SenseTime Group: Let AI Lead the Progress of Intellectual Property?
By Zhang Yixiang, China IP
When it comes to cuttingedge concepts in science and industry field today, “Artificial Intelligence (AI)” must be on the popular list. Up to now, artificial intelligence technology has begun to integrate into all aspects of the field of science and technology and industry, and then into every corner of daily life of ordinary people, profoundly changing the whole face of human production and life.
As a technical science, artificial intelligence technology has developed for decades, but for most people, “artificial intelligence” is still a new concept. As an AI platform company focusing on computer vision and deep learning of original technology, SenseTime is as “young” as the concept of “artificial intelligence” in most people’s eyes. Founded in 2014, SenseTime Group is on a mission to “adhere to the originality, let AI guide human progress”. It established a domestic top, self-developed deep learning supercomputing center in just four years, and became China’s first-class supplier of artificial intelligence algorithm. It takes the lead in the same industry in terms of technical strength and business revenue and also ranks the first in the market share of several vertical fields. At present, SenseTime has established cooperation with more than 400 famous universities, enterprises and institutions at home and abroad and provided solutions based on face recognition, image recognition, text recognition, medical image recognition, video analysis, unmanned driving and other technologies for them. In May 2018, SenseTime announced the completion of C+ round of When it comes to cuttingedge concepts in science and industry field today, “Artificial Intelligence (AI)” must be on the popular list. Up to now, artificial intelligence technology has begun to integrate into all aspects of the field of science and technology and industry, and then into every corner of daily life of ordinary people, profoundly changing the whole face of human production and life. As a technical science, artificial intelligence technology has developed for decades, but for financing of USD 620 million, which once set a global record in the field of artificial intelligence again and became the world’s most valuable artificial intelligence platform company. At present, SenseTime has now set up its branches in Hong Kong, Beijing, Shenzhen, Shanghai, Chengdu, Hangzhou, Kyoto, Tokyo, Singapore and other countries and regions. Top talents from all over the world are gathering together and untiringly struggling to build a worldclass original artificial intelligence technology company.
In 2017, the intellectual property team of SenseTime Group won the honorary title of “China’s Outstanding Intellectual Property Service Team”. The intellectual property team of SenseTime was established with the birth of the company. Like other departments of the company, this team with only nine people has made remarkable achievements in less than four years. When artificial intelligence and intellectual property meet, what kind of sparks will the two collide? With this question in mind, China IP reporter approached SenseTime’s intellectual property team and chatted with them about every detail of the team work over the past four years.
Talents make it successful upon four years’growth
In the view of Gao Chenhao, leader of the intellectual property team of SenseTime, the increase in the number of team members from one to nine is the result of the rapid development of the company and reflects the double progress of team work in depth and breadth.
Compared with other enterprises in the traditional industry, as an emerging original artificial intelligence technology company, SenseTime is facing with complex and diverse new problems in intellectual property affairs, which also puts forward higher requirements for the business capability and personal quality of the group’s intellectual property team members. In view of this, SenseTime has its own set of strict standards for selection of the team talents. Gao Chenhao told the China IP reporter the crux, frankly speaking, as a rapidly developing enterprise; we don’t have much time and energy to cultivate intellectual property talents from scratch. Therefore, we introduce more mature talents from the intellectual property industry. We mainly have two aspects of requirements for team members. First, members should have the ability to deal with the complex intellectual property business within the enterprise; second, members should have the potential to grow and progress together with the enterprise. For example, we add a special requirement in the job description: at least two kinds of work experience in the State Intellectual Property Office, Intellectual Property Agency or Enterprise Intellectual Property Department. The reason for this requirement is that we hope the candidates can improve their understanding of the intellectual property rights by themselves and have the ability to adapt to the roles of different industries through different types of work experience in the intellectual property industry, which is also one of the important basis for them to adapt to the demands of the intellectual property rights of the SenseTime Group. Of course, in terms of talent introduction, we watch the present and more the future, watch the stock and more the increment. Artificial intelligence is an emerging industry with rapid development, and it also faces new challenges in intellectual property rights. Therefore, besides good basic ability, we also need every team member to have the desire and perseverance to grow up, learn and improve together with the enterprise.
In terms of team talent training, SenseTime also has a unique set of practices and experience. According to the market industry division of the group’s main business, the team members are assigned to each industry as the head of the industry intellectual property rights. The head of intellectual property rights in each industry shall be independently responsible for all intellectual property matters, including innovation mining, patent application layout, product intellectual property risk prevention, supporting the application of trademark, software copyright, domain name and other intellectual property rights, approval of intellectual property contract terms, intellectual property training.
Team members point out that the size of SenseTime is equivalent to a small and medium-sized enterprise in each key industry. Through being independently responsible for the intellectual property affairs of a certain industry, each team member can have the ability to independently handle the complex intellectual property issues within the enterprise, and can be competent for the role of the head of enterprise intellectual property rights. In addition, the team will provide various internal and external training opportunities for members and encourage team members to improve themselves in combination with enterprise practices.
Today, relying on the force of nine members, the young intellectual property team of SenseTime has supported all intellectual property matters of the group. In addition to the traditional enterprise patent, trademark, copyright, domain name and other intellectual property businesses, the team has also made breakthroughs in the aspects of opensource software management, data security management, protection of privacy right and protection of the technical secrets, which was paid special attention to in the field of artificial intelligence. In addition, the team also cooperated with other departments of the group to complete the approval of contract intellectual property clause