Patents4innovation - Inventor Stories

Inventor Stories

Inventions take several years of research before leading to actual development of products. It is only natural that the inventors would like to see their computer implemented inventions protected. Below you can read some of their stories:

Ronald Aarts, inventor at Philips Research, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

Inventor: Ronald Aarts, Philips Research
Invention: Incredible Sound
Areas of application: television-sets with built-in loudspeakers, ghetto-blasters, other audio and video electronics.

Ronald Aarts For a long time, the sound quality of television-sets with built-in loudspeakers was not optimal for a simple reason. Even if the sound was transmitted by the TV in excellent two-channel stereo, the viewer could not expect to perceive satisfactory stereo quality. For a good perception of stereo sound, the angle formed by loudspeakers and listener must be relatively wide. In a television-set with built-in speakers, however, this angle is very narrow, because the speakers are very close together.

In the 1990’s, Ronald Aarts of Philips Research came up with a solution: Incredible Sound. This stereo base-widening system provides the listener with a virtual stereo effect, even when the speakers are too close together for normal stereo.

Aarts’ expertise in psycho-physiological acoustics was the basis for his invention. He carefully analyzed the perception of stereo sound by listeners in situations where the location of the two loudspeakers was ideal. He made the same perception-analysis in ‘bad’ situations, where the speakers were positioned too closely together.

Aarts captured the differences in sound-perception in a mathematical model that he used for signal modification. As a result, the television-set with built in speakers sounds just like high quality stereo.The signal modification in Incredible Sound is very complex, as almost all aspects of the sound must be modified. The algorithms can be executed through hardware and software. ‘If there is a digital signal processor in the appliance already, it is cheaper and more versatile to choose embedded software for implementation. That’s what you see nowadays in television-sets and most other applications’, Aarts explains. ‘Hardware implementation with a printed circuit board (PCB) would be a clumsy and more expensive solution. Why? Because it would oblige you to convert an already digital signal to analog for it to work with the PCB, and then back again to digital’. Hardware implementation is nowadays only used for relatively cheap audio equipment without digital signal processors, such as a ghetto-blaster.

‘But whatever the implementation, hardware or software, the invention is embodied in the technical model and algorithms. That’s the real fruit of the idea and the R&D that made Incredible Sound possible’, Aarts says. ‘Whether you choose hardware or software for the implementation is irrelevant to the invention as such’.

Ronald Aarts and Philips have laid down the inventions that made Incredible Sound possible in five patents. Different forms of implementation (software, hardware) are mentioned in the patent, but the software itself is not spelled out. ‘You don’t run into that software by accident’, Aarts explains. ‘The software for implementation of Incredible Sound is so specific, that somebody outside Philips would only write these or similar lines of software code if he was trying to copy Incredible Sound. But then he would be infringing our patent’.

Ronald Aarts

Ronald Aarts (1956) is a Research Fellow at the Digital Signal Processing Group of Philips Research in Eindhoven (The Netherlands). Ronald Aarts, who joined Philips Research in 1977, has made major contributions to audio inventions such as Incredible Sound and Ultra Bass. He is currently engaged in signal processing for medical engineering and audio.

Ronald Aarts is a Fellow of the Audio Engineering Society and a Senior Member of the IEEE. He has received various internal Philips awards. He has written, and contributed to, various books. Ronald Aarts has also produced more than 70 external papers for journals and conferences. In 1995, he received a PhD from the University of Delft (The Netherlands) for a thesis on the design and psychophysical assessment of loudspeaker systems.

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Jeroen Breebaart, inventor at Philips Research, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

Inventor: Jeroen Breebaart, Philips Research
Invention: Parametric Stereo
Areas of application: Mobile phones, MP3 players, digital radio

Jeroen Breebaart Nowadays, sound is often transported from one location to another through digital transmission. Downloading music from the internet is a good example. Various compression technologies make these transmissions faster and cheaper, by reducing the amount of digital information that has to be sent from transmitter to receiver.

Jeroen Breebaart (Philips Research) has made a valuable contribution in this area. Normally, digital transmission of stereo sound (two channels) involves many more bites than transmission of mono sound (one channel). Jeroen Breebaart’s Parametric Stereo technology makes it possible to encode a stereo audio signal as if it were a mono signal. This reduced mono bit stream is accompanied by a small amount of extra information that allows the receiver’s decoder to convert the mono signal back to a stereo signal, with hardly any loss of sound quality. Parametric Stereo achieves up to 40% higher compression rates than conventional stereo coding techniques.

