Random Segments of Code

An anecdote on Technical Disclosures and Defensive Publications

2008-06-21T12:22:00.000-07:00

Recently, one of my disclosures on a classification variant using neural-networks got published on ip.com as a defensive publication. I always thought it to be a really strong candidate for a patent application, and was rather upset when I came to know that it would be published openly. A little research on the topic however changed my impression, and on retrospection I was quite happy with the state of affairs. I thus decided that I would record my observations here for anyone to read and clarify this whole patent-publication terminology as such. But, as always, blessed with whatever, I can't just resist that tinge of drama; I would thus tell you an anecdote.

Let us start with an example scenario whence a top-notch scientist working in a world-class firm makes a ground-breaking discovery, leading to an equally precious idea and associated methodology to implement the idea.

He knows that ideas are meant to be patented and thus he files a disclosure with his local Invention Development Team (IDT). Now, this IDT consists of equally capable guys, with a decent patent-portfolio and a healthy disdain for jack-in-the-office patent wannabes. They begin to scrutinize the disclosure as usual.

They go through the existing and easily-accessible prior-art and find some seemingly similar implementations. Thus, they immediately publish a questionnaire soliciting a response. Now, our dear scientist, being quite busy with putting new ideas and draft disclosure in pipeline, misses the solicitation deadline given, and gets a note with the subject - 'Disclosure Rated Close' in his mailbox after some days.

Panic struck, he immediately writes to IDT expressing his distress and feeling of injustice et al. Soon after, he realizes his sloppiness and writes another apologetic note asking for a re-consideration of deadline and disclosure. He spends that night sorting out the core idea and drafting the answers to the questionnaire.. with his mind already messed-up with new ideas. He finally strikes gold and publishes his detailed explanation requesting IDT to revoke the 'close decision' on the application. After much deliberation, he finally succeeds and the disclosure status again changes to 'under evaluation'. Rejuvenated with his cock-a-doodle of victory, he starts following-up with IDT at regular intervals, dropping notes and giving an impression as if he is next-in-line after Euler, Newton and Einstein.

Anyhow, the IDT guys, after many more comparisons and explanations aren't satisfied with whatever prior-art they evaluated the idea against, and give the decision as 'Search'. Now, this was something that the scientist guy wasn't prepared for. Afterall, if you asked him, he had manually searched every single entry on Google's databases on all of it's servers, and found nothing even remotely similar.

Anyhow, he started working with the IDT; IDT guys giving him a new paper every other day to evaluate and he would make sure that he pointed out sufficient differences between that and his own disclosure. This process went on for sometime, after which, the IDT guys started giving that blue-moon feeling of getting impressed. But now, they faced a bigger problem. They were pretty convinced that the idea was unique and the implementation novel, unrelated to anything done before, but the patent, if filed, wouldn't have business value.

Now, the scientist was inconsolable.. "Business Value ? But this is a beautiful innovation.. Novelty, Uniqueness, Rigor.. everything in perfect proportions.. just patent it, it would create a new business for you."

It would not however benefit the existing business in any way. And this issue, brought into light another stance - the stance of Patent Attorney. He is the guy who finally puts that eternal seal of 'File' on a patent application. And his job is to consider the patent application holistically..

"The revenue that the patent, if filed, would generate on an average after 'n' number of years and after going through 't' lawsuits doesn't weigh well against the cost of the patent application (cost of filing + cost of effort + cost of time spent) and the cost of those 't' lawsuits and the cost of establishing a new business to accommodate your invention."

In the hindsight, his job is really difficult.. or so thought the scientist guy. But his explanation seemed pretty rational. But the scientist guy still reasoned - "Okay, so you don't want to file an application now, no problem.. I can wait till we get a suitable business, and we'll then file an application."

To this, the patent guy smiles and says - "Your innovation is valuable and has got all the limelight and hype and the sole reason for that is because 'it is unique right now'. We can wait, but then you'll risk someone else making the same discovery and finding a firm that is ready to file a patent application for him, in which case, your efforts will be rendered useless."

The scientist snapped and took a moment to think about 6 billion people, who at that moment, seemed all capable of making the par and taking away his prized possession. "So, what is the way out ?", asked Scientist guy.

"Umm.. Lets publish this defensively, which would mean publishing this on an open database accessible to all patent attorneys. That way, we preserve our right of using this and no one else can patent this in future. So, from then on, this becomes a piece of un-patentable, public knowledge. You will of course retain the major inventor title and we will become the disclosing entity. The only thing is that since this is public, we can't generate revenue from any lawsuits."

