DETAILED ACTION
Notice of Pre-AIA or AIA Status
The present application, filed on or after March 16, 2013, is being examined under the first inventor to file provisions of the AIA .
Election/Restrictions
Applicant’s election without traverse of group I (Claims 1-18 and 21) in the reply filed on 6/18/2025 is acknowledged.
Priority
Acknowledgement is made to applicant’s claims for priority from Provisional Application 63397970, filed 08/15/2022.
Information Disclosure Statement
The listing of references in the specification is not a proper information disclosure statement. 37 CFR 1.98(b) requires a list of all patents, publications, or other information submitted for consideration by the Office, and MPEP § 609.04(a) states, "the list may not be incorporated into the specification but must be submitted in a separate paper." Therefore, unless the references have been cited by the examiner on form PTO-892, they have not been considered.
CLAIM INTERPRETATION
The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 112(f):
(f) Element in Claim for a Combination. – An element in a claim for a combination may be expressed as a means or step for performing a specified function without the recital of structure, material, or acts in support thereof, and such claim shall be construed to cover the corresponding structure, material, or acts described in the specification and equivalents thereof.
The following is a quotation of pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 112, sixth paragraph:
An element in a claim for a combination may be expressed as a means or step for performing a specified function without the recital of structure, material, or acts in support thereof, and such claim shall be construed to cover the corresponding structure, material, or acts described in the specification and equivalents thereof.
The claims in this application are given their broadest reasonable interpretation using the plain meaning of the claim language in light of the specification as it would be understood by one of ordinary skill in the art. The broadest reasonable interpretation of a claim element (also commonly referred to as a claim limitation) is limited by the description in the specification when 35 U.S.C. 112(f) or pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 112, sixth paragraph, is invoked.
As explained in MPEP § 2181, subsection I, claim limitations that meet the following three-prong test will be interpreted under 35 U.S.C. 112(f) or pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 112, sixth paragraph:
(A) the claim limitation uses the term “means” or “step” or a term used as a substitute for “means” that is a generic placeholder (also called a nonce term or a non-structural term having no specific structural meaning) for performing the claimed function;
(B) the term “means” or “step” or the generic placeholder is modified by functional language, typically, but not always linked by the transition word “for” (e.g., “means for”) or another linking word or phrase, such as “configured to” or “so that”; and
(C) the term “means” or “step” or the generic placeholder is not modified by sufficient structure, material, or acts for performing the claimed function.
Use of the word “means” (or “step”) in a claim with functional language creates a rebuttable presumption that the claim limitation is to be treated in accordance with 35 U.S.C. 112(f) or pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 112, sixth paragraph. The presumption that the claim limitation is interpreted under 35 U.S.C. 112(f) or pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 112, sixth paragraph, is rebutted when the claim limitation recites sufficient structure, material, or acts to entirely perform the recited function.
Absence of the word “means” (or “step”) in a claim creates a rebuttable presumption that the claim limitation is not to be treated in accordance with 35 U.S.C. 112(f) or pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 112, sixth paragraph. The presumption that the claim limitation is not interpreted under 35 U.S.C. 112(f) or pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 112, sixth paragraph, is rebutted when the claim limitation recites function without reciting sufficient structure, material or acts to entirely perform the recited function.
Claim limitations in this application that use the word “means” (or “step”) (claim 21) are being interpreted under 35 U.S.C. 112(f) or pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 112, sixth paragraph, except as otherwise indicated in an Office action. Conversely, claim limitations in this application that do not use the word “means” (or “step”) are not being interpreted under 35 U.S.C. 112(f) or pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 112, sixth paragraph, except as otherwise indicated in an Office action.
Claim Objections
Claims 1 and 21 are objected because of the following informalities.
As to claim 1,
“the streams”, in the second limitation, should be “the one ore more streams” for proper antecedent basis.
“the productivity rejection criteria”, in the second limitation, should be “the one or more productivity rejection criteria” for proper antecedent basis.
As to claim 21, the claim is also objected to under the same rational of claim 1 as indicated above.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 112
The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 112(b):
(b) CONCLUSION.—The specification shall conclude with one or more claims particularly pointing out and distinctly claiming the subject matter which the inventor or a joint inventor regards as the invention.
The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 112 (pre-AIA ), second paragraph:
The specification shall conclude with one or more claims particularly pointing out and distinctly claiming the subject matter which the applicant regards as his invention.
Claims 1-18 and 21 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 112(b) or 35 U.S.C. 112 (pre-AIA ), second paragraph, as being indefinite for failing to particularly point out and distinctly claim the subject matter which the inventor or a joint inventor (or for applications subject to pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 112, the applicant), regards as the invention.
As to claims 1 and 21, the claims recite the limitation “the network”, in the last limitation. There is insufficient antecedent basis for this limitation in the claim.