‘Parametric Stereo started off as a “Friday Afternoon” project’, Jeroen Breebaart says. ‘At Philips Research, that’s how we call the spontaneous, unscheduled projects we are encouraged to embark on every now and then. Some of these projects are not successful, but they are always challenging and keep your mind fresh. Fortunately, this one also resulted in a nice breakthrough’.

The invention consists of algorithms (well-defined sets of instructions) that are executed through software programs. Parametric Stereo is particularly useful for mobile telephony, where bandwidth is relatively scarce and expensive. Parametric Stereo was included in the audio compressing standard MPEG4 (the successor to MP3), as well as in the new 3GPP standards for digital transmission via mobile phones.

Breebaart and his colleagues at Philips Research are currently working to extend the technology from two-channel to multi-channel audio. Philips and Coding Technologies, a small Swedish-German company specialized in audio compression technology, have already jointly developed an algorithm to represent 5.1-channel audio in a reduced digital format. Digital radio is expected to become an important area of application for this 5.1-channel variant of Parametric Stereo.

Since he joined Philips in 2001, Jeroen Breebaart has filed about twenty patents. The majority of these patent-applications are related to Parametric Stereo. Because the algorithms are executed through software, patentability of this cluster of inventions would be endangered if computer-implemented inventions were no longer allowed to be patented, despite the clear technical application of the inventions. What’s more, in 2003 the European Parliament suggested in one of its amendments to the draft Directive that ‘processing, handling and presenting of information’ are to be excluded from patentability. ‘Sound’ can be defined as nothing but ‘information’, so this amendment could exclude the whole invention from patentability.

‘I would find the exclusion of computer-implemented inventions from patentability hard to understand’, says Breebaart. ‘In electronics, there are hardly any areas left where you do not use software for the implementation of an invention. There is even software in some coffee-makers these days.’

Jeroen Breebaart:

Jeroen Breebaart (1970) is a Senior Scientist with the Digital Signal Processing Group at Philips Research Eindhoven (The Netherlands). He has always had a great interest in the perception and modification of sound. Jeroen Breebaart joined Philips in 2001, immediately after receiving his PhD from the University of Eindhoven for his thesis on mathematical models to describe the human perception of spatial sound. He graduated in biomedical engineering from the same university in 1997.

In his short career, Jeroen Breebaart has already filed for about twenty patents, most of them related to Parametric Stereo . He has written more than twenty papers for external conferences and journals.

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Jose Costa-Requena, inventor at Nokia, Helsinki, Finland

Inventor: Jose Costa-Requena

My name is Jose Costa-Requena. I am a Senior Technology manager who works for Nokia in Helsinki, Finland. I am very familiar with the Nokia patent process. I believe that my expertise in multiple technology areas and my creative personality are the basis for my being so innovative. I have submitted many invention reports for evaluation - mostly in the field of computer-implemented inventions (CIIs) - during the 5 years I have been working for Nokia. Nokia has decided to file patent applications on about half of my ideas.

An example of one of my CIIs is to do with mobile phones and is about including location information as part of the so-called “Presence” data. In the Presence service users get information about other users such as status, mood, user’s device capabilities, etc. Presence did not previously take into account location information as an important piece of data that brings added value to the service. The key technology involved in this invention is something called Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) which is part of the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS). Research is crucial to make inventions like this where new formats for representing location data needs to be provided either directly from the mobile phone or assisted by the network. This involves a lot of technical expertise and is far from trivial.

Nokia rewards inventors for their contributions with a monetary payment. However, for me personally the best feeling of appreciation comes just with the email communicating that Nokia has decided to file a patent application on my ideas. I enjoy the fact that I am influencing the future technology and adding value to Nokia business.

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Igor Curcio, inventor at Nokia Corporation, Tampere, Finland

My name is Igor Curcio. I am working for Nokia Corporation in Tampere, Finland. I am involved in standardization and technology creation in the areas of video telephony, Voice over IP, streaming, multicasting/broadcasting etc. I have personally authored about 30 invention reports in the above technology areas. The patent process in Nokia is very challenging: I am involved in all the relevant phases of the patent drafting until a patent application is filed and after that, also when a patent goes through the different examination phases. Personally, I am also involved as a consultant/reviewer on other people’s inventions in my main technology area specialties.