To the scientist, this was a revelation - Unification of Business and technological brilliance. Feeling of maintaining the celibacy of a brain-child forever. A sweet harmony et al. And thus, he decided to rest his case.

I wanted to discuss my disclosure, but I'm too much into it to get that technical. I would take it up in the next post on my UII Blog

Cheers !

[Disclaimer: All the above images are copyright of phdcomics.com and have been referred for non-commercial use]

Of bread, butter, chastity and ChAoS

2008-06-04T10:08:00.000-07:00

In line with my resolve to maintain the non-technicality of these spaces, tonight, I try to get my whims in sync with story-telling mood.. Ergo, let me tell you a story - "There used to be a boy who used to love bread and butter.. And he ate bread and butter.... until he started to detest bread and butter..." Its obvious right.. monotony of the meal got him.. It's human nature you see. \m/

Lets delve a lil' deeper nonetheless. It's the natural tendency of every living thing to reduce disorder and reach 'Thee limiting case of stability'.. ' Aaaaa.. I'm tending towards --> 0'.. However, only the most paranormal beings try to arrive at those limiting cases in a very convoluted way. They tend to see through the 'apparant heavens' and / or shun them at will. Obviously, the so called 'convoluted ways' are directed.. secretly governed.. unknowingly governed by the most basic needs that humans are doomed (programmed) to live (execute) with. So in our thread of execution, the subject was driven by 'hunger'. But of course, there had to be an element of disambiguation.. So, where others saw food, the boy saw another prospect of entropy reduction.. Where others saw monotony of fat and wheat, the boy saw Nirvana..

Indeed, he tried to spawn a novel method and related apparatus to serve the ultimate cause -- The apparatus of bread and butter based on chastity leading to reduction of disorder..
And how ? Disorder in a living context, macro context can be related to absence of purity.. the boy thought, so the presence of purity must lead to absence of disorder.. Viola ! The problem thus reduced to a simple quest for pure.. or so it seemed for sometime. But, now what is pure.. how do you define pure, eh ? "Umm.. Ma'am.. Khalsa means 'the pure' ". True, but the boy hadn't turned a cannibal.. not as yet. So, the intersection of pure and food lead to..
um um.. 'Pure Food'.. See see.. how I did it.. :-)

Now, how do you know what food is pure.. the boy wasn't blessed with a cuisine-serving genie.. nah.. not till then.. Issac Newton defined purity when he experimented through his prisms, placed end-to-end, scattering light and then merging the 7 wavelengths into one.. Or so the boy thought.. "single ray scattered into 7 colours imples Disorder.. And again merged into one --> Order again.. whats the common thread.. what is that I'm missing.." After much deliberation, it stuck him.. The obviousness of Truth.. The eventuality of purity.. "White" !! The only thing that remains chaste.. the epitome of order.. The common cause.

Backtracking...... Intersection of Pure Food and White.. Eureka.. He had found it !

So, he got up and walked up to the nearest shop n started to look up close & yonder.. Too engrossed in executing his search routine to notice surrounding noobs' bizarre glares and shopkeeper's sigh of urgency.. And right at that moment, he stuck gold.. He had found an instance of seemingly impossible-to-instantiate class definition.. He had found Bread and he had found butter. Both almost white and both pure.... well almost.

So long for bread, butter and a chaste epitome of Purity. It only now remains to be analyzed as to how that chaste epitome was chastised leading to the disruption of the momentary illusion harbored by the boy and re-corroborating the notion that we live in parallel universes with only one universal time warp, vis-a-vis Chaos.

All in all, not to make a labor of it, the disruption started with a seemingly harmless, lifeless addition to this exquisitely almost perfect harmony of mathematical precision, i.e, bread and butter.. An agent - 'Aloo bhujiya - masala flavour'.. Stumbled upon by the boy and used only to add a little spice to his seemingly perfect but flavourless combo of purity, this impurity was enough to make the entire system unbalanced, destroy the precision, induce unfound flaws in the equations and equilibrium, and put boy to such a state of desperation that he was forced to abandon the entire program execution. The agent was a very simple, replicating doubt-inducing agent.. Trying to convince the boy that something that tastes good has to be pure.. Otherwise, why would it feel so nice.. taste so good. And so the Agent kept replicating.. increasing it's presence on the boy's lil' programmed food-Matrix and thus eating up the presence of the 'pure food'.

And then there was Chaos.. The unpredictable.. The flutter of a butterfly than lead to a typhoon.. James Gleick explains it as something which isn't explained by - "Physicists like to think that all you have to do is say, these are the conditions, now what happens next?"

But where Chaos begins, 'the classic' stops. For instance, a little indulgence in spicy leading to the only remaining indulgence until another chaos strikes and makes the previous chaos.. 'the classic'.