A to claim 3, the claim further recites the limitation “the rejection criteria”. There is insufficient antecedent basis for this limitation in the claim
As to claim 8, the claim further recites the limitation “the application of probabilistic heuristics”. There is insufficient antecedent basis for the limitation in the claim.
As to the claim(s) that are dependent on claim(s) 1, the dependent claim(s) are also rejected under 112(b) for the same reason of their base claim(s).
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 102
The following is a quotation of the appropriate paragraphs of 35 U.S.C. 102 that form the basis for the rejections under this section made in this Office action:
A person shall be entitled to a patent unless –
(a)(1) the claimed invention was patented, described in a printed publication, or in public use, on sale, or otherwise available to the public before the effective filing date of the claimed invention.
Claim(s) 1-3, 6-9 and 21 is/are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 102(a)(1) as being anticipated by Edwards et al. (Pub. No.: US 20020038430 A1).
As to claim 1, Edwards teaches a computer network security threat monitoring method for a processor and a storage device including instructions configured to run on the processor, including:
continuously gathering machine-readable documents from one or more streams of third-party machine-readable documents from network sources selected based on predetermined selection criteria (paragraph [0012], “the data collection step 104”),
evaluating machine-readable documents gathered from the streams according to one or more productivity rejection criteria and rejecting machine-readable documents that meet the productivity rejection criteria (paragraph [0014], “a set of retention criteria” teaches productivity rejection criteria), and
processing the gathered machine-readable documents to extract threat information about conditions on the network except if they meet the one or more productivity rejection criteria (paragraphs [0033]-[0036], at least “hardware affected” teaches extracted threat information about conditions on a network).
As to claim 2, Edwards teaches evaluating machine-readable documents gathered from the streams according to one or more productivity acceptance criteria and wherein the processing the gathered machine-readable documents processes all of the gathered machine-readable documents that satisfy the acceptance criteria to extract threat information (paragraph [0014], “…Intelligence data that satisfies the retention criteria is further assessed at step 308…”).
As to claim 3, Edwards teaches queuing at least some of the documents that do not satisfy the rejection criteria for manual review (paragraph [0006], “The intelligence data is stored in a first data store, and further sent to one or several queues based on the content of the data. Data analysts then review the items specific to their queue and retain or discard the content”).
As to claim 6, Edwards teaches wherein the evaluating documents according to rejection criteria applies a plurality of heuristics (paragraph [0014], “…the criteria includes the number of keyword hits on a source, a date/time stamp for recognizing the same data content and source already retained by the system, and a relevancy ranking on keyword hits to retain only the most relevant intelligence data reporting on the same issue…”).
As to claim 7, Edwards teaches wherein the evaluating documents according to rejection criteria applies probabilistic heuristics (paragraph [0014], “…the criteria includes the number of keyword hits on a source, a date/time stamp for recognizing the same data content and source already retained by the system, and a relevancy ranking on keyword hits to retain only the most relevant intelligence data reporting on the same issue…”).
As to claim 8, Edwards teaches wherein the application of probabilistic heuristics includes calculating a distance between a feature representation of a stream of machine-readable documents and identified clusters previously learned by a probabilistic model (paragraph [0014], “…the criteria includes the number of keyword hits on a source, a date/time stamp for recognizing the same data content and source already retained by the system, and a relevancy ranking on keyword hits to retain only the most relevant intelligence data reporting on the same issue…”).
As to claim 9, Edwards teaches wherein the evaluating documents according to rejection criteria applies deterministic heuristics (paragraph [0014], “…the criteria includes the number of keyword hits on a source, a date/time stamp for recognizing the same data content and source already retained by the system, and a relevancy ranking on keyword hits to retain only the most relevant intelligence data reporting on the same issue…”).
As to claim 21, Edwards teaches a computer network security threat monitoring system, including: means for continuously gathering machine-readable documents from one or more streams of third-party machine-readable documents from network sources (paragraph [0012], “the data collection step 104”),
means for evaluating gathered machine-readable documents from the streams according to one or more productivity acceptance criteria and accepting machine-readable documents that meet the productivity acceptance criteria (paragraph [0014], “a set of retention criteria” teaches productivity acceptance criteria),
means for evaluating gathered machine-readable documents from the streams according to one or more productivity rejection criteria and rejecting machine-readable documents that meet the productivity rejection criteria (paragraph [0014], “a set of retention criteria” teaches productivity rejection criteria), and
means for processing the gathered machine-readable documents that satisfy the acceptance criteria and do not satisfy the rejection criteria to extract threat information about conditions on the network (paragraphs [0033]-[0036], at least “hardware affected” teaches extracted threat information about conditions on a network).
