FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
                                                      PTO 96-13
CONTACT:  Richard Maulsby
    Lisa-Joy Zgorski
    (703)305-8341

    PTO ANNOUNCES RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT CONTRACTS

ARLINGTON, VA -- The Commerce Department's Patent and Trademark Office
(PTO), in partnership with the Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency, has awarded $11 million in research and development
contracts to the University of Massachusetts Center for Intelligent
Information Retrieval and the San Diego Supercomputer Center to
enhance PTO's ability to access and evaluate complex technical data
in patent applications relating to
electronic commerce.

The PTO will use these research initiatives to advance search and
information retrieval of complex documents and data bases and to
test and evaluate advanced concepts for secure electronic commerce,
including electronic filing and patent application processing.
Complex scientific and technical information contained in patent
and trademark documents will be created once in their most
intelligent format, managed effectively, and re-used often by PTO's
examiners in the prosecution of patent and trademark applications.
Each project will support a team of academic and commercial
partners.  Over a dozen new, highly-skilled research jobs will be
created.

The University of Massachusetts Center for Intelligent Information
Retrieval (CIIR) will focus on developing and evaluating advanced
automated pattern matching tools.  The tools will be used to search
and retrieve intellectual property information associated with
figures and images, an important part of patent and trademark
applications.

The San Diego Supercomputer Center will provide high-performance
supercomputers linked by a very high-speed transcontinental
telecommunications network, which is the essential fabric of the
emerging Global Information Infrastructure (GII).  These inter-
linked supercomputers will provide a virtual computing environment
and the raw processing power for the PTO to test and evaluate
standardized approaches for handling complex scientific and
engineering documents across the GII.

These contracts include planned experiments to test the ability to
automatically identify, classify, and retrieve trademarks and logos
embedded within photographs.  The PTO seeks to demonstrate an early
automated capability to identify similarities in designs, figures,
and images in support of prior art patent searching.  Current non-
text searching is time consuming and relies mostly on the
examiner's visual search methods.

According to Bruce Lehman, Assistant Secretary of Commerce and
Commissioner of Patents and Trademarks, "By applying the research
we will take a giant step towards achieving our strategic vision of
developing a robust information technology that engages the
American public in the GII environment."

August 13, 1996                         ####