Faced with the problem of a declining birthrate, an aging population and a declining labor force, Japan has been expecting women’s more active participation in society. Recently, certain data suggested that women’s participation is also important for promoting innovation. On July 16 2018, it was reported that Development Bank of Japan concluded that companies’ research and development would create higher economic value patents, if it involves both male and female inventors. The economic value in this analysis is calculated based on the value of patent assets calculated from the company’s market capitalization etc. and the number of papers that cite the patent. The result of analysis reportedly shows that the […]

Japan has a national holiday called “Marine Day”. It was July 16 this year. The purposes of the holiday is to give thanks to ocean’s bounty and to consider the importance of the ocean to Japan as an island nation. It’s good time to think about the destruction of the environment of the ocean. Ocean pollution arising from plastic garbage has been getting worse. Reportedly, more than 8 million tons of plastics enter the ocean every year. It destroys the ocean ecosystem and also possibly causes human health damage through seafood.   UN DECLARES WAR ON OCEAN PLASTIC Japan is the second largest in the per capita amount of garbage […]

The machine translation system of the Japan Patent Office (JPO) will be upgraded in May 2019. Toshiba Digital Solutions Corporation (TDS), which was split off from Toshiba Corporation in July 2017, won a contract with the JPO for the  development of the system. According to the announcement on July 10 2018, in order to improve translation accuracy, the new system will adopt the technologies to: automatically extract Claims and fixed format parts from a patent document using TDS’s natural language processing system and appropriately distribute them to NMT (Neural Machine Translation), RBMT (Rule Based Machine Translation), and SMT (Statistical Machine Translation); and format input sentence. As for NMT, it will […]

Japan starts to study a blockchain system for contents management. The government is aiming to support Japanese contents business (e.g. game, character) by providing a system which realizes smooth copyrights handling by using smart contract and other functions based on blockchain technology. The Japanese government is reportedly planning to proceed to the validation phase in 2019. In addition to this government project, Sony seems considering using blockchain technology for Digital Rights Management (DRM). Reportedly, Sony has filed a patent application, which was published by USPTO on April 26 2018, for using blockchain technology to manage ownership of purchased games for PlayStation 4. Blockchain technology-based IP platform is becoming hot. So […]