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 103
The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 103 which forms the basis for all obviousness rejections set forth in this Office action:
A patent for a claimed invention may not be obtained, notwithstanding that the claimed invention is not identically disclosed as set forth in section 102, if the differences between the claimed invention and the prior art are such that the claimed invention as a whole would have been obvious before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to a person having ordinary skill in the art to which the claimed invention pertains. Patentability shall not be negated by the manner in which the invention was made.
Claim(s) 4-5 is/are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Edwards et al. (Pub. No.: US 20020038430 A1) in view of Carr (Patent. No.: US 10353940 B1).
As to claim 4, Edward does not explicitly teach adjusting rejection criteria based on manual review.
However, in the same field of endeavor (document processing) Carr teaches including adjusting at least some of the rejection criteria based on results of the manual review (col. 14, lines 15-36, “The review (e.g. 1 or 0) may be stored with the reviewed document in the training documents buffer 202 as a flag, to indicate that the particular reviewed document is relevant (1) or not relevant (0). In some embodiments, documents that the user considers to be relevant and documents the user considers to be non-relevant are both added to the training buffer 206”).
Based on Edwards in view of Carr, it would have been obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the art, before the effective filing date of the claimed invention, to incorporate adjusting document rejection criteria based on manual review (taught by Carr) with document collection and analysis (taught by Edward) in order to enhance the process of document collection by allowing the user to validate the collected document as motivated by Carr (col. 14, lines 15-36).
As to claim 5, Carr further teaches including confirming at least some of the rejection criteria based on results of the manual review (col. 14, lines 15-36, “The review (e.g. 1 or 0) may be stored with the reviewed document in the training documents buffer 202 as a flag, to indicate that the particular reviewed document is relevant (1) or not relevant (0). In some embodiments, documents that the user considers to be relevant and documents the user considers to be non-relevant are both added to the training buffer 206”). The limitations of claim 5 are rejected in view of the analysis of claim 4 above, and the rationale to combine, as discussed in claim 4, applies here as well.
Claim(s) 10-11 is/are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Edwards et al. (Pub. No.: US 20020038430 A1) in view of Liao et al. (Patent. No.: US 11444978 B1).
As to claim 10, Edward does not explicitly teach applying score to the documents.
However, in the same field of endeavor (electronic document processing) Liao teaches evaluating documents according to rejection criteria applies a dispensability score to the documents (col. 10, lines 5-16, “…Phishing classifier layers 275 process the URL feature hash, word encoding and image embedding to produce at least one likelihood score that the URL and the content accessed via the URL represents a phishing risk…”).
Based on Edwards in view of Liao, it would have been obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the art, before the effective filing date of the claimed invention, to incorporate applying score to the documents (taught by Liao) with document collection and analysis (taught by Edwards) in order to use the score to facilitate the process of filtering of the collected documents.
As to claim 11, Edward does not explicitly teach applying score to the documents.
However, in the same field of endeavor (electronic document processing) Liao teaches evaluating documents according to rejection criteria applies a dispensability score to the documents based on URLs of the documents (col. 10, lines 5-16, “…Phishing classifier layers 275 process the URL feature hash, word encoding and image embedding to produce at least one likelihood score that the URL and the content accessed via the URL represents a phishing risk…”).
Based on Edwards in view of Liao, it would have been obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the art, before the effective filing date of the claimed invention, to incorporate applying score to the documents (taught by Liao) with document collection and analysis (taught by Edwards) in order to use the score to facilitate the process of filtering of the collected documents.
Claim(s) 12 is/are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Edwards et al. (Pub. No.: US 20020038430 A1) in view of Xu et al. (Patent. No.: US 8380693 B1).
As to claim 12, Edward does not explicitly teach applying score to the documents.
However, in the same field of endeavor (electronic document processing) Xu teaches evaluating documents according to rejection criteria applies a dispensability score to the documents based on the presence in the URL of one or more weighted indicator expressions (col. 16, lines 46-67, “…In some embodiments, the details page URL 1102 includes other terms 1110 (or abbreviations) that specifically describe aspects of the detail page posting. These terms or URL tokens are also used in some embodiments in determining a details page score for a details page candidate. For example, in some embodiments, a degree of similarity between URL tokens of a details page candidate and URL tokens of a corpus of known classified website pages is determined, and is then used in determining its details page score”).
Based on Edwards in view of Xu, it would have been obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the art, before the effective filing date of the claimed invention, to incorporate applying score to the documents (taught by Xu) with document collection and analysis (taught by Edwards) in order to use the score to facilitate the process of filtering of the collected documents.
Claim(s) 13 is/are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Edwards et al. (Pub. No.: US 20020038430 A1) in view of Bulusu et al. (Patent. No.: US 10866719 B1).
As to claim 13, Edward does not explicitly teach applying score to the documents.
