AI Hot Topics: The AI-Friendly Patent Office: A New Era or a House of Cards

NC State University is hosting a panel on the intersection of AI and patent law on Thursday, October 15, from 8:45 to 9:45 AM. The session is titled The AI-Friendly Patent Office: A New Era or a House of Cards, and it's part of the AI Hot Topics series run by the NC State Data Science and AI Academy.

The conversation centers on recent policy changes at the USPTO that suggest a more open path for patenting AI technologies and inventions developed with AI assistance. The panelists will weigh whether this really is a new era for AI innovation or a house of cards waiting to fall, given that the USPTO can't rewrite the Patent Act on its own—Congress and the federal courts still have the final word. It's a look at where the rules stand now and where they might shift when the legal system catches up.

The panel brings together a mix of academic, legal, and industry perspectives. Bill Rand, Executive Director of the Institute for Advanced Analytics at NC State, joins patent attorneys Greg Hunt of Jenkins, Taylor & Hunt and Jordan Glassman of Kilpatrick Townsend & Stockton LLP, who will also moderate. They're joined by Michael Gagliardo, a staff software engineer at GitHub, and Marina Harrell, an MBA and former director of software engineering. Between the lawyers, the engineers, and the academic side, you'll get a few different angles on how these policies actually land in practice.

The session is part of Data Science and AI Week at NC State, a campus-wide celebration of how data science and AI are shaping research, teaching, and discovery at the university. Other signature events during the week include the DataFest competition for undergraduates and the Data Science and AI Academy Speaker Series. The AI Hot Topics series itself is a monthly forum that brings together experts, scholars, and practitioners from industry and academia to explore a specific 'hot topic' in AI research, ethics, and practice, with an eye toward building industry-academia-government partnerships. Past sessions have covered smart maps and geospatial technologies and human-machine teaming.

The panel runs from 8:45 to 9:45 AM on Thursday, October 15, at NC State University, 1017 Main Campus Dr, Raleigh, NC, on the Centennial Campus.