A team from the Swinburne University of Technology is analysing text data from Australia’s patent office to predict the evolution of technologies.
The team is working at the University’s new Intelligent Data Analytics Lab, which is a part of the University’s Digital Research Innovation Capability Platform.
According to a recent press release, the data scientists are bringing deep neural-network machine learning algorithms and rapidly maturing natural language processing technology to the government agency, IP Australia.
What will the software do?
They are hoping to develop software that scans the agency’s past 20 years of patents as well as scientific article texts, including specifications and claims.
The model will tackle the natural language processing needed to analyse the patent data and any associated scientific articles. However, it will be the modelling parameters that are the hardest to identify.
The project would analyse information regarding failed technologies and success stories. Doing so, it can indicate which technologies the country should invest in.
On a broader scale, the work could reveal why scientific knowledge progresses in certain directions and triggers for faster or slower growth across fields.
The ARC Linkage Project grant funded results could ultimately improve IP Australia’s database search, revealing new technologies and potential collaborators for business analytics companies.
Moreover, it can help academic economists to understand how knowledge travels and accumulates.
Tracking Trademarks with TM-Link
This project follows the University’s successful 2017 collaboration with IP Australia and the University of Melbourne.
The group from Swinburne created a world-first trademark database, called TM-Link, which links the trademark application numbers across countries.
The databases’ neural network was designed to identify equivalent trade marks in different jurisdictions, assigning a common identification marker by considering similar trademark text, applicant names and classes.
This provided insights into the foreign trade interests of Australian businesses, by showing how trademarks are used in different markets, while also opening research into trademark trends.
The data already includes more than 10 million entries and helps track trademark use across regions. It confirms its finding based on text and imagery, using state-of-the-art imaging technology.
A trademark labelling game also improves the algorithm’s training data by asking users to confirm a match between suggested pairs of trademarks.
Finding a home in Melbourne
In other news, a global data analytics company announced that it will set up an Australian and New Zealand (ANZ) headquarters in Melbourne to grow its client base, creating new local jobs.
Parliamentary Secretary for Jobs Jane Garrett officially opened the company’s office, with the company’s investment demonstrating that Melbourne is continuing to gain momentum as a global tech hub.
The company empowers the builders of analytics apps like the data analysts, engineers and scientists, and developers and business analysts to derive insights from complex data.
The ANZ headquarters will connect Victoria’s tech and start-up sectors with more than 500 global employees at offices in Tel-Aviv, New York, Arizona, Tokyo and London.
Victoria is now home to more than 19,000 tech businesses that employ more than 117,000 people and generate revenue upwards of A$ 36.6 billion each year.
Melbourne is the ideal location so that the company can tap into the local market with nearly a quarter of Australia’s data centres and 86% of the nation’s large enterprises using cloud computing services.
This region has numerous companies that want to leverage insights from complex data, to change the way they do business and, perhaps, change the world.