And.. he started to detest bread and butter..." \m/

MS Application Process Research - Information on Game Design and Development Programs

2008-03-25T12:40:00.000-07:00

This is some of the info that I had gathered during my 'initial pre-apping' phase, so to say the pre-apping was mostly geared towards AI, to which I finally applied. I thought of sharing this and I hope that game design and development future applicants would find this useful.

I would start off with some words of advice. First, decide whether you want to get into

1.) Game design / Development - For this, I would suggest an MSCS with a focus on Games (like USCs course).

2.) Game Art / Animation - Something like DigiPen, go for a Master of Arts rather than MSCS.

3.) Research into Games / AI / Immersion, etc. - MS CS with a focus on AI, For eg., Stanford has courses on gaming (best by far).

Finally, my perspective is that you can always get to 1 after you done with 3, but I can't think of any other possible permutation. And 2 is a totally different track. Following is a list of institutes offering courses relevant to games (atleast when I researched, they were). I would add to this list later: -

1. Digipen: -
http://www.digipen.edu/main/MSCS_Sequence
Affiliated with Nintendo of America. Cost is reasonable and it is located in Seattle, Washington.

2. Entertainment Technology Center @ Carnegie Mellon University

3. Georgia Insitiute of Technology,Atlanta, GA
The Computer Science college of Georgia Tech offers classes at the GVU center (Graphics, Visualization, and Usability) about animation, virtual reality, etc. The college also has classes for game programming and development.

4. Michagan State University
East Lansing, MI Offer a Game Design and Development specialization for undergrad students majoring in Computer Science, Art, or Telecommunication, Information Studies, and Media.

5. Rochester Institute of Technology
Masters in Game Design & Development (http://games.rit.edu)
Rochester, NY First degree in Software Engineering. Other game-related majors: Computer Science, Animation.

6. The Art Institute,USA
With locations in more than 20 US cities as well as online offerings, their program in Game Art & Design is well worth checking out.

7. University of Advancing Technology,Tempe, AZ
UAT is an accredited, private, four year university. Focused around technology, their unique college degree programs include: Game Design, Network Security, Digital Animation, Computer Programming, Multimedia
Design, E-commerce, and more. Courses available on campus (Arizona) or obtain your degree on line.

8. University of Michigan,Ann Arbor, MI
Offers a course in Computer Game Design and Development.

9. University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA
http://www.cs.usc.edu/admissions/graduate/msgames.htm
Besides having an excellent CS program in general, USC also offers a minor in Multimedia, which includes several courses directly related to game development. Game dev at USC is one of the best and customizable course that I could find. You can focus on many different aspects of game design and development. It could be an industry-oriented course or research-based. But, USC is costly as usual and again, this is a very subjective issue.

10. University of North Texas,Denton, TX
Offers a game programming course taught by Ian Parberry. Students work together to create a game in the Laboratory of Recreational Computing.
Check this out :-
http://larc.csci.unt.edu/

11. GuildHall at SMU: -
http://guildhall.smu.edu/admissions
Offers a Master of Interactive Technology in Digital Game Development
Quite costly and very Microsoft centric. Cost ~ $ 57k. 21 month course as far as I rem. Check the placements thr before applying.

12. UPenn: -
http://www.cis.upenn.edu/grad/cggt/cggt-overview.shtml

13. WPI: -
http://www.wpi.edu/Academics/Majors/IMGD/
http://poe.gdc.wpi.edu/contact
Offers a major in Interactive Media and Game Development, which is only for undergrads.

14. Fullsail: -
http://www.fullsail.com/

15. For what its worth: -
http://www.nid.edu/
Toy & Game Design (PGDPD) - http://www.nid.edu/study_pg_tdd.htm
This program is multidisciplinary in nature. It encompasses elements
from industrial design, animation and graphic design, human psychology
and interaction, sociology and management domains. The program
commences with courses in Play Theory, Cognitive Ergonomics, Color &
Composition, Material/ Media Technology, Study of Forms, Aesthetics,
and Design Management etc., which provide the basic design foundation.
Specialized inputs are also given to develop skills in forms and movement,
character design, strategy building, multisensory design etc.

This is a comprehensive list of game schools - Reference List

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Useful info regarding game design and development programs (Contd.)

