THE HIATUS
THE HIATUS
Hello,
We're back from a brief hiatus. The FedInvent team worked on some side hustles and some FedInvent night shift projects.
What Have We Been Up To
First, here are the latest FedInvent Reports. You can access them here.
The Nebraska FedInvent team went to expos to investigate the latest AgTech. We learned that farmers like drones, autonomous tech, and geolocation as much as the Silicon Valley crowd. Unlike the firms focused on urban autonomous vehicles, Farmers can operate autonomous tractors, plows, and combines without the risk of a soccer ball rolling into the street followed by a kid. Farmers can operate autonomous tractors, plows, and combines without soccer ball calculus.
At the expos, FedInvent Nebraska also got to talk to folks about technology focused on bovine and porcine inventions. Cattle farming and ranching are big in Nebraska. Agriculture is the number one industry in Nebraska, and cattle production represents its largest segment. The state has more cows than people. The 1.8 million cows in Nebraska combined with the nearly 5 million head that are annually fed in Nebraska total nearly 6.8 million cattle. The cows have plenty of company. There are also about 3.6 million hogs in Nebraska. Bovine and porcine innovation is big in Nebraska. Long live the T-bone and the pork chop.
Taxpayer-funded research produced a host of veterinarian and farming-related inventions for cows and pigs. We learned that ticks and fly infestations are annoying and dangerous for cows and pigs and that protecting the food supply chain from foot and mouth disease is a high national security priority. Here is a list of some of the notable bovine and porcine inventions. We also added a list of animals and the “ine” names to assist in your scientific, research, and cruciverbalist (crossword-doing) endeavors.
In Virginia, we worked on cybersecurity risk management projects focused on intellectual property. We spent a lot of time explaining that you can't "lift and shift" a mission-critical application to move to the cloud. Lift and shift is a popular term of art that implies all you have to do is copy and paste your complex application from your on-premise data center to the cloud, and viola, you are ready to go. The cybersecurity associated with these types of moves can be monumental, not to mention that if you don't do security correctly, you'll be leaking IP all over the place. We worked to prevent our client's valuable digital intellectual property from being exfiltrated from the network when they weren't looking. Things got a little complicated when we found a new threat — security clearance toting OG Airmen printing out the intelligence reports, taking pictures of them, and posting them on Discord or, worse, on 4Chan. It was a busy month.
The Night Shift
While we were working on these projects, we also worked the night shift. We bit the bullet and created the FedInvent reports for every Tuesday back to 2005. There are over 117,000 taxpayer-funded patents that were granted from 2005 through 2023 to date. We have a complete patent corpus of enforceable federally-funded patents assuming the fees are current and the patents weren't abandoned.
This process involved a lot of data wrangling. We refined the data so we can link the money and the grants to the inventions and the inventors. Pulling this new data meant dealing with agency reorganizations, a cache of older contract numbers, and other data quality issues. As we've said before, how can our American smart people invent amazing things, but a sixteen-character contract number is a challenge?
We're having a good time digging through the older patents again. From a science and technology policy perspective, you can see the emergence of new R&D pathways. For example, the emergence of new nanotechnology and materials patents starts to appear around 2006. This makes sense. On December 3, 2003, President Bush signed into law the 21st Century Nanotechnology Research and Development Act, which authorizes funding for nanotechnology research and development (R&D) over four years, starting in Fiscal Year 2005. This legislation puts into law programs and activities supported by the National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI), one of the highest multi-agency R&D priorities. Since its inception, the 20 agencies that make up the NNI have spent over $31 billion. You can see how the National Nanotechnology Initiative took shape here.
Social Media Inventions
The older FedInvent patents show how academic researchers were trying to figure out how to use the massive streams of social media posts and social networks. At the time, Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) wasn't a term yet. Researchers were working on methods and technology for digging through social media to figure out what is news and what is fakery, who is participating in social networks, and how to build even timelines from social media. The older patents include technology to detect bots and how to use mobile phone location data to see who is hanging out with whom. There are also patents on how the government can use our biometrics and your mobile driver's license to help verify your identity on dating sites. There is a series of patents from the IBM Watson crew for techniques for extracting information from documents and using it to identify people, events, and timelines. The IBM patents have no government contract information. Our prognosticators are fairly sure that the CIA or ODNI is funding this work.
A Patent Pending Sarcasm Intention
Our favorite pending patent application in this space is 20230073602, "System of and Method for Automatically Detecting Sarcasm of a Batch of Text." Researchers from the University of Central Florida received a $6.2 million grant from the DARPA via the Air Force for SOCIALSIM, Computational Simulation of Online Social Behavior (SocialSim) We thought it said Socialism at first, too. The grant application is titled Deep Agent: A Framework for Information Spread and Evolution in Social Networks. You can read about their project here.
In case you're wondering, most social media-related patents and the research that led to the patents was funded by DOD, the Intel Community, and Law Enforcement agencies.
The Vintage FedInvent Reports
Here are the vintage FedInvent Reports from 2005-2023 for your browsing pleasure.
The links to the vintage FedInvent Reports can be found here. The latest 2023 FedInvent Patent Reports are here.
Thanks for reading FedInvent. As always, please reach out to us if you have questions, have suggestions, or if you find strange stuff in the patent data.
Best,
The FedInvent Team
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. Please reach out if you have questions or suggestions. You can reach us at info@wayfinder.digital.