AI/ET Partnership Series #2: AI & Biotech

Ernie Beffel is a Managing Partner at Haynes Beffel & Wolfeld LLP. Ernie’s experience includes patent prosecution and development, the preparation of opinions on infringement and validity, and pre-litigation analysis, as well as general advice pertaining to intellectual property (IP) strategies and portfolio management. Since AlexNet in 2012, he has worked on the whole stack of Deep Learning (DL) implementation, including hardware, frameworks, feature engineering, and products. His team worked with Richard Socher patenting new frameworks after SalesForce acquired MetaMind. More recently, we have worked on Coarse Grained Reconfigurable Array (CGRA) chip technology and the Illumina stack for sequencing by synthesis (SBS), giving us exposure to the whole DL stack from the metal to Single Nucleotide Polymorphism (SNP) impacts on protein geometry.

Prior to his patent counseling and prosecution practice, Ernie devoted 18 years to trial practice, handling technology disputes, with nine months in-trial time. Ernie’s expertise as a trial lawyer has readily translated into the successful representation of clients, particularly in effective interviews and persuading Patent Examiners. Ernie is a graduate of Stanford Law School and of the University of Michigan, College of Engineering (IE + OR), with Highest Honors, including Tau Beta Pi and Alpha Pi Mu. In 1999, Ernie joined his law school classmate, Mark Haynes, to co-found Haynes Beffel & Wolfeld LLP.

Charles Boudreau is a Lead Administrative Patent Judge at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB or the Board). He earned his law degree from Columbia University and Master of Arts and Bachelor of Arts degrees in Chemistry from Harvard University. Prior to his appointment to the Board in May 2014, Judge Boudreau served as Associate General Counsel at Corel, Inc. He also previously served in private practice for nearly fifteen years, with broad experience in patent prosecution and litigation, and as a law clerk to the Honorable Alan D. Lourie of the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.

With two decades of experience in intellectual property law, Lisa Hillman's practice encompasses domestic and foreign patent procurement and portfolio management, interference practice, client counseling on validity, infringement, freedom-to-operate, due diligence review, and patent strategy matters. Lisa has broad experience in patent procurement and portfolio management in the areas of molecular biology, microbiology, fermentation technologies, human and veterinary diagnostics, personal diagnostics, proteomics, siRNA technologies, antibody technologies, Clustered Regularly Interspaced Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR) technologies, liposomes, biosensors, personalized medicine, tissue scaffolds, agriculture, orthobiologics, medical devices, immunotherapy, and pharmaceuticals. She represents small and large biotechnology, pharmaceutical, and diagnostic companies, as well as university clients and startups. 

Erik Huestis represents technology companies and research universities in intellectual property (IP) matters. His practice encompasses patent prosecution and strategy, as well as high technology aspects of IP litigation, export control, licensing, and corporate transactions. Erik provides IP advice to companies at all phases of development, from pre-funding through the Fortune 50. He works with clients in a variety of industries, including telecommunications, software, biotechnology, medical devices, and consumer products. Erik’s recent focus has included artificial intelligence in the genomics and medical imaging space, cryptography, quantum computing, and neuromorphic computing. Erik’s background is in computer science, and his industry experience includes several startup companies in the peer-to-peer and mobile software spaces. As a result of his prior work as a software engineer, he is a named inventor of six U.S. patents.

Theofanis Karaletsos is Vice President of Machine Learning (ML) at Insitro, an AI-driven Biotech company in the San Francisco Bay Area. At Insitro, Theofanis is interested in the intersection of advanced ML and drug discovery in service of learning causal models of disease biology. His core technical interests revolve around deep learning, Bayesian Inference & probabilistic programming, and applications to real world problems. In his previous steps he was a Staff ML Scientist at Meta, previously Facebook, working on probabilistic modeling and uncertainty, a founding member of Uber AI Labs after acquisition of the startup Geometric Intelligence by Uber, and a researcher at the Sloan Kettering Institute in New York and the Max Planck Institute For Intelligent Systems in Tuebingen, Germany. Theofanis seeks to build robust, data-efficient models of complex systems that allow us to understand and control the world around us. 

