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 .
DETAILED ACTION
The instant application having Application No. 18/263,137 filed on 7/27/2023 is presented for examination.
Examiner Notes
Examiner cites particular columns and line numbers in the references as applied to the claims below for the convenience of the applicant. Although the specified citations are representative of the teachings in the art and are applied to the specific limitations within the individual claim, other passages and figures may apply as well. It is respectfully requested that, in preparing responses, the applicant fully consider the references in entirety as potentially teaching all or part of the claimed invention, as well as the context of the passage as taught by the prior art or disclosed by the examiner.
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Information Disclosure Statement
As required by M.P.E.P. 609, the applicant’s submissions of the Information Disclosure Statement dated 7/27/2023 and 2/27/2025 are acknowledged by the examiner and the cited references have been considered in the examination of the claims now pending.
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.
Claims 1-6, 8, 9, 11, 15-20, 27 and 28 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Dean (US 7,650,331) in view of Mak (US 7,522,075) in further view of Biwas (US 2019/0228085)
As per claim 1, Dean discloses a method for performing a digital process (P), comprising the steps of:
a) providing a central system (110) (Column 3, lines 10-35);
b) the central system (110) initiating the process (P) with a defined set of activities (A1;A2) to be performed by respective peripheral systems (210;220) being autonomous systems operating independently from said central system (110), said activities (A1;A2) comprising a second activity (A2) to be performed by a second one of said peripheral systems (220) (Column 6, lines 5-30 “FIG. 6 is a flow diagram of an embodiment of a process 600 for assigning tasks to processes. Process 600 parallelizes a data processing task over as many processes as is consistent with the available computing resources. While the process 600 described below includes a number of steps that appear to occur in a specific order, it should be apparent that the process 600 steps are not limited to any particular order, and, moreover, the process 600 can include more or fewer steps, which can be executed serially or in parallel (e.g., using parallel processors or a multi-threading environment). Further, it should noted that the steps or acts in process 600 are application-independent and are implemented using modules or instructions that are application-independent. Only the actual map and reduce operators, which produce intermediate data values from the input data and that produce output data from the intermediate data values, respectively, are application-specific. These application-specific operators are invoked by the map and reduce tasks assigned to processes in step 610. By making a clear boundary between the application-independent aspects and application-specific aspects of performing a large scale data processing operation, the application-independent aspects can be optimized, thereby making the entire large scale data processing operation very efficient.”);
c) the central system (110), in a second request (R2), requesting said second peripheral system (220) to perform said second activity (A2) (Column 3, lines 28-40);
d) the second peripheral system (220) performing said second activity (A2) (Column 4, lines 7-25 “As shown in FIG. 2, a set of input files 202 are processed by a first set of processes 204, herein called map processes, to produce a set of intermediate data, represented here by files 206. The intermediate data 206 is processed by a second set of processes 208, herein called reduce processes, to produce output data 210. Generally each "map process" is a process configured (or configurable) to perform map functions and to execute an application-specific map operator. Each "reduce process" is a process configured (or configurable) to perform reduce functions and to execute an application-specific reduce operator. A control or supervisory process, herein called the work queue master 214, controls the set of processing tasks. As described in more detail below, the work queue master 214 determines how many map tasks to use, how many reduce tasks to use, which processes and processors to use to perform those tasks, where to store the intermediate data and output data, how to respond to any processing failures, and so on.”);
e) a second piece of information (I2) resulting from said second activity (A2) being made available from the second peripheral system (220) to said central system (110) (Column 5, lines 15-45 “Referring to FIGS. 2 and 5, in some embodiments the input data files 202 are stored in one or more data centers DC1-DC4. Ideally, the work queue master 214 assigns tasks to processors 510 in datacenters where the input files are stored so as to minimize network traffic whenever possible. In some embodiments, the work queue master 214 uses input file information received from a file system to determine the appropriate processor or process for executing a task, using a hierarchical decision process. When a process in a processor in a datacenter DC1-DC4 is idle, it requests a task from the work queue master 214. The work queue master 214 searches the input file information received from the file system (e.g., FS 446, FIG. 5), for an unprocessed data block on the machine assigned to process the task. If none are available, the work queue master 214 searches the file information for an unprocessed data block on the same rack 508 as the machine assigned to process the task. If none are available, the work queue master 214 searches the file information for an unprocessed data block in the same datacenter as the machine assigned to process the task. If none are available, the work queue master 214 will search for unprocessed blocks in other datacenters.”); and
f) the central system (110) updating a status of said process (P) based on said second (I2) piece of information (Column 6, lines 40-52 “Whenever a process completes a task, the process sends a corresponding message to the work queue master 214, which updates the process and task status tables (step 612). The work queue master 214 may then assign a new task to the idle process, if it has any unassigned tasks waiting for processing resources. For reduce tasks, the work queue master 214 may defer assigning any particular reduce task to an idle process until such time that the intermediate data to be processed by the reduce task has, in fact, been generated by the map tasks. Some reduce tasks may be started long before the last of the map tasks are started if the intermediate data to be processed by those reduce tasks is ready for reduce processing.”).
