Patent Office Presents $50,000 Innovation Challenge

[ via Information Week ] 20 Dec

The U.S. Trademark and Patent Office (USPTO) is offering a $50,000 prize to technologists that special in image processing to create new technology to help modernize the process of patent examination.

The USPTO Innovation Challenge seeks the creation of a new algorithm to help reduce the paper burden of its current system for deciding whether to approve patents or not, according to a post on the White House blog.

Read more at Information Week

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Japan faces Colossal Nuclear Cleanup Challenge

[ The New York Times ] 6 Dec

Futaba is a modern-day ghost town — not a boomtown gone bust, not even entirely a victim of the devastating earthquake and tsunami that leveled other parts of Japan’s northeast coast.

Some 90,000 people were evacuated from a 12-mile zone around the Fukushima Daiichi plant and another area to the northwest contaminated when a plume from the plant scattered radioactive cesium and iodine.

Futaba Cleanup Challenge (Photo: Ko Sasaki for NYT)

Now, Japan is faced with a colossal challenge to cleanup the area for the displaced people could go back home.

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