As the Acting Regional Director, Stephen Koziol carries out the strategic direction of the Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the USPTO and is responsible for leading the USPTO's West Coast regional office in Silicon Valley. Focusing on the region and actively engaging with the community, Mr. Koziol ensures the USPTO’s initiatives and programs are tailored to the region's unique ecosystem of industries and stakeholders. Mr. Koziol also serves as the Managing Regional Assistant Director for the Silicon Valley Regional Office. In this role, he leads the coordination of stakeholder outreach efforts, ensuring the equitable distribution of USPTO services and resources across the western region. 

Jerry Ma serves as the Director of Emerging Technology at the USPTO, overseeing a comprehensive portfolio of artificial intelligence and emerging technology matters within the agency. In this role, Mr. Ma provides strategic and technical leadership toward ensuring that the USPTO deploys innovative technologies in service of innovators, and that the USPTO adopts forward-thinking policies to support new domains of invention and creativity.

Prior to joining the USPTO, Mr. Ma developed engineering and infrastructure agendas for global research & development (R&D) teams, overseeing major initiatives resulting in the world's first public-domain superhuman, Go bot, and the first deep neural network to be trained on the known protein universe. Mr. Ma's scientific research has been published at venues such as the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences PNAS, and IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P), and he has taught computer science & mathematics in undergraduate, graduate, and professional settings across multiple institutions. Mr. Ma holds an A.B. in Economics and the Classics from Harvard University, and he is admitted to practice before the USPTO.

Nicholas A. Pairolero is a senior research economist in the Office of the Chief Economist at the USPTO. His interests are in evidence-based policy making, with research in the economics of innovation. His research has appeared in peer-reviewed academic journals, like Research Policy, and has informed discussions in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. In addition, his research has received professional and academic awards, including the Department of Commerce Gold Medal for scientific/engineering achievement, and has been featured in the media, for example Axios, VentureBeat, and Forbes. Nicholas has a Ph.D. and M.A. in Economics from Indiana University Bloomington and a B.B.A. in Economics and Mathematics from the University of Wisconsin Eau Claire.

Allison A. Schmitt is a Fellow at Berkeley Law and the first Director of the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology’s Life Sciences Project. Allison’s research (and the work of the BCLT Life Sciences Project) focuses on multiple issues across the landscape of the intersection between life sciences and the law, including study of the drivers behind innovation in the life sciences for established and emerging technologies. Allison holds a PhD in chemistry from Duke University, and bachelor’s degrees in chemistry and biochemistry from the University of Washington. After graduation from Berkeley Law, Allison clerked for the Honorable Stanley R. Chesler at the United States District Court for the District of New Jersey, and for the Honorable Kathleen M. O’Malley at the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. She then spent several years in private practice, focused on life science patent litigation, patent counseling, and policy matters. 

Karl Skowronek joined the USPTO in 2006 examining applications in bioinformatics and is currently a Supervisory Patent Examiner in the area of bioinformatics. Karl earned Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Maryland in Microbiology and a Doctorate in Cell and Molecular biology with a research emphasis in G-Protein signal transduction in Saccharomyces cerevisiae from the University of Vermont. Before joining the USPTO, Karl held a post-doctoral position at Stony Brook University in New York, where his research focused on the structural biology of small G-protein signal transduction. Karl currently lives in Alexandria with his wife and five children.

Nelson Yang is Senior Advisor for International Patent Business Solutions, and has been part of the Office of International Patent Cooperation (OIPC) at the USPTO since 2013. During his time in OIPC, Mr. Yang has held several positions, including Acting Director of International Patent Business Solutions, Acting Director of International Work sharing Planning and Implementation, International Patent Classifier, and Patent Business Analyst. Prior to working in OIPC, Mr. Yang was a biotechnology patent examiner at the USPTO.  

Mr. Yang also serves as the Lead Product Owner for International Data Exchange, and has been involved in many key initiatives, including the Global Dossier, the Global Patent Search Network (GPSN), the Hague Agreement, and Patents End to End (PE2E). Mr. Yang also has represented the USPTO in various international meetings and events, including the IP5 Working Group meetings, Information and Communication Technology meetings, and the Committee of World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Standards.