Dean does not expressly disclose but Mak discloses wherein the second request (R2) comprises a second identifier (ID2), the second identifier (ID2) comprising redundant information (Column 3, lines 47-57 “As shown in FIG. 3, the method requires that information in the form of an original n-digit ticket code 30 be converted into binary format 31 using published bit-based redundancy algorithm. A suitable algorithm is Reed Solomon, but this is not mandatory. For instance, a ticket code of 123456789012345 will be converted into binary: 00000100100010000110000011011101111101111001, which is now a 47-bit binary number. As the original number has 15 digits, it will be converted into an N-Code formation as illustrated in FIG. 2.”).
Therefore it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to modify the method of Dean as modified to include the teachings of Mak because it provides for the purpose of it is less “potentially clumsy, time-consuming, costly, error-prone and not entirely secure” than other solutions to sending an identifier. See Mak, Background of the Invention.
Dean does not expressly disclose but Biwas discloses
the second piece of information (I2) is made available to the central system (110) in the form of a digital work product (WP) output by the second peripheral system (220), and
the central system (110) automatically performs the additional steps of:
g) collecting said work product (WP) (Paragraph 20 “At stage C, the hasher 125 generates truncated hashed records 130 and a hash inversion map 132. The hasher 125 hashes each of the event records in the normalized log file 120 to generate a hashed record using a cryptographic hashing algorithm. The hasher 125 then truncates each hashed record and combines them into the truncated hashed records 130. The hasher 125 generates the hash inversion map 132 simultaneously with or after generating truncated hashed records 130. The hash inversion map 132 includes a set of key-value pairs, wherein each key is one of the truncated hashed event records and each value is the corresponding normalized event record. As will be described below for stage G, the pattern identifier 100 uses the hash inversion map 132 to determine transaction patterns based on a set of hashed patterns. For example, a hashing algorithm can be used to generate the data shown in Table 2 below, wherein each row includes a normalized event record, the corresponding hashed record (the full hash value is not indicated for ease of explanation), and the corresponding truncated hashed record.”);
h) finding an anchor piece of information or pattern (I2′) in the work product (WP), the anchor piece of information or pattern (I2′) comprising only a subpart of the second identifier (ID2) and not the entire second identifier (ID2) (Paragraph 38 “The pattern identifier normalizes the log file (208) to account for variations across different event record sources and identify variables. Normalization accounts for linguistic differences between different event record sources and increases the reliability of a token dictionary. Normalizing a log file can include stemming and lemmatization. The pattern identifier tokenizes the normalized event records. The pattern identifier may perform multiple passes over the log to allow for feedback between the normalizing and tokenization. The pattern identifier replaces variables within the event records with a token defined to represent variables (“variable token”). The pattern identifier may replace each token not found in the token dictionary with the variable token. The token dictionary or a separate set of heuristics can specify patterns that guide the pattern identifier to identify variables. For instance, the token dictionary or a set of heuristics can specify that the token immediately preceding the token “login” or following the token “user” is a variable to be replaced with the variable token. Embodiments can also use different classes of tokens to replace different types of variables (e.g., data variables, username variables, and other variables). As an example, a rule can specify that the first token in an event record that has a format of dddd-dd-dd (“d” representing any character that is a numeric character) be replaced with the token “$DATE.””); and
i) identifying said second piece of information (I2) in said work product (WP) based on a content of the anchor piece of information or pattern (I2′) (Paragraph 42 “The pattern identifier then generates a suffix array and a LCP array from the truncated, hashed event records (216). The pattern identifier treats the truncated, hashed event records as a string input into the algorithms for generating the suffix array and the LCP array. Embodiments can generate individual arrays, a multi-dimensional array, or another structure that preserves correspondence across the sorted suffix information and longest common prefix lengths. A suffix array can explicitly indicate the sorted suffixes in order with correspondence to their starting positions within the input string or can implicitly indicate the suffixes by ordering starting positions. For example, the suffix array represented as SA can indicate that the fourth character of the input string is the second suffix when sorted by setting the value for SA[1] to be 4.”).
Therefore it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to modify the method of Dean as modified to include the teachings of Biwas because it provides for the purpose of “correlating events to transactions, identifying anomalies, performing root cause analysis, etc.” (Biwas, paragraph 2).
