Profile of an Article One Patent Researcher
Posted on Fri, Jul 02, 2010
Researcher Michael O'Keeffe (Riskmentor) was the winning Researcher for the AUTO 442 Study.
Michael is an Irish biotechnology expert who currently divides his time visiting family in Ireland, the UK, Spain and Canada. Michael works as a freelance patent searcher and Japanese to English translator, and he has lived in La Rioja in the North of Spain for the past three years.
In the past, Michael worked as a patent examiner and on the World Patent Index database with Thomson Scientific. To aid his research efforts, Michael has a B.Sc. in Biology with a major in Genetics from Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, a M.Sc. in Biotechnology from Okayama University in Japan and a Diploma in Japanese from Osaka University. Michael's primary language is English, but he also speaks Japanese and Spanish fluently, which allows him to research in all three of these languages. Michael says that researching for AOP Studies is "challenging and, when successful, rewarding."
Below Michael kindly shares the factors which led him to be so successful in the AUTO 442 Study:
The task of finding prior art on 442 was a natural one for me for a number of reasons.
- I remember the start-stop technology in a VW my brother-in-law owned in the mid 1980s.
- The start-stop technology was in use in city buses in Japan from the late 1990s when I lived there.
- I know my way around patent databases such as that of the USPTO, Esp@ce, JPO and World Patent Index (WPI) as I worked on WPI for 12 years.
- I can read and translate Japanese and while others can too, using my knowledge to find unpublished [in English] Japanese references adds depth to any patent study.
To succeed in solving an AOP patent prior art Study requires knowledge of the technology, an understanding of patents and a lot of determination to track down key references, but an ounce of inspiration or 'I-saw-that-somewhere-before' goes a long way.
Michael offers the following advice to the AOP community: "Read the patent carefully and then dig deep in the patent and non-patent databases to find relevant prior art. Talk to someone who knows the field and, if successful, share the reward with them!"
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