Yelling To the Butcher
FedInvent Portfolio Patent Applications for March 17, 2022
FEDINVENT APP NEWSLETTER MARCH 17, 2022
Good Afternoon from FedInvent,
This week federally funded inventors had 160 of their patent applications published.
As usual, you can read the FedInvent Report here. If you browse by department, please start here.
Yelling To the Butcher
I've spent the better part of the last two years yelling to the butcher through my KN95 mask. It's the only way he can hear me, I can't hear him (or her) unless he (or she) yells back, and I can't read his (or her) lips to help with information exchange. This yelling routine got complicated over the Christmas holiday. I had to order a 3-bone standing beef rib-eye roast, chine bone removed, bones unfrenched. (I had no idea what a chine bone is, let alone what bones unfrenched means. I was in charge of grocery buying, not cooking.) Try ordering that through a mask. It was a brutal exchange. On Thursday, the Department of Veterans Affairs (DVA) may have invented a solution.
DVA invented a "Face Mask With Transparent Portion." Their application publication number is 20220079269. If you were on Mars for the last two years and don't know how a mask works, the patent application explains that "a mask can be used on a face of a wearer having a head, a face, a nose, and a mouth." Oddly, they left off the ears to hold it on, but I digress.
The DVA explained that "many individuals (e.g., those who interact with medical providers and many providers themselves) rely upon lip-reading and visual cues for communication. The COVID-19 pandemic has made it difficult for these individuals to communicate due to the absence of transparent face masks. Face masks with suitable filtering capability are in short supply in general, and available alternatives that have transparent portions have deficiencies." So the DVA invented a new reusable respirator mask, surgical grade, with filters so that you can see the face of the butcher over the meat counter.
On The Representative Figure
Before we move on, this is one of those patents where a quick look at the patent didn't reveal the novel invention. The Representative Drawing, the drawing that appears on the first page of the patent, wasn't particularly useful. It looks like a blob with a bunch of circles on it — we learned these are apertures called vent ports. We knew it was a mask but couldn't figure out how to put it on. We rotated the picture. Not much help. Then we scrolled through the drawings until we found the drawing that made the invention "transparent."
DARPA
DARPA funded eight new patent applications published on March 17, including two quantum computing inventions, 20220082639 from inventors at MIT and 20220083889 titled, "Parallel Multi-Qubit Operations on a Universal Ion Trap Quantum Computer," from inventors at IonQ Inc. and the University of Maryland. DARPA also funded two high-performance computing patent applications from NVIDIA — 20220083314 and 20220083500 both titled, "Flexible Accelerator for A Tensor Workload." NVIDIA's application 20220083068, "Detection of Hazardous Driving Using Machine Learning." This invention detects hazardous driving by an autonomous vehicle. This patent application came from the DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Lab.
As of Thursday, NIH has been cited as a funding source on 676 patent applications this year. NIH reached 205 individual funding citations for support of researchers and inventors. The National Cancer Institute (NCI) is cited 205 times on 2022 patent applications. National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) and National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) are both over 100 with 127 and 122 funding citations respectively.
Policy-Driven Innovation — Scope 3 Scoop
FedInvent likes to stay focused on the federal policy-based science that drives decisions on what R&D to fund and the inventions that are the product of that work. But the federal government being the federal government, sometimes federal regulations and rulemaking are the mothers of invention. The SEC's latest proposed climate change reporting rule is just such a situation.
On March 21, 2022, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced its plan to require public companies to report on their greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) and their energy use. The SEC included:
A 510 page proposed rule for the reporting requirement.
Comments are due on May 22, 2022.
If past initiatives are any indication of what will come next, the business methods patent gurus and a flock of consultants will be working hard to corner the market for climate change reporting technology and measuring. A quick look at patents indicating inventions useful in being responsive to regulatory requirements shows:
Sarbanes-Oxley Patents: 1567 patents
Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA): 1428 patents
Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA): 17 patents
Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA): 120 patents
There are also hundreds of patents floating around that cover privacy regulations, payment card regulations, FedRAMP, and FISMA cybersecurity requirements, to name a few.
