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 claims 16-20 in the reply filed on 09/30/2025 is acknowledged.
Information Disclosure Statement
The information disclosure statements (IDS) submitted on 11/20/2024 and 09/30/2025 are in compliance with the provisions of 37 CFR 1.97. Accordingly, the information disclosure statements are being considered by the examiner.
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 22 and 29 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. Claims 22 and 29 recite “generate a score…based on the score…,” however, there are multiple scores between claims 22 and 16 (from which 22 depends) and claims 29 and 23 (from which 29 depends). As such, clarity is needed to differentiate between the score of claims 22 and 29 from the score of claims 16 and 23.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 103
In the event the determination of the status of the application as subject to AIA 35 U.S.C. 102 and 103 (or as subject to pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 102 and 103) is incorrect, any correction of the statutory basis (i.e., changing from AIA to pre-AIA ) for the rejection will not be considered a new ground of rejection if the prior art relied upon, and the rationale supporting the rejection, would be the same under either status.
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) 16-19, 23-26 and 30-33 is/are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Kushmerick et al. (U.S. Patent No. 10,205,627; hereinafter Kushmerick) in view of Karuppasamy (U.S. PGPub 2018/0285768) and further in view of Titon et al. (U.S. PGPub 2024/0256418; hereinafter Titon).
Regarding claim 16, Kushmerick discloses a non-transitory processor-readable medium storing code representing instructions to be executed by one or more processors, the instructions comprising code to cause the one or more processors (Col. 4, Lines 20-47: computer-readable data-storage devices and processors) to:
receive, from a plurality of sources, data associated with a plurality of events at the plurality of sources (Col. 13, Line 63 – Col. 14, Line 20: event messages/logs are received from different data sources);
standardize the data based on a set of predefined standardization rules to define standardized data (Col. 18, Lines 46-52; Col. 19, Lines 13-20, Col. 26, Lines 51-54; Col. 27, Lines 55-61: received event messages are transformed and normalized based on rules);
define a vector representation for each event from the plurality of events based on the standardized data (Col. 21, Lines 33-50: feature vectors are determined/computed for the normalized event messages);
calculate a similarity associated with the vector representation for each event from the plurality of events and a plurality of cohorts using a coarse sorting process and a fine sorting process (Col. 21, Lines 33-50: feature vectors are determined/computed for the normalized event messages based on distances; Col. 20, Line 42 – Col. 21, Line 9; Col. 22, Lines 23-56: distance/similarity is computed for the feature vectors of the event messages and clusters (e.g., such as cohorts) using dot product (e.g., such as a fine sorting process) and distance/similarity is computed using similarity-preserving hash functions (e.g., such as a coarse sorting process);
assign each event from the plurality of events to at least one cohort from the plurality of cohorts based on the similarity associated with the vector representation for that event and each cohort from the plurality of cohorts (Col. 21, Lines 33-50; Col. 20, Line 42 – Col. 21, Line 9; Col. 22, Lines 23-56: the event messages are assigned to clusters based on the feature vector and distance/similarity).
Kushmerick fails to disclose:
assign each cohort from the plurality of cohorts to an ontology;
generate a score associated with each event from the plurality of events based on the ontology; and
identify an anomalous event from the plurality of events based on the score associated with that event not meeting a criterion.
However, Karuppasamy discloses:
assign each cohort from the plurality of cohorts to an ontology ([0024]-[0027]: mapping the clusters to an ontology based on a plurality of categories);
generate a score associated with each event from the plurality of events based on the ontology ([0025]-[0027]: scores are generated for incident tickets/logs based on the ontology).
Therefore, it would have been obvious before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to a person having ordinary skill in the art to which said subject matter pertains, having the teachings of Kushmerick and Karuppasamy before him/her, to modify the teachings of Kushmerick with the teachings of Karuppasamy. The motivation for doing so would combine the event messages/logs of Kushmerick with the incident tickets/logs of Karuppasamy to provide an ontology based prediction model to determine the most appropriate or accurate resolution for an incident ticket in real-time and increase the productivity of the user as well as the resolution team handling those tickets by saving their effort as well as time; the user may have quick resolution to his query while the resolution team may focus on new issues that are not in ticket dump and for which there are no mapped resolutions as disclosed by Karuppasamy [0078].
The combination of Kushmerick and Karuppasamy fails to disclose, however, Titon discloses identify an anomalous event from the plurality of events based on the score associated with that event not meeting a criterion ([0032]-[0035], [0043] scores are generated for events of service incidents in which the events are labeled as anomalous based on a score threshold).
Therefore, it would have been obvious before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to a person having ordinary skill in the art to which said subject matter pertains, having the teachings of Kushmerick, Karuppasamy and Titon before him/her, to modify the teachings of Kushmerick with the teachings of Titon. The motivation for doing so would combine the event messages/logs and anomaly detection of Kushmerick with the incident tickets and anomaly detection of Titon to provide for improved addressing and detection of issues that are user-impacting as the issues are occurring (e.g., in real-time), thus providing improved time-to-detect, precision, and coverage for the detection of user-impacting issues in the cloud computing platform, and overage and precision are improved using a single user metric by building a variety of features at different granularity levels to learn anomalous behaviors as disclosed by Titon [0036], [0037].
Regarding claim 17, the combination of Kushmerick, Karuppasamy and Titon discloses the non-transitory processor-readable medium of claim 16, wherein the coarse sorting process includes using a locality sensitive hashing (LSH) function (Kushmerick: Col. 22, Lines 23-56: similarity-preserving hash functions (e.g., such as a locality sensitive hashing function)).