An example of one of my computer-implemented inventions is one related to the area of mobile streaming on bit rate adaptation. The invention will make video streaming really work over mobile phones and will be implemented in Nokia products with streaming capabilities. This particular patent application has been used for licensing purposes. In general, for producing an invention, a considerable amount of research effort is required.
Making inventions gives also quite good rewards. Monetary rewards and the possibility to receive also special company rewards (for example my project was awarded as Project of the year 2004 by the Nokia CTO). In addition, the personal satisfaction of being an inventor is also part of the benefit of working in this field.

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Lars Dalsgaard, inventor at Nokia, Oulu, Finland

Inventor: Lars Dalsgaard

My name is Lars Dalsgaard. I work for Nokia R&D in Oulu, Finland. My experience with the invention process inside Nokia is basically as long as my employment (more than 9 years). During this period I have filed around 15 invention reports resulting in 4 granted patents. The inventions are mostly concentrated in the area of protocol software signalling, Mobile Station (MS) behaviour and improvements, that is to say “computer-implemented inventions” (CIIs).

One CII invention I could mention is a basic but valuable improvement in the signalling between the network and MS. By adding some extra information in the information broadcasted by the network concerning neighbouring cells service support, it became possible for the MS to change cell with less interruption time in the data transfer. This means better overall user experience.

This and another of my CII inventions are currently used in Nokia products. As they are included in the standards for how the MS shall operate they have improved Nokia’s competitive situation. The process of coming up with new ways of solving these kind of technical problems is long and based a lot on knowledge and experience.

I feel that filing an invention report and getting a patent granted is a great achievement, as this means that you have contributed with something essential. Besides this, it gives personal satisfaction if the idea helps improving our products or solves a clear problem in the industry. I have also received financial compensation from Nokia’s inventor awards.

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Rossella De Benedittis, inventor at Siemens Mobile Communication S.p.A., Milan, Italy

Name: Rossella De Benedittis
Title: Ing.
Profession: Technical leader for the radio access technologies; system engineering aspects
Date of birth : 5 July 1961
Organisation Unit: Siemens Mobile Communication S.p.A., Milan Italy

Rossella De Benedittis I was appointed as inventor or co-inventor in 31 patent applications in the time period from 1993 in the fields of ’DECT standard‘ and ’3G radio communication systems‘; most of these led to patents world-wide. The greatest part of my inventions have been realized in products and have contributed to success in the market.

Regarding the technology and the inventions, phone and e-mail are among the fundamentals in third-generation mobile phones. Using the mobile to transmit “live” pictures from your holiday resort to friends back home, or to hold videoconferences, to send faxes, to surf the internet, wherever you are: such are the multimedia services that will be available worldwide and will make “3G” mobiles so attractive.

Said list of patents was originated after a research effort of several years by my Italian company Siemens Mobile Communication S.p.A. and most of them are included in the Siemens 3G patent list for the Siemens ongoing cross-license-agreements.

Considering that the Mobile Networks Division of Siemens Mobile Communication S.p.A. has the mission to develop and sell mobile communication infrastructure and services for mobile communications, my inventions contributed in improving the efficiency of the Siemens Mobile Communications S.p.A. 3G systems supplied by my company to the Italian service provider H3G. My inventions have given therefore a significant contribution to the Siemens mobile’s success in 3G/UMTS networks technology for the Italian market and for increasing the Siemens market share in mobile communication infrastructure world-wide.

Conclusion
The version of the directive as adopted by the European Parliament in September 2003 would forbid patents in the area of information and data processing, even if a technical contribution is made and technical devices are used. This excludes patent protection for 3G related inventions which are about information and data processing. My inventions would lose protection and would therefore be invalidated and the Siemens Mobile Communication S.p.A. R&D effort zeroed.

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Gerard de Haan, inventor at Philips Research, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

Inventor: Gerard de Haan, Philips Research
Invention: 100 Hertz television

Gerard de Haan is the father of 100 Hertz television: the projection of 100 images per second on a television screen instead of the traditional 50. More images per second means a better, smoother, less ‘flickering’ viewer’s experience.

Television cameras only register 50 images per second. In order to raise the number of images projected to 100, the television set has to ‘invent’ another 50 images. Inside a sandwich of each pair of real images, an invented one is introduced. To achieve the correct new images, the movements of objects in the real images must be estimated and compensated correctly.

