Ex Parte Aslot et alDownload PDFPatent Trial and Appeal BoardJan 12, 201814067150 (P.T.A.B. Jan. 12, 2018) Copy Citation United States Patent and Trademark Office UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE United States Patent and Trademark Office Address: COMMISSIONER FOR PATENTS P.O.Box 1450 Alexandria, Virginia 22313-1450 www.uspto.gov APPLICATION NO. FILING DATE FIRST NAMED INVENTOR ATTORNEY DOCKET NO. CONFIRMATION NO. 14/067,150 10/30/2013 Vishal Chittranjan Aslot END920100209US2 1076 87354 7590 IBM Corp. (END/RCR) c/o Rolnik Law Firm, P.C. 24 N. Main St. Kingwood, TX 77339 EXAMINER BLACK, LINH ART UNIT PAPER NUMBER 2163 NOTIFICATION DATE DELIVERY MODE 01/17/2018 ELECTRONIC Please find below and/or attached an Office communication concerning this application or proceeding. The time period for reply, if any, is set in the attached communication. Notice of the Office communication was sent electronically on above-indicated "Notification Date" to the following e-mail address(es): PTOL-90A (Rev. 04/07) UNITED STATES PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE BEFORE THE PATENT TRIAL AND APPEAL BOARD Ex parte VISHAL CHITTRANJAN ASLOT, BRIAN W HART, ANIL KALAVAKOLANU, and EVELYN TINGMAY YEUNG Appeal 2017-008570 Application 14/067,150 Technology Center 2100 Before ALLEN R. MacDONALD, KARA L. SZPONDOWSKI, and MICHAEL J. ENGLE, Administrative Patent Judges. MacDONALD, Administrative Patent Judge. DECISION ON APPEAL Appeal 2017-008570 Application 14/067,150 STATEMENT OF CASE Appellants appeal under 35 U.S.C. § 134(a) from a Final Rejection of claims 17 and 18. Final Act. 1. Claims 1—16 are canceled. App. Br. 13. We have jurisdiction under 35 U.S.C. § 6(b). Representative Claim Representative claim 17 under appeal reads as follows (emphasis, formatting, and bracketed material added): 17. A method of managing queries, the method comprising: [(A)] a first program and a second program registering with a dispatcher, as available to perform queries and subsequently, [(B)] the first program receiving from the dispatcher a request to perform a query, the query specifying a type of data to be searched, and [(i)] in response, the first program determining that the first program can perform the query for data structures having the type of data, and [(ii)] in response, the first program completing performance of the query, the first program writing a status of the first program to a first memory buffer, and [(C)] the second program receiving from the dispatcher the request to perform the query, and [(i)] in response, the second program determining that the second program cannot perform the query for data structures having the type of data; and [(ii)] in response, the second program not writing a status of the second program to a second memory buffer that it would have written had the second program determined that the second program can perform the query for the data structures having the type of data. App. Br. 13 (Claims Appendix). 2 Appeal 2017-008570 Application 14/067,150 Rejection The Examiner rejected claims 17 and 18 under 35 U.S.C. § 103(a) as being unpatentable over the combination of Day et al. (US 2003/0084030 Al; pub. May 1, 2003) and Dostert et al. (US 2006/0143359 Al; pub. June 29, 2006).1 Issue on Appeal Did the Examiner err in rejecting claim 17 as being obvious? ANALYSIS We have reviewed the Examiner’s rejections in light of Appellants’ arguments2 (Appeal Brief and Reply Brief) that the Examiner has erred. The Examiner relies on Day (paragraphs 35—40, 50-53, 66—68, 70, and 71) as disclosing all of claim 17’s limitations except B(ii). The Examiner relies on Dostert (paragraphs 26—30 and 36) as disclosing limitation B(ii). Final Act. 11—13. The Examiner concludes: Thus, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art at the time of the invention to combine the teachings of Day and Dostert et al. in order to allow the buffer to keep track of the current status of application(s) to better manage/dispatch events/ actions/ queries. Final Act. 13—14. 1 Separate patentability is not argued for claim 18. Except for our ultimate decision, claim 18 is not discussed further herein. 