PTAB

IPR2019-00840

Microsoft Corp v. IPA Technologies Inc

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Petition
petition

1. Case Identification

2. Patent Overview

  • Title: Using a Community of Distributed Electronic Agents to Support a Highly Mobile, Ambient Computing Environment
  • Brief Description: The ’128 patent discloses a system for collective task completion among distributed software agents in a mobile computing environment. The system uses a proprietary inter-agent communication language (ICL) with distinct protocol layers to facilitate cooperative communication and problem-solving between agents.

3. Grounds for Unpatentability

Ground 1: Obviousness over Kiss and FIPA97 - Claims 1-6, 20-26, 40-42, and 44-45 are obvious over Kiss in view of FIPA97.

  • Prior Art Relied Upon: Kiss (Patent 6,484,155) and FIPA97 (FIPA 1997 v 1.0 Specification).
  • Core Argument for this Ground:
    • Prior Art Mapping: Petitioner argued that Kiss discloses the foundational system of a collaborative community of distributed electronic agents, including an agent registry for tracking agent capabilities and a "meta-agent" that functions as the claimed facilitator agent for coordinating tasks. However, Kiss does not explicitly teach the specific inter-agent communication language (ICL) limitations added during prosecution. Petitioner asserted that FIPA97, a well-known industry standard for agent interoperability, supplies these missing elements. FIPA97's Agent Communication Language (ACL) discloses a "layer of conversational protocol" defined by "communicative acts" (the claimed "event types") and associated parameter lists. Petitioner contended that FIPA97's parameters, such as :receiver (which can specify a single agent or a tuple of agents for multicasting) and :protocol (which alters the meaning of a "call for proposals"), refine the meaning of the message, thus teaching the "parameter lists further refine the one or more events" limitation. FIPA97 also teaches applying agent technology in a mobile environment with devices like PDAs, satisfying the "mobile computing environment" limitation.
    • Motivation to Combine: A Person of Ordinary Skill in the Art (POSITA) would combine the Kiss system with the FIPA97 communication standard because Kiss's multi-agent system inherently requires a robust communication protocol to function. FIPA97 provided a publicly available, standardized, and predictable solution designed specifically to facilitate interoperability among disparate agent systems. Implementing FIPA97's ACL within Kiss's framework was argued to be a convenient and efficient way to enable effective communication.
    • Expectation of Success: A POSITA would have had a reasonable expectation of success because combining a known agent architecture (Kiss) with a standard communication protocol (FIPA97) was an arrangement of old elements, each performing its known function to yield a predictable result.

Ground 2: Obviousness over Kiss, FIPA97, and Moran - Claims 3, 9-11, 24, 27, 29-31, and 44 are obvious over Kiss in view of FIPA97 and Moran.

  • Prior Art Relied Upon: Kiss (Patent 6,484,155), FIPA97 (FIPA 1997 v 1.0 Specification), and Moran (a 1997 publication titled "Multimodal User Interfaces in the Open Agent Architecture").
  • Core Argument for this Ground:
    • Prior Art Mapping: This ground builds upon the Kiss/FIPA97 combination to address additional limitations in certain dependent claims. Petitioner asserted that Moran teaches the specific multimodal functionalities not fully disclosed by the primary combination. For instance, Moran describes a multi-agent mobile system with "Map-based Tourist Information" (relevant to claims 3 and 24), a multifunctional "office assistant" with email and telephony interfaces responsive to spoken commands (relevant to claims 9-11, 27, 29-31), and agents with expertise in "calendar and database access" to trigger notifications (relevant to claim 44).
    • Motivation to Combine: A POSITA would combine Moran's teachings with the Kiss/FIPA97 system to enhance its functionality and create a more user-friendly, feature-rich product. Moran explicitly encourages the integration of pre-existing components and disparate agents into a cohesive system. Adding Moran's advanced, human-centered user interface capabilities (e.g., natural language processing, gesture recognition) to the robust back-end agent framework of Kiss/FIPA97 would have been a logical and desirable design choice.
    • Expectation of Success: The combination would have been successful because Moran's architecture was designed for interoperability and the integration of multimodal functions into agent-based systems was a known area of development.

4. Key Claim Construction Positions

  • "a layer of conversational protocol": Petitioner proposed this term be construed as "a set of rules and standards governing the semantics of messages between agents." This construction emphasizes the semantic rules that allow one agent to understand a message from another.
  • "wherein the parameter lists further refine the one or more events": Petitioner argued this phrase means that the parameter list affects the semantic meaning of the event itself. This construction was central to distinguishing the claimed invention from prior art considered during prosecution (e.g., the Nwana reference), where parameters were argued to only modify context (like language or ontology) rather than the core meaning of the communicative act. For example, a parameter could change an "inform" message to an "inform one" or "inform many" message, thereby refining its meaning.

5. Relief Requested

  • Petitioner requests institution of IPR and cancellation of claims 1-6, 9-11, 20-27, 29-31, 40-42, and 44-45 as unpatentable.