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 […]