The GRC (governance, reporting, and compliance) consultants are happy.
The SEC seeks to have pubic companies report their GHG emissions across a company's entire value chain, also known as the supply chain. If you buy parts from China and they arrive via a GHG belching container ship, you need to report that too. If your employees bike to work or drive a car, the GHG footprint of your workforce will need to be quantified. This is Scope 3 reporting.
Two of our favorite categories are Scope 3 Category 6: Business Travel and Category 7: Employee Commuting. If business travel ever recovers, a firm would need to report all of the CO2 (Carbon Dioxide), CH4 (Methane), and N2O (Nitrous Oxide) emissions data for every trip every employee takes. Firms would also need to report how their employees get to work. All those mayors pushing companies to get their people back into the office will be unhappy to learn that working from home is better for GHG emissions reduction.
To get a sense of the scope of the Scope 3 reporting calculations that will need to be reported, check out EPA's GHG Emission Factors Hub spreadsheet with all of the categories and elements defined. This is a data explosion.
We love a good data-intense regulation. However, a battle is likely to ensue on the scope of the Scope 3 reporting that the SEC is planning. Congress wants to study it. Public companies aren't happy about massive new reporting requirements. On the other hand, software people are excited about opportunities to build new tools and sell them to the SEC and public companies. So much business methods opportunity, so little time. Watch this space.
(And if you want to have a bust-a-gut laugh check out the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1995 information that starts around page 438 of the proposed rule document. The Paperwork Reduction Act (PRA) of 1995 requires that agencies obtain Office of Management and Budget (OMB) approval before requesting most information from the public. The agency needs to tell OMB its estimates on how long this reporting will take and the estimated hourly cost. If you can find a $55/hour consultant who knows how to do Scope 3 reporting, please let us know.)
Bayh-Dole Scofflaws
This week Raytheon contributed two new patent applications to the scofflaw portfolio. The first is for gas turbine engine technology. The second is for a mass shock absorber for an aircraft.
Patent Applications By The Numbers
On March 17, 2022, the US Patent Office published 8,130 pre-grant patent applications, 160 benefitted from taxpayer funding. Here is how things broke down on Thursday.
One hundred fifty-four (154) patent applications have Government Interest Statements.
Thirty (30) applications have an applicant or an assignee that is a government agency.
A federal department is the only assignee on fourteen (14) patent applications.
The 160 new patent applications have 185 department-level funding citations.
These applications are the work of 570 inventors.
The 562 American inventors come from 42 states.
The eight (8) foreign inventors come from seven (7) countries.
There are 89 patent applications (56%) where at least one assignee is a college or university, the HERD.
Eight patent applications (8) resulted from the collaboration between two or more universities.
Federally Funded Research and Development Centers (FFRDCs) have 25 published patent applications.
There are three patent applications with a Y CPC symbol indicating that the invention may be useful in mitigating the impact of climate change.
The Big Three
This week's top three states are:
California had 29 first-named inventors and 106 total inventors.
Massachusetts had 11 first-named inventors and 48 total inventors.
Maryland had nine first-named inventors and 32 total inventors.
The 186 inventors from these three states account for 33% of the inventors on the week's published patent applications.
Count By Department
Health Complex This Week
The Health Complex section of the FedInvent Report presents new patent applications from the Department of Health and Human Services and its parts. Each week the Health Complex has the highest number of published pre-grant taxpayer-funded patent applications.
Health Complex Year To Date
The Health Complex's inventors have included individual funding citations on the pre-grant patent applications published since the beginning of 2022. You can see the details here.
We've also been updating our Messages from Ukraine page with the latest news.
We'll be back with the March 22, 2022, FedInvent portfolio patents later this week.
Thank you for reading FedInvent.
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. FedInvent is a work in progress. Please reach out if you have questions or suggestions. You can reach us at info@wayfinder.digital.