfire was heard. It was quiet in our area of the city, so I slept the best that I have since the start of the war. We are still sleeping in our clothes, though. I think that this pause may be connected with the start of negotiations, but we are afraid that if they do not produce a result, everything will begin again.
Today my wife and I left our building for the first time since Friday. We have a small market near us, and we were able to buy vegetables, meat and some cereals. As a result, we now even have a small stock of food. There are huge queues of people everywhere, because they are still selling old goods, though the authorities have promised that when they run out, the delivery of essential products will be arranged.
While we were standing in the market, a Russian missile was shot down above us.
This situation in Ukraine is harrowing.
Ukrainian Innovation
FedInvent writes about innovation. We thought we'd spend a few minutes on innovation in Ukraine. We wanted to share some thoughts on the Ukrainian innovation-sphere and what the Russians have put at risk with this unprovoked war.
According to Crunchbase, Ukrainian venture-backed startups received at least $33.8 million in investment in 2021. Grammarly, the tool we use to make sure that we catch the typos and difficult to read sentences, started in Ukraine. There are an estimated 200,000 IT professionals in Ukraine. Many highly skilled.
Many in the tech industry have worked with Ukrainian systems engineers and programmers. It's relatively easy with the internet and technology platforms like UpWork and others. We've worked with engineers on startup projects. When you can't afford the $200 an hour engineers from the US, you hire the $50 an hour computer scientists from Kyiv. The only obstacle was the time zone difference, but the startups worked late. We can only wait to see how these far-away associates fare. It's very tragic from a human level. It's also very tragic that so many talented people and their families are in danger.
UkrPat
The State Enterprise "Ukrainian Intellectual Property Institute" (Ukrpatent) is an institutional component of the state intellectual property legal protection system in Ukraine. These are some of the people who lead UkrPat. These are some of the important faces of intellectual property in Kyiv.
Today, March 1, 2022, the Ukrainian Intellectual Property Institute (UkrPat) website says that they are operating in normal mode. That's hard to believe, given the current geopolitical situation near Kyiv.
UkrPat posted its statistics report for January 2022, which now seems like a very long time ago. Here are some of their numbers. The first chart is the UkrPat intellectual property indicators.
The second chart is the patent office's January 2022 performance indicators for patents.
If the Ukrainian Patent offices are operational, we commend them. If not, it's understandable. Unfortunately, patents and copyrights will have to wait.
The US Regional Intellectual Property Attaché was at the US Embassy in Kyiv. We suspect these diplomats are most likely out of the country.
US Patents
At FedInvent, we pulled together a sample list of some of the US patents awarded to Ukrainian assignees. There are many inventions on streaming television and entertainment inventions, mostly from the European offices of EchoStar and Dish.
When you look at patents and patent applications with Ukrainian inventors, you'll find a lot of collaboration between US bicoastal inventors — Massachusetts, New York, and California. You see collaboration between Ukrainian and inventors from the Netherlands and other European organizations. There are also many collaborations with Russian-American inventors and Russian inventors in Russia.
As is the FedInvent way, we looked to see if there were interesting patents in the collection. Here is what we found.
US Patent 10390104, "Context advertising based on viewer's stress/relaxation level" — "use of one or more sensors, including thermal sensors, electrical sensors, optical sensors, acoustic sensors, biosensors, etc., to determine a stress level of the viewer and then matching the viewer's stress level to an appropriately tagged advertisement." If you're stressed, you get the ad for the Calm app, maybe an ad from the Pillow Guy, and a nice Chardonnay.
There was one FedInvent Portfolio patent in the sample, US Patent 10,800,966, "Organic scintillators derived from pyrazoline." This patent is assigned to Clemson University and the Institute of Organic Chemistry, National Academy of Science of Ukraine. These inventors received funding from the DOD Defense Threat Reduction Agency.
You can look at the list of Ukrainian US patents here. There is a lot of interesting innovation and collaboration going on. We're hopeful for the Ukrainian people and not willing to say that there was a lot of innovation going on. We're hoping it is just a pause.
We wish the Ukrainian people well. We also want all those future scientists and researchers, Ukrainian children, to get back to school and home again.
We'll try to turn our attention back to this week's taxpayer-funded patents. Please stay tuned.
The Team at FedInvent
FedInvent tells the stories of inventors, investigators, and innovators. Wayfinder Digital's FedInvent Project follows the federal innovation ecosphere, taxpayer money, and the inventions it pays for. FedInvent is a work in progress. Please reach out if you have questions or suggestions. You can reach us at info@wayfinder.digital.