Innovation keeps rolling - 15 January 2024

Employed by IBM as an engineer means that there will be continuous opportunity and pressure to create intellectual property, specifically patents.  I was exposed to this during my time there from 2001-2005.  It was one of the better parts of the job.  Engineers would write up an internal document that proposed and described a patent idea.  These proposals would be reviewed by teams of senior engineers under the guidance of an internal patent lawyer (external patent lawyers would be used for the process of drafting and submitting the patents, and the internal lawyers would oversee them).  

Among the patent ideas I wrote in about 2003 or so was the idea that a camera should combine GPS information with compass readings and focus data to determine what someone was photographing.  If you are standing in a particular location (GPS data) and pointing your camera in a particular direction with a focus point about 200 yards away, then you are probably taking a photo of the Eiffel Tower.  And so on.  Clearly this did not work for photos of people or pets, but you would at least be able to say that the Eiffel Tower was in the background of your photo of little Fee-Fee.  This was in the days before AI - long before something as small as a camera could carry the training set or network of a large language model (LLM-AI).  

Sadly, the idea was denied by the local patent team.  They felt it was too easy to fake using false GPS transmitters and the like (as if anyone wanted to disrupt your photos of Fee-Fee such that they would spend thousands of dollars and risk arrest to disrupt your GPS signals.  But I digress.)

Recently, Swarovski has announced new binoculars that will identify birds.  The Swarovski product is a variant of my idea - the one I could not patent.  (Viz., to use geospatial and image data to deduce situational information when taking or viewing an image.)  I wish them well.