Patent decision
- BL number
- O/549/19
- Concerning rights in
- GB1716526.7
- Hearing Officer
- Mrs C L Davies
- Decision date
- 19 September 2019
- Person(s) or Company(s) involved
- Adobe Systems Incorporated
- Provisions discussed
- PA 1977 Section 1(2)(a) and 1(2)(c)
- Keywords
- Excluded fields (refused)
- Related Decisions
- None
Summary
The invention relates to a method and system for recommending software actions to create an image and recommending images to demonstrate the effects of software actions. Asset processing applications may recommend actions to a designer who is editing a particular asset e.g. images, videos, audio files, drawings, and the like. In contrast to systems that recommend actions (e.g., software edits) based on a history of edits applied by a designer to show the designer new or unexplored features of an asset processing application, the application describes techniques for recommending actions for an asset provided by the designer (e.g., for an image being edited by the designer) selected according to a distance measure between the asset provided by the designer and a plurality of representations of actions. A projection function is used to transform representations of assets to a same dimension as representations of actions, in order to enable calculation of the distance measure in a vector space. Based on comparisons in the vector space, recommendations of software actions and assets can be made that reflect a "closeness" in the vector space according to the joint embedding learned by the projection function.
The Hearing Officer heard arguments from the applicant on the standard of proof required by examiners in objecting to inventions relating to excluded subject-matter and on how the invention is similar to the invention set out in Vicom which had been found to be patentable.
On applying the Aerotel/Macrossan test, the Hearing Officer found that the invention claimed was excluded as a computer program as such and a mathematical method as such. The application was refused under section 18(3).
Full decision O/549/19 
720Kb
