Details of a new technology making possible automatic personal profiling, which was developed by academics at the Palacký University Faculty of Arts (UP FA) and patented at the US Patent Office, has been published by the World Intellectual Property Organization.
Dan Faltýnek, Martina Benešová, Ondřej Kučera, and Vladimír Matlach, members of the UP FA Departments of General Linguistics and Asian Studies, have recently developed a technology which makes it possible to “tune” digital communication in such a way that the text is formulated particularly for each individual, in their own means of expression. The technology translates any text into the language of the target individual. This, the first “single-person personalisation”, is finding its uses for example in the areas of safety and state defence, in public administration, personnel, marketing, and personalisation. The academics recently patented it at the US Patent Office, and halfway through its patent pending period, it details have been published by the World Intellectual Property Organization.
“The patent process is as follows: the inventor contacts a patent attorney, who evaluates whether the novelty of the proposal can be protected as a technological whole. Then patent research is carried out, which determines whether the insistence that the technology is novel is true. If the proposed solution is found novel, then it is declared patentable. Our patent attorney filed an application to the United States Patent and Trademark Office and the filing of that application created instant intellectual property protection. At the same time, an eighteen-month deadline was given to publish the patent. Firms use this window in order to prepare the technology for the market as a competitive advantage. We however decided to speed this process up and asked for premature publication of the patent in the middle of this window. We want to make use of the publication as an invitation to potential users,” said Dan Faltýnek from the UP FA Department of General Linguistics.
The UP team decided to reveal their solution because in recent months the evolution of artificial intelligence has made incredible advances. “Thanks to the promotion of the faculty and university, we are already discussing implementing the technology with the Czech Army and the Czech Police National Center for Combating Terrorism, Extremism, and Cybercrime,” said Martina Benešová. She added that in the near future they would like to implement an automatic chat system with these partners translating disinformation channels, using analogue technology. “Full personalisation is the missing link in the huge advances of GPT. We no longer doubt the intelligence and agency of human-designed software. By using our personalisation, we just want to make it more human, and we hope that we will soon find other partners who will help us achieve AI with a human face,” the UP FA linguists said.
The Olomouc technology, entitled “System and method for adapting text-based data structures to text samples”, was created at UP FA. It is competing against technologies by Adobe and Google. The academics have three pieces of software tailored to the technology with the activities they want to connect. We have already written on this theme. More information on the start-up is available here.