Regarding claim 18, the combination of Kushmerick, Karuppasamy and Titon discloses the non-transitory processor-readable medium of claim 16, wherein the code to cause the one or more processors to calculate includes code to cause the one or more processors to calculate the similarity based on at least one of a cosine similarity, a hamming distance, a nearest neighbor search, a dot product similarity, or a Euclidean distance (Kushmerick: Col. 20, Line 42 – Col. 21, Line 9: dot product similarity).
Regarding claim 19, the combination of Kushmerick, Karuppasamy and Titon discloses the non-transitory processor-readable medium of claim 16, wherein the ontology includes a plurality of categories (Karuppasamy: [0024]-[0027]: mapping the clusters to an ontology based on a plurality of categories).
Claims 23-26 and 30-33 contain corresponding limitations as claims 16-19 and are therefore rejected for the same rationale.
Claim(s) 20, 27and 34 is/are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Kushmerick et al. (U.S. Patent No. 10,205,627; hereinafter Kushmerick) in view of Karuppasamy (U.S. PGPub 2018/0285768) in view of Titon et al. (U.S. PGPub 2024/0256418; hereinafter Titon) and further in view of Kempf et al. (U.S. PGPub 2025/0086391: hereinafter Kempf).
Regarding claim 20, the combination of Kushmerick, Karuppasamy and Titon discloses the non-transitory processor-readable medium of claim 16, wherein the code to cause the one or more processors, but fails to disclose, however, Kempf discloses to define the vector representation includes code to cause the one or more processors to define the vector representation for each event from the plurality of events using a hybrid vector space based on both a dense vector search and a sparse vector search ([0057]-[0061]: one or more searches via a dense search index and a sparse search index).
Therefore, it would have been obvious before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to a person having ordinary skill in the art to which said subject matter pertains, having the teachings of Kushmerick, Karuppasamy, Titon and Kempf before him/her, to modify the teachings of Kushmerick with the teachings of Kempf. The motivation for doing so would combine the vectors and tokens of Kushmerick with the vectors and tokens of Kempf to provide a dense/vector based search and sparse/text/token based search to yield the predictable results of improved information retrieval accuracy and relevance.
Claims 27 and 34 contain corresponding limitations as claim 20 and are therefore rejected for the same rationale.
Claim(s) 22 and 29 is/are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Kushmerick et al. (U.S. Patent No. 10,205,627; hereinafter Kushmerick) in view of Karuppasamy (U.S. PGPub 2018/0285768) in view of Titon et al. (U.S. PGPub 2024/0256418; hereinafter Titon) and further in view of Chandrasekaran et al. (U.S. PGPub 2018/0075070; hereinafter Chandrasekaran).
Regarding claim 22, the combination of Kushmerick, Karuppasamy and Titon discloses the non-transitory processor-readable medium of claim 16, wherein the ontology is a first ontology, the instructions further comprising code to cause the one or more processors to: generate a score for an event based on the first ontology (Karuppasamy: [0025]-[0027]); but fails to disclose, however, Chandrasekaran discloses based on the score for the event being below a threshold for the first ontology, generate, using a machine learning model and based on the event, a second ontology; and assign the event to the second ontology ([0033] if a score for an entity is below a threshold for an initial ontology, the entity can be added to a second generated ontology).
Therefore, it would have been obvious before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to a person having ordinary skill in the art to which said subject matter pertains, having the teachings of Kushmerick, Karuppasamy, Titon and Chandrasekaran before him/her, to modify the teachings of Karuppasamy with the teachings of Chandrasekaran. The motivation for doing so would combine the ontology of Karuppasamy with the ontology of Chandrasekaran to provide a reduced search space/ontology in which future searches can be made more relevant based on previous searches as disclosed by Chandrasekaran [0043].
Claim 29 contains corresponding limitations as claim 22 and is therefore rejected for the same rationale.
Allowable Subject Matter
Claims 21, 28 and 35 are objected to as being dependent upon a rejected base claim, but would be allowable if rewritten in independent form including all of the limitations of the base claim and any intervening claims.
Support for Amendments and Newly Added Claims
Applicants are respectfully requested, in the event of an amendment to claims or submission of new claims, that such claims and their limitations be directly mapped to the specification, which provides support for the subject matter. This will assist in expediting compact prosecution and reducing potential 35 USC § 112(a) or 35 USC § 112, 1st paragraph issues that can arise when claims are amended. MPEP 714.02 recites: “Applicant should also specifically point out the support for any amendments made to the disclosure. See MPEP § 2163.06. An amendment which does not comply with the provisions of 37 CFR 1.121(b), (c), (d), and (h) may be held not fully responsive. See MPEP § 714.” Amendments not pointing to specific support in the disclosure may be deemed as not complying with provisions of 37 C.F.R. 1.121(b), (c), (d), and (h) and therefore held not fully responsive. Generic statements such as “Applicants believe no new matter has been introduced” may be deemed insufficient. The examiner thanks the Applicant in advance for providing support for any amendments or newly added claims.
Examiner cites particular columns and line numbers or paragraphs in the references as applied to claims above 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 be applied 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.
Conclusion
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to DIEDRA M MCQUITERY whose telephone number is (571)272-9607. The examiner can normally be reached Monday - Thursday, 8 am - 6 pm (C.S.T.).
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/Diedra McQuitery/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2166