That’s where Gerard de Haan comes in. About forty out of the more than sixty European patents filed by him over the years deal with different aspects of motion estimation and compensation. Under his direction, Philips’ researchers managed to analyze and describe the presence, direction and speed of motion in images. Their findings resulted in the definition of new, complex algorithms (well-defined sets of instructions) that enabled televisions to come up with the right new images through signal processing of the existing images. According to De Haan, finding the right solutions wasn’t easy or cheap: ‘There was a lot of trial-and-error and good old craftsmanship involved in our inventions. Getting the right algorithms cost us time, money and effort’.

As usual, the family of patents protects the technical invention as well as the methods and devices used for its implementation. This implementation in a television set can take place through pure hardware (an integrated circuit) or through software defining the operations of a general-purpose processor.

Software often provides a less expensive and more flexible solution than hardware. If computer-implemented inventions cannot be patented anymore, competitors could simply copy the software-implementation of the invention without paying any compensation to Philips. What’s more, in 2003 the European Parliament suggested in one of its amendments to the draft Directive that ‘processing, handling and presenting of information’ are to be excluded from patentability. As a television image could be defined as nothing but ‘information’, this would exclude the whole invention from patentability, although it clearly has a technical application.

The patents should not worry software developers at all, according to Gerard de Haan. The software used in the implementation of the invention is extremely specific. You don’t run into it by accident, working on something entirely different. Similar software would only be written by somebody who is looking to solve the same technical problem in the same way. In other words, by somebody who is consciously trying to copy the invention, infringing the patent.

Gerard de Haan:

Gerard de Haan (1956) is a Research Fellow at the Video Processing & Visual Perception Group of Philips Research Eindhoven (The Netherlands). He also teaches ‘Video Processing for Multimedia Systems’ at Eindhoven University of Technology as a part-time Professor.

Gerard de Haan has a particular interest in motion estimation, video format conversion and image enhancement. His work in these areas has resulted in several books, about one hundred papers and over 60 patents. He received a PhD from Delft University of Technology (The Netherlands) in 1992 for his thesis on ‘Motion Estimation and Motion Compensation’.

Gerard de Haan and Philips have received many international awards for his scientific work. Among others, the ‘Chester Sall Award’ from the IEEE Consumer Electronics Society (2002), the ‘Business Innovation Award’ from The Wall Street Journal Europe (2001) and the ‘European Video Innovation Award’ from the European Imaging and Sound Association (1995) stand out.

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Paul Harvey, inventor at Philips Medical Systems, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

Inventor: Paul Harvey, Philips Medical Systems
Invention: Contrast-Enhanced, Timing-Robust Angiography (CENTRA)
Areas of application: Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) of blood vessels (professional medical equipment)

Paul Harvey Over the last few decades, Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) has revolutionized the way images of internal organs, tissues and structures of the body are obtained. Compared to other technologies in this area, MRI is often safer and more versatile.

Contrast enhanced MR angiography (CE-MRA) is a relatively new application of MRI. It provides detailed images of the blood vessels inside the human body.

During a CE-MRA procedure, a contrast agent is administered to the patient through intravenous injection. When the contrast agent reaches the heart, a 3D imaging process is started, designed to be sensitive primarily to the contrast agent.

Timing is very important in this procedure. Normally, doctors are interested in an MR image that shows only the arterial blood vessels, the vessels that carry the blood from the heart to the body. They want to avoid so-called ‘venous enhancement’, a ‘contamination’ of the image by veins, the vessels through which the blood returns to the heart. If the 3D scan is triggered too late, venous enhancement will occur, as the contrast agent will have reached the veins. If the 3D scan is triggered too early, contrast is lost.

Because of this time-sensitiveness, in traditional CE-MRA operators have to combine many consecutive MR images of the same patient to get a satisfactory ‘picture’. This is a costly and time-consuming exercise.

Contrast-Enhanced, Timing-Robust Angiography (CENTRA), invented by Paul Harvey, eliminates this problem of venous enhancement and timing errors through a smart choice of the order in which different MRI data are acquired during the uptake of the contrast agent by the body. This difference in order of data-collection is implemented through modifications in the software that is used to operate the CE-MRA scan method. According to Harvey, this is a prime example of how an invention, based on new insight into a physical mechanism, was realized by changing the software in an otherwise standard MRI. Implementation of new inventions with software is part of a well-established pattern in the history of MRI. Harvey: ‘Over the last three decades, speed and quality of MRI have increased tremendously. These dramatic improvements have been brought about largely by inventions of new MRI methods that, for their implementation, rely almost completely on the use of different software instructions for controlling similar hardware.’

