Ex Parte Rezaei et alDownload PDFPatent Trial and Appeal BoardMay 2, 201612436748 (P.T.A.B. May. 2, 2016) Copy Citation UNITED STA TES p A TENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE APPLICATION NO. 12/436,748 46188 7590 Nixon Peabody LLP P.O. Box 60610 Palo Alto, CA 94306 FILING DATE FIRST NAMED INVENTOR 0510612009 Behnam Attaran Rezaei 05/25/2016 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 ATTORNEY DOCKET NO. CONFIRMATION NO. 050759-007000 6047 EXAMINER SORKOWITZ, DANIEL M ART UNIT PAPER NUMBER 3681 NOTIFICATION DATE DELIVERY MODE 05/25/2016 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): patentsv@nixonpeabody.com ipairlink@nixonpeabody.com ocastanon@nixonpeabody.com PTOL-90A (Rev. 04/07) UNITED STATES PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE BEFORE THE PATENT TRIAL AND APPEAL BOARD Ex parte BEHNAM ATTARAN REZAEI, RICCARDO BOSCOLO, and VWANI P. ROYCHOWDHURY Appeal2014-000639 1 Application 12/436,7482 Technology Center 3600 Before MURRIEL E. CRAWFORD, BRADLEY B. BAY AT, and AMEE A. SHAH, Administrative Patent Judges. SHAH, Administrative Patent Judge. DECISION ON APPEAL The Appellants appeal under 35 U.S.C. § 134(a) from the Examiner's decision finally rejecting claims 1-24. We have jurisdiction under 35 U.S.C. § 6(b ). We REVERSE. 1 Throughout this opinion, we refer to the Appeal Brief ("Appeal Br.," filed June 3, 2013), the Examiner's Answer ("Ans.," mailed Aug. 15, 2013), the Reply Brief ("Reply Br.," filed Oct. 15, 2013), the Final Office Action ("Final Act.," mailed May 2, 2012), and the Specification ("Spec.," filed May 6, 2009). 2 According to the Appellants, the real party in interest is NETSEER, INC. Appeal Br. 3. Appeal2014-000639 Application 12/436,748 STATEMENT OF THE CASE The Appellants' invention "relates to discovering relevant concepts and context for content nodes to determine a user's intent, and using this information to provide targeted advertisement and content." Spec. i-fi-12, 11. Claims 1, 12, 23, and 24 are the independent claims on appeal. Claim 1, which we reproduce below, is illustrative of the subject matter on appeal: 1. A computerized method comprising: extracting one or more concept candidates from a content node with a computer based at least in part on: one or more statistical measures; and matching concepts in a concept association map against text in the content node, the concept association map representing concepts, concept metadata, and relationships between the concepts; ranking the one or more concept candidates to create a ranked one or more concept candidates based at least in part on a measure of relevance with the computer after extracting the one or more concepts in the content node; expanding the ranked one or more concept candidates according to one or more cost functions, the expanding creating an expanded set of concepts with the computer after ranking the one or more concept candidates; and storing the expanded set of concepts in association with the content node after expanding the ranked one or more concept candidates. Appeal Br. 22 (Claims App.). 2 Appeal2014-000639 Application 12/436,748 REJECTION The only ground of rejection on appeal is the rejection under 35 U.S.C. § 102(e) of claims 1, 12, 23, and24 as being anticipated byDeLong (US 2008/0033932 Al, pub. Feb. 7, 2008). Appeal Br. 9. 3 ANALYSIS Each of the independent claims 12, 23, and 24 recites a limitation substantially similar to claim 1 's "expanding the ranked one or more concept candidates according to one or more cost functions, the expanding creating an expanded set of concepts with the computer after ranking the one or more concept candidates." Appeal Br., Claims App. The Appellants contend, in relevant part, that the Examiner's rejection is in error because DeLong does not disclose this limitation. Appeal Br. 12. The Examiner finds DeLong discloses the expanding limitation at Figure 4 and paragraphs 29, 30, 34--37, and 60. Final Act. 3, Ans. 9. Paragraphs 29 and 30 of DeLong disclose using implicit links to "separate high-value conceptual authorities from low-value web pages," and that the potential "serious performance issues when adding implicit links" is part of future work. DeLong further discloses that ( 1) for the ranking process, the ranking module using an adjacency matrix to create a temporary table of concept-page entries using concepts existing in the link from A to B, resulting in a likely large adjacency matrix (DeLong i-fi-134, 35); (2) the scalability issues associated with the resulting large adjacency matrix would 3 The rejections of the dependent claims 2-11 and 13-22 under 35 U.S.C. §§ 102(e) and 103(a) are not addressed by the Appellants as they stand or fall with the rejection of the independent claims. Appeal Br. 8. 3 Appeal2014-000639 Application 12/436,748 have to be addressed for commercial viability (id. ilil 36, 60); and (3) after building the adjacency matrix, an unaltered version to the PageRank algorithm is run to determine conceptual authorities, with the resulting ranked page-concepts inserted into a ranked page-concept graph (id. i-f 37). Figure 4 depicts "that conceptual authority is derived from the referring hub." Id. i-f 35. We find persuasive the Appellants' argument that DeLong does not disclose the expanding limitation because DeLong' s concept candidates are not expanded according to a cost function and any alleged expanding occurs before the ranking, not after as claimed. Appeal Br. 12. The Examiner does not explain how DeLong' s address of the scalability issues resulting from the growth in nodes when moving from a regular web graph to a concept-age adjacency matrix (see Ans. 9, citing DeLong i-f 60) meets the limitation of expanding the ranked concept candidates according to a cost function. Further, it is not clear how DeLong's expansion of the adjacency matrix by the iterations of PageRank (id. i-fi-134--37) meets the limitation of expanding the ranked concept candidates, much less according to cost functions. We agree with the Appellants that DeLong's expansion of the matrix, i.e., addition of concept candidates, occurs prior to the ranking process (see Appeal Br. 12; see also DeLong i-f 37) and not according to a cost function, as required by the claims. Thus, we are persuaded of error on the part of the Examiner in the rejection of claims 1, 12, 23, and 24 under 35 U.S.C. § 102(e), and we do not sustain the rejection. We also do not sustain the rejections of dependent claims 2-11 and 13-22 as they stand with claims 1 and 12. Cf In re Fritch, 4 Appeal2014-000639 Application 12/436,748 972 F.2d. 1260, 1266 (Fed. Cir. 1992) ("dependent claims are nonobvious if the independent claims from which they depend are nonobvious"). DECISION The Examiner's rejections of claims 1-24 are REVERSED. REVERSED 5 Copy with citationCopy as parenthetical citation