As per claim 2, Dean further discloses wherein
said activities (A1;A2) further comprise a first activity (A1) to be performed by a first peripheral system (210) (Column 6, lines 32-52 “The process 600 begins by determining if there are tasks waiting to be assigned to a process (step 606). If there are no tasks waiting, then the process 600 waits for all the tasks to complete (step 604). If there are tasks waiting, then the process 600 determines if there are any idle processes (step 608). If there are idle processes, then the process 600 assigns a waiting task to an idle process (step 610) and returns to step 606. If there are no idle processes, the process 600 waits for an idle process (step 614). Whenever a process completes a task, the process sends a corresponding message to the work queue master 214, which updates the process and task status tables (step 612). The work queue master 214 may then assign a new task to the idle process, if it has any unassigned tasks waiting for processing resources. For reduce tasks, the work queue master 214 may defer assigning any particular reduce task to an idle process until such time that the intermediate data to be processed by the reduce task has, in fact, been generated by the map tasks. Some reduce tasks may be started long before the last of the map tasks are started if the intermediate data to be processed by those reduce tasks is ready for reduce processing.”);
wherein the method further comprises the central system (110), in a first request (R1), requesting said first peripheral system (210) to perform said first activity (A1); the first peripheral system (210) performing said first activity (A1); and a first piece of information (I1) resulting from said first activity (A1) being made available from the first peripheral system (210) to said central system (110) (Column 6, lines 32-52);
wherein said first piece of information (I1) is automatically made available to the central system (110) using an API (Application Programming Interface) (111,211) (Column 6, lines 32-52); and
wherein the central system (110) updates said status of said process (P) based also on said first piece of information (I1) (Column 6, lines 32-52).
As per claim 3, Dean does not expressly discloses but discloses Mak discloses wherein the method comprises using an information-expanding, redundancy-producing coding algorithm, such as a Reed-Solomon encoding, to pre-process the second identifier (ID2), so that a resulting alphanumeric string has a predetermined size (Column 3, lines 47-57 “As shown in FIG. 3, the method requires that information in the form of an original n-digit ticket code 30 be converted into binary format 31 using published bit-based redundancy algorithm. A suitable algorithm is Reed Solomon, but this is not mandatory. For instance, a ticket code of 123456789012345 will be converted into binary: 00000100100010000110000011011101111101111001, which is now a 47-bit binary number. As the original number has 15 digits, it will be converted into an N-Code formation as illustrated in FIG. 2.”).
As per claim 4, Dean does not expressly discloses but discloses Mak discloses wherein the pre-processing of the second identifier (ID2) is such that the second identifier (ID2) fits a biggest available space in the second request (R2) (Column 8, lines 7-11 “Once the effective time period expires, the 12-digit data can then be effectively discarded and thus be reused again for mapping for other time periods. This continual renewing of the 12-digit data pool allows the smaller data-size numbers to continually be mapped to larger data sets.”).
As per claim 5, Dean does not expressly discloses but discloses Mak discloses wherein the pre-processing of the second identifier (ID2) is such that the second identifier (ID2) after pre-processing contains at least 100 bytes of information that is put into the second request (R2) (Column 8, lines 7-11 “Once the effective time period expires, the 12-digit data can then be effectively discarded and thus be reused again for mapping for other time periods. This continual renewing of the 12-digit data pool allows the smaller data-size numbers to continually be mapped to larger data sets.”).
As per claim 6, Dean does not expressly discloses but discloses Mak discloses wherein the second identifier (ID2) comprises or is fully constituted by encrypted information (Abstract “Information, such as ticket information is encoded, for transmission of the encoded information to a device that can display the encoded information as visible alphanumeric characters.”).
As per claim 8, Dean does not expressly discloses but discloses Biwas discloses wherein said work product (WP) is a log file output by said second peripheral system (220), and wherein the second request (R2) is arranged so that said anchor piece of information or pattern (I2′) will exist in said log file upon activity completion by said second peripheral system (220) of the second activity (A2) as a consequence of the second activity (A2) (Paragraph 38).
As per claim 9, Dean does not expressly discloses but discloses Mak discloses wherein the second identifier (ID2) comprises encrypted information (Abstract “Information, such as ticket information is encoded, for transmission of the encoded information to a device that can display the encoded information as visible alphanumeric characters.”).
As per claim 11, Dean does not expressly discloses but discloses Mak discloses wherein the second identifier (ID2) comprises a checksum (CS) of other information comprised in the second identifier (ID2) (Column 6, line 58 – column 7, line 5 “As shown in FIG. 8, the exemplary method presented here turns the best guess 80 into a binary code format 83 then applies bit-based data correction and recovery 84 to the binary version of the best candidate N-Code guess string 80 to determine original code 81, upon satisfying the checksum requirement 85 for code to ensure the final guess as to the original code 81 is a valid code. Should the result 81 fails the checksum test, then the method will attempt to use mathematical algorithms to resample the image at a different sampling resolutions and retry the processing, without having to take another image capture. For example, if the original image is sampled and captured at 400 dots per inch, use mathematical algorithms to resample at say 500 dots per inch, and re-apply above methods. This is very likely to return a correct code 81 with a correct checksum.”).