For Harvey, it would be very unfortunate, to say the least, if this type of software-enabled invention could not be patented anymore: ‘Becoming an expert who can move MRI-technology forward takes years. MRI equipment costs millions of euros to produce. MRI-related R&D is costly, too. Without the financial incentive provided by patent ownership, most companies and individuals would have pursued other activities and MRI would not have progressed the way it has.’

Paul Harvey

Paul Harvey (1966) is a Senior System Architect for MRI at Philips’ Product Division Medical Systems. He is based in Best (The Netherlands). Since joining Philips in 1999, Paul Harvey has directed the system design of Gyroscan 3.0T Intera and the initial pre-development of the Gyroscan 1.0T Panorama, two revolutionary MR products.
Paul Harvey has written more than 60 scientific articles and is regularly invited to conferences and other meetings as a guest-speaker on MRI.
Paul Harvey obtained his PhD from Nottingham University (UK) in 1991, after working at the same university for several years with Nobel-prize winning professor Sir Peter Mansfield. Paul Harvey worked as a Senior Physicist MRI for Elscint Ltd. from 1993 to 1998.

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Terho Kaikuranta, inventor at Nokia, Salo, Finland

Inventor: Terho Kaikuranta

My name is Terho Kaikuranta and I work as a research manager for Nokia in Salo, Finland. I coordinate activities relating to emerging technologies in several fields, such as user interface hardware, new product concepts, optics and cross-disciplinary projects.

Innovations and patenting are naturally closely linked with early phase activities and working with IPR has become a natural part of the job. Most of the innovation in the areas I am working falls into the category of computer-implemented inventions ("CIIs").

One example of these innovations is actually a CII in which we created a specific method to process audio signals so that people with significant hearing loss could listen and understand speech in conditions that otherwise would have been difficult. This increases the number of e.g. elderly people that could use mobile phones making every day living more convenient. We focused in creating the audio processing functionality and verifying its efficiency. We had to work with phonetics, medical testing methods and signal processing, and finally succeeded in proving the benefit. Typical implementation in a product involves audio processing software with control methods for users.

I personally benefit from the patenting process because each accepted invention report, filed patent application or granted patent is associated with a small financial award. I have also received a few special awards for my innovative ideas.

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Dieter Kopp, inventor at Alcatel, Stuttgart, Germany

Inventor: Dieter Kopp, Alcatel

I am Dieter Kopp, an inventor employed with Alcatel in Stuttgart, Germany. I am currently leading a project on the convergence of IT technology with communication technology.

The core of our work consists in inventing applications and developing the new ideas into marketable products. My inventions pertain to technologies such as Digital Signal Processing, interfaces to telecommunication systems, architecture, methods, algorithms and related implementation.

Between 1983 and 2003, Alcatel has filed 59 patent applications in which I was inventor or co-inventor.

To relate just two examples of our computer-implemented inventions:

In 1996, we invented a method which allows an answering machine to choose one of several recoded messages, according to the country code of the incoming call.

In 2000, a method was invented that improved speech recognition by separating splitting the client from the server, and a specific pre-processing within the user terminal itself. This was enabled only by running software in the user terminal.

When I began my career, much of the innovation in our industry was hardware-related. Over the years, the balance has gradually shifted as new solutions included fewer and fewer hardware elements and more and more software. Today, almost all of the inventions in my area concern systems implemented in software.

To be able to match the protection to the actual invention, the patent claims therefore have to refer to functionalities of the invention, not to hardware components that can easily be substituted by others.

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Rainer Kuth, inventor at Siemens AG Medical Solutions, Erlangen, Germany

Inventor: Rainer Kuth
Title: Physicist
Date of birth: 1. September 1959
Organization Unit: SIEMENS AG, Medical Solutions

Rainer Kuth I am inventor since 1988 on a number of inventions on Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) of which many were joint inventions with inventors from different universities throughout Europe. Many did also lead to patents.

MRI produces images with high contrast of the soft tissue including functional information of diffusion, perfusion and oxygen-consumption. In addition MRI avoids exposing the patients to x-ray.

My inventions brought MRI into surgical ORs for minimal invasive surgery of the brain and other complex regions of the body. The new functional MRI of the lung visualizes asthma and other severe lung diseases quantitatively in a high resolution and allows the physicians to optimize the medication.

The software of an MRI scanner consists of app. 30 Million lines of code. 95% of the MRI scanners are exported, mostly to the US.

Patent protection for computer-implemented inventions is essential to compete with our 10 world-wide competitors.

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