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 .
Status of Application
The non-final office action vacates the previous non-final action because the previous action examined the wrong claim set. Here, the amended claims set, filed on 04/02/2025 is examined. Claims 1, 3-10 are pending. Claim 2 is cancelled. Claim 1 is the independent claim.
Drawings
The drawings are objected to due to low image quality and resolutions of figures 1-7. The figures appear blurry/pixelated and do not clearly show the claimed features. Corrected drawing sheets in compliance with 37 CFR 1.121(d) are required in reply to the Office action to avoid abandonment of the application. Any amended replacement drawing sheet should include all of the figures appearing on the immediate prior version of the sheet, even if only one figure is being amended. The figure or figure number of an amended drawing should not be labeled as “amended.” If a drawing figure is to be canceled, the appropriate figure must be removed from the replacement sheet, and where necessary, the remaining figures must be renumbered and appropriate changes made to the brief description of the several views of the drawings for consistency. Additional replacement sheets may be necessary to show the renumbering of the remaining figures. Each drawing sheet submitted after the filing date of an application must be labeled in the top margin as either “Replacement Sheet” or “New Sheet” pursuant to 37 CFR 1.121(d). If the changes are not accepted by the examiner, the applicant will be notified and informed of any required corrective action in the next Office action. The objection to the drawings will not be held in abeyance.
Claim Objections
Claim 7 is objected to because it depends on a cancelled claim 2. Appropriate correction is required.
Note: For the purpose of examination, the examiner will examine claim 7 as if it depends on claim 1.
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, 3-10 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.
Regarding claims 1, and 3-5, the claims are lengthy and contain long recitations that the scope of the claimed invention is rendered indefinite thereby. Therefore, the claims are rejected under 35 U.S.C § 112(b) as being prolix because the metes and bounds of the claimed subject matter can not been determined, See MPEP 2173.05(m). It is appeared that the claims have been pasted directly from the specification without any modification to clarify the scope of the claimed subject matter. The broadest reasonable interpretation has been used for the examining of the claims over prior art.
Claim 6-10 are rejected under 35 U.S.C § 112(b) as being dependent on an indefinite claim.
Allowable Subject Matter
Claim 1 would be allowable if rewritten or amended to overcome the rejection(s) under 35 U.S.C. 112(b) or 35 U.S.C. 112 (pre-AIA ), 2nd paragraph, set forth in this Office action.
Claim 3-10 would be allowable if rewritten to overcome the rejection(s) under 35 U.S.C. 112(b) or 35 U.S.C. 112 (pre-AIA ), 2nd paragraph, set forth in this Office action and to include all of the limitations of the base claim and any intervening claims.
The following is a statement of reasons for the indication of allowable subject matter:
Claim 1 as recited, is related to a method for predicting a collision risk of an emergency rescue autonomous driving vehicle based on HM-TRW and HAGENN structure search (Note: HM-TRW and HAGENN are acronyms for, respectively, “higher-order memory guided temporal random walk” and “hierarchical attention graph embedding neural network”. The closest arts found are as followed:
Faruque et al., US20230230484A1, discloses a methodology to determine a risk of collision for an autonomous vehicle via a collision prediction module and teaches Dataset construction, Collision risk prediction model construction, model training, model testing and collision risk prediction as recited in claim 1 (See Faruque, at least Abstract, and Paragraphs [0005], [0008], [0013], [0024], [0063], [0068]-[0070], [0112], [0115]). However, Faruque doesn’t teach “heterogeneous characteristics and dynamic changing rules of the dynamic heterogeneous graph are learned by a high-order memory guided time random walk algorithm, wherein a node representation of the surrounding moving objects is then fed to a hierarchical attention graph embedding neural network to predict a collision risk.”. Faruque discloses feeding the data through graph attention layer (attention-based graph pooling layer) to determine the risk of collision; however, it doesn’t teach applying hierarchical attention graph embedding as recited in the claimed invention. Although these methods are related, but they have technically two different scopes. Hierarchical attention graph embedding neural network method describes the overall multi-level structure using attention at different structural level (e.g., node-level attention, edge-level attention and time- level attention, according to the instant specification, Page 5, second paragraph) within graph neural network architecture which helps in capturing information at multiple scales while attention graph embedding. On the other hand, attention-based graph pooling layer is a technique to decide which nodes or edges are important during pooling. Therefore, Faruque fails to explicitly disclose or suggest hierarchical attention graph embedding method.
Furthermore, Ji et al., in a scientific article named , “Higher-order memory guided temporal random walk for dynamic heterogeneous network embedding”, at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.patcog.2023.109766 teaches using higher order memory guided temporal random walk to capture heterogeneous and dynamic information of multiple types of nodes and edges (See at least Abstract and section 4.2). However, Ji fails to teach or suggest feeding the node representation of the surrounding moving objects to a hierarchical attention graph embedding neural network.
None of the prior art of record, taken alone or in combination, teach the specific limitations of “hierarchical attention graph embedding” stated in claim 1.
Therefor the aforementioned prior arts either alone or in combination of the references and common knowledge of a person of ordinary skilled in the art, would not arrive at the features disclosed in claim 1.
Claim 3-5 would also be allowed if rewritten to overcome the rejection under 35 U.S.C § 112(b), based on their dependency on claim 1.
Claim 6-10 would be allowed due to its dependency on claim 1, if the rejection of claim 1 be overcome.
Conclusion
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to HAJAR HASSANIARDEKANI whose telephone number is (571)272-1448. The examiner can normally be reached Monday thru Friday 8 am-5 pm ET.
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/H.H./Examiner, Art Unit 3669
/Erin M Piateski/Supervisory Patent Examiner, Art Unit 3669