As per claim 15, Dean does not expressly disclose but Biwas discloses wherein the second piece of information (I2) has a predetermined format, and in that the central system (110) identifies said second piece of information (I2) as a piece of information having said format and being present in the same work product (WP) that also comprises said anchor piece of information or pattern (I2′) (Paragraph 52 “If the pattern is already in the parent-child pattern map, the pattern identifier will proceed to the next available pattern in the patterns array (352). If the pattern is already in the parent-child pattern map, then it would be a child pattern of another pattern.”).
As per claim 16, Dean further discloses wherein step e) comprises the central system (110) checking a predetermined information storage area (221) for updates, and in that the central system (110) identifies said work product (WP) in said storage area (221) and reads said work product (WP) from said storage area (221) (Column 3, lines 28-40).
As per claim 17, Dean further discloses wherein step e) comprises a plurality of work products being provided to the central system (110), in that the central system (110) identifies one particular work product (WP) among said plurality of work products, and in that the central system (110) finds said anchor piece of information or pattern (I2′) in said particular work product (WP) (Column 3, lines 28-40).
As per claim 18, Dean further discloses wherein the central system (110) comprises or communicates with a central database (113), in turn storing said second identifier (ID2) (Column 3, lines 28-40).
As per claim 19, Dean further discloses wherein at least one standardized activity is defined by respective values of a predetermined set of activity-defining parameters, in that said database (113) further comprises said activity-defining parameter values, and in that the central system (110) requests at least one activity (A1;A2) based on said activity-defining parameter values (Column 4, lines 7-25).
As per claim 20, Dean further discloses wherein the process (P) is a standardized process defined by respective values of a predetermined set of process-defining parameters, in that said database (113) further comprises said process-defining parameter values, and in that the central system (110) automatically identifies and executes said activities based on said process-defining parameter values (Column 4, lines 7-25).
As per claim 27, Dean further discloses further comprising the steps of:
j) said second (220) peripheral system, as a result of said second request (R2), requesting, in a fifth request (R5), a third peripheral system (230) to perform a delta activity (A5), said fifth request (R1) comprising said second (ID2) identifier;
k) said third peripheral system (230) performing said delta activity (A5); and
l) a fifth piece of information (I5) resulting from said delta activity (A5) being made available from the third peripheral system (230) to said requesting peripheral system (210;220) (Column 4, lines 7-25).
As per claim 28, it is a system claim having similar limitations as cited in claim 1 and is thus rejected under the same rationale.
Claims 12-14 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Dean in view of Mak in further view of Biwas in further view of Gu (US 10,831,585).
As per claim 12, Dean does not expressly disclose but discloses Gu discloses wherein the finding of the anchor piece of information or pattern (I2′) and/or identifying of the second piece of information (I2) is performed by a trained machine learning model (112) comprised in the central system (110) (Column 3 lines 24-37 “In an exemplary embodiment, the innovation may further identify key features of each event pattern to automatically create a label for each event pattern. This pattern label is created through the use of unsupervised machine learning methods. In a non-limiting example, if the innovation identifies the key metrics that make an event pattern unique are the result of a gradually increasing memory consumption and a near constant CPU usage, these metrics are captured when the machine has learned to categorize this event as a “memory leak,” a pattern label is created for this event, and the event is labeled and stored under the created pattern label. A user may override or edit the pattern label using domain knowledge that is specific to the domain in which the system under analysis is operational.”).
Therefore it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to modify the method of Dean as modified to include the teachings of Gu because it provides for the performs better as the machine learning model improves over time.
As per claim 13, Dean does not expressly disclose but discloses Gu discloses wherein a successful finding and/or identifying results in a fully automatic extraction of said second piece of information (I2) from the work product (WP) by the central system (110) (Column 3 lines 24-37).
As per claim 14, Dean does not expressly disclose but discloses Gu discloses wherein an unsuccessful interpretation results in an at least partly manual interpretation of said work product (WP), a result of said interpretation being fed back to a machine learning training feedback loop affecting training of said machine learning model (112) with respect to said finding and/or identifying (Column 3 lines 24-37).
Conclusion
The prior art made of record and not relied upon is considered pertinent to applicant's disclosure.
Przada (US 2020/0026710) discloses providing an information delivery platform configured to: extract raw data from a plurality of source systems; load and store the raw data at a non-transient data store; receive a request to generate data for consumption for a specific purpose; in response to the request, select a set of data from the raw data based on a data map; transform the selected set of data into a curated set of data based on the data map; and transmit the curated set of data to a channel for consumption.
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to TIMOTHY A MUDRICK whose telephone number is (571)270-3374. The examiner can normally be reached 9am-5pm Central Time.
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/TIMOTHY A MUDRICK/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2198 2/26/2026