2 Arguments which Appellants could have made but chose not to make in the Briefs have not been considered and are deemed to be waived (see 37 C.F.R. § 41.37(c)(l)(vii)). 3 Appeal 2017-008570 Application 14/067,150 Appellants contend that the Examiner erred in rejecting claim 17 under 35 U.S.C. § 103(a) because: [T]he Examiner alleges Day to allegedly suggest the claimed cause, and then, after admitting that Day fails to teach the claimed result, relies on Dostert to suggest the claimed result. Assuming, for the moment, that Day, indeed, suggests the cause, and that Dostert, indeed, suggests the result, nothing whatsoever, in Day or Dostert suggests that the first step and the second step (taught in a second art), are connected by any form of causality. The Examiner reads out the terms “and in response”, which is wholly improper. Pro forma, the Examiner includes the “and in response” language among the teachings of Dostert. However, Dostert cannot even suggest a causal linkage to a step that is not even present in Dostert. App. Br. 10, emphasis added. Appellants continue: Rather, Dostert suggests an entirely different cause for its monitoring code obtaining the Dostert “status information”, namely, being interleaved with program code of sub-entities. In other words, Dostert relies on an interleaving alone to operate as the pre-requisite cause to its alleged, “completing performance of the query”. App. Br. 10-11, emphasis added. As to Appellants’ above contentions, we disagree. The Examiner’s rejection (Final Act. 13) points to paragraph 29 of Dostert which states: In one embodiment, various entities of VM 105 are “instrumented” with monitoring code to accumulate/generate at least a portion of status information 125 and copy the portion of status information 125 into internal memory buffer 220. Execution of the monitoring code may be interleaved with execution of the regular program code of the entities. The portion of status information 125 which is accumulated/generated by the monitoring code may include processing start and stop times of each entity, processing runtime of each thread 245 executing the entity, a number of objects 255 created by the particular entity, an amount of memory consumed 4 Appeal 2017-008570 Application 14/067,150 by the entity, and the like. Each entity can be instrumented to accumulate and/or generate a variety of status information 125 relating the operation and execution of the particular entity. Dostert 129. We agree with the Examiner’s conclusion that it would have been obvious to combine the teachings of Day and Dostert because Dostert also discloses as to the subject matter of paragraph 29 that: Status information 125 may be “pulled” to monitoring console 115 in response to status queries 130 issued by monitoring console 115.... Status information 125 may include a variety of data including, but not limited to, garbage collecting activity, heap status, execution activity, thread activity, program activity, and the like. Dostert 121 (emphasis added). Contrary to Appellants’ cause/result argument that Dostert does not suggest the claimed query and writing to memory buffer, Dostert explicitly teaches (1) status information can be pulled in response to status queries (Dostert 121), and (2) the status information can be copied into an internal memory buffer (Dostert 129). As to Appellants’ argument that interleaving is the cause in Dostert, we see no basis for this reading of the reference. Rather, we read Dostert at paragraphs 29, 30, and 36 to be describing the interleaving as merely the method by which the monitoring code is executed, e.g., “Execution of the monitoring code may be interleaved with execution of the regular program code of the entities.” (Dostert 129). CONCLUSIONS (1) The Examiner has not erred in rejecting claims 17 and 18 as being unpatentable under 35 U.S.C. § 103(a). 5 Appeal 2017-008570 Application 14/067,150 (2) Claims 17 and 18 are not patentable. DECISION The Examiner’s rejection of claims 17 and 18 is affirmed. No time period for taking any subsequent action in connection with this appeal may be extended under 37 C.F.R. § 1.136(a)(l)(iv). AFFIRMED 6 Copy with citationCopy as parenthetical citation