Game Industry Salary surveys for year 2007: -

[Source - Game Career Guide]

Basically divided into following genres in line with the earlier categorization: -

1.) Programming - Average salary for three or fewer years experience: $65,833 or $57,913.
Average salary Across all experience levels: $80,886

2.) Art & Animation - Average salary for three or fewer years experience: $42,672.
Average salary Across all experience levels: $65,107

3.) Game Design - Average salary for three or fewer years experience: $44,574.
Avgerage salary across all experience levels: $61,538

4.) Production - Average salary for three or fewer years experience: $52,885 or $44,167.
Average salary across all experience levels: $77,131

5.) Quality Assurance, Testers - Average salary for three or fewer years experience: $26,410.
Average salary across all experience levels: $37,861

MS Application Process Research - Light-weight Clear VisionTM

2008-01-15T06:09:00.004-08:00

While pondering upon the possibilities and different result-combinations that my MS applications could have, I always wanted to have a 'comforting' line-of-thought (L-O-T), something which would save me from a world of worry and countless permutations that I always would draw using the sample space - {admit, reject, aid, no-aid, scholarship, TA, RA, Fellowship, On-Campus jobs, Cafeteria-jobs, N/w Administrator, Librarian, Cooking at home, eating-out, Buying a Car in 1st sem, Buying a Bicycle in first sem, Buying a bike in first-sem, Having roomies, having too-many roomies,...}. It struck me one day that all of this troublesome lineage could be traced back to a common cause - $$$. I then evangelized an L-O-T, which has since been comforting me to quite an extent. I recently made it public by sharing it with my fellows @ Edulix forums (http://edulix.com/forum) and I'm pasting the exact contents here as well.

Begin:

Well, I've been seeing a lot of views exchanged (in Edulix and apart) on the subject of $-depreciation, Grad-edu in US being worth it considering present circumstances, ROI issue, top companies assigning new employees back to the division in their native countries and the consequences as such.

I'm actually a fan of Light-weight Clear Vision^TM which can guide in these circumstances and help with keeping things in perspective.
Lemme explain this a bit here..

My strong focus and urge to do grad-study, beliefs in my abilities, dream to make a diff etc. not withstanding, even I'm at times intimidated or at least bothered by all the news regd dollar-dep., US eco, and scores of related items.. Adopting LCV helps me get my focus back.

Clear Vision in LCV means to have a clear-focus, have a dream; coz without that theres no point embarking on nethin.. And I shall safely assume that most of us have a 'CV' in why we want to do grad study.. It really helps if one decouples it from 'money-making' and getting rich..

I would actually pt out an example here. There's a guy by the name C.Mohan (IBM fellow and chief scientist) You can check his profile here.. http://www.almaden.ibm.com/u/mohan/. I've attended couple of technical talks whr he was the main speaker or CG and actually, one can learn the art of decoupling ('getting-rich' from 'love of research') from him. He keeps on re-iterating that when he finished his PhD from Austin in '81, silicon valley charm was on its peak.. He could've easily joined / launched a start-up.. stock-options.. got rich.. But, he din't.. Remained in research and is now an IBM fellow, world renowned guy.. and ya, is rich neways..

Read this as well.. http://www.kalpanamohan.org/personal.shtml ..

C. Mohan, is a database guru who believes that money corrupts and that absolute stock options corrupt absolutely. So they live on in the valley of dreams, one, a weaver of words, the other, a spinner of papers. .. This is the extreme case of 'clear vision' in LCV.

And 'lightweight' is the back-door for those of us who won't end up like C.Mohan. I mean its not like everyone gets into Austin, writes a thesis, joins Almaden etc. So, LCV says 'be-lightweight'.. don't burden yourself with too much debt. Now, with due respect to all concerned people / parties, I'm not going to get into discussions on ROI on an MS from Stanford or job prospects after passing out from costly && top schools, but all I've to say is, 'in view of present situation / economic aspects, et al.', keeping yourself 'light-weight' helps just in case the CV part backfires. So, going for an MS to a univ for which you dun have to take a 'lot of loan' would give you options like.. pass-out, do a job in US or come back to India and do a job, do a job for sometime and then start off with your thesis (funded-PhD), or do something totally diff coz you suddenly feel that your life isn't meant for what you've been doin and you want to be, say a guitarist or a rockstar or want to become a dedicated Iscon member leaving all worldly attrcations ;-), for instance..

Again, defining 'lot of loan' is very subjective and so is drawing a lower-cut on the kind of school you want to go to, but I still feel every person who's as mature as being an aspiring graduate shld know whr to draw the line. Being lightweight just gives us those extra options and freedom which is needed after all to realize the CV part.. and short-term, at least effectively decouples us in turn from economy and depreciation woes which I seriously think shouldn't be a priority for us right now.

Well, I find this line of thought very helpful, so thought of sharing. I'm not trying to generalize / target on anything living or dead :-). This is a piece of information evangelizing an idea and is free to own (the TM not withstanding)

ATB and Cheers !

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