However, in the same field of endeavor (electronic document processing) Bulusu teaches evaluating documents according to rejection criteria applies a dispensability score to the documents based on a ratio of valuable entities to total token value (col. 10, line 63- col. 11, line 18, “…Information content density may be a ratio of important keywords to total words in a post and may be indicative of a value of the content (e.g., the higher the information content density, the more important the content, etc.)…”).
Based on Edwards in view of Bulusu, it would have been obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the art, before the effective filing date of the claimed invention, to incorporate applying score to the documents (taught by Bulusu) with document collection and analysis (taught by Edwards) in order to use the score to facilitate the process of filtering of the collected documents.
Claim(s) 14 is/are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Edwards et al. (Pub. No.: US 20020038430 A1) in view of Shmueli (Pub. No.: US 20130006948 A1).
As to claim 14, Edward does not explicitly teach applying score to the documents.
However, in the same field of endeavor (electronic document processing) Shmueli teaches evaluating documents according to rejection criteria applies a dispensability score to the documents based on a relationship between true content size and compressed size (paragraph [0006],”…calculating a compression ratio for a file stored on one of the multiple tiers, calculating, using the compression ratio, a priority score for the file…”).
Based on Edwards in view of Shmueli, it would have been obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the art, before the effective filing date of the claimed invention, to incorporate applying score to the documents (taught by Shmueli) with document collection and analysis (taught by Edwards) in order to use the score to facilitate the process of filtering of the collected documents.
Claim(s) 15-17 is/are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Edwards et al. (Pub. No.: US 20020038430 A1) in view of Mahapatra et al. (Pub. No.: US 20230020886 A1).
As to claim 15, Edwards teaches application of heuristics includes utilizing one or more functions to reprocess items in a stream of machine readable documents (paragraph [0014]).
Edward does not explicitly teach utilizing a foundation model.
However, in the same field of endeavor (electronic document processing) Mahapatra teaches application of heuristics includes utilizing one or more foundation models to reprocess items in a stream of machine readable documents (paragraph [0057], “…the text summarization system feeds the input text to the text summarization model that was generated using neural architecture search and knowledge distillation as described hereinabove…”).
Based on Edwards in view of Mahapatra, it would have been obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the art, before the effective filing date of the claimed invention, to incorporate utilizing a foundation model (taught by Mahapatra) with document collection and analysis (taught by Edwards) in order to use the foundation model to facilitate the process of filtering of the collected documents.
As to claim 16, Mahapatra further teaches wherein the application of heuristics includes utilizing one or more Large Language Models (LLMs) to reprocess items in a stream of machine readable documents (paragraph [0029], “The knowledge distillation module 112 leverages knowledge from a large language model to inform the search and training of a text summarization model being generated”). The limitations of claim 16 are rejected in view of the analysis of claim 15 above, and the rationale to combine, as discussed in claim 15, applies here as well.
As to claim 17, Mahapatra further teaches wherein the application of heuristics includes utilizing one or more foundation models to gain more information about or summarize items in a stream of machine readable documents (paragraph [0057], “…the text summarization system feeds the input text to the text summarization model that was generated using neural architecture search and knowledge distillation as described hereinabove…”). The limitations of claim 17 are rejected in view of the analysis of claim 15 above, and the rationale to combine, as discussed in claim 15, applies here as well.
Claim(s) 18 is/are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Edwards et al. (Pub. No.: US 20020038430 A1) in view of Weilbacher (Pub. No.: US 20160308890 A1).
As to claim 18, Edwards teaches wherein the continuously gathering and evaluating machine-readable documents operate on a plurality of formats including textual, image, video formatted machine-readable documents (paragraph [0012]).
Edward does not explicitly teach PDF format.
However, in the same field of endeavor (cybersecurity) Weilbacher teaches gathering and evaluating machine-readable documents operate on a plurality of formats including pdf formatted machine-readable documents (paragraph [0056], “ For example, non-limiting example, user interface 340 may display a drop location and the user may drag a PDF of a DHS threat report onto that drop location to manually provide information to cyber-threat device 130”).
Based on Edwards in view of Weilbacher, it would have been obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the art, before the effective filing date of the claimed invention, to incorporate evaluating PDF format documents (taught by Weilbacher) with cybersecurity threats collection and analysis (taught by Weilbacher) in order to extend the capability of the collection process which will result in more potential threat discovery.
Conclusion
The prior art made of record and not relied upon is considered pertinent to applicant's disclosure. Please see PTO-892.
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to ABDULKADER M ALRIYASHI whose telephone number is (313)446-6551. The examiner can normally be reached Monday - Friday, 8AM - 5PM Alt, Friday, EST.
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If attempts to reach the examiner by telephone are unsuccessful, the examiner’s supervisor, JOON HWANG can be reached at (571)272-4036. The fax phone number for the organization where this application or proceeding is assigned is 571-273-8300.
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/Abdulkader M Alriyashi/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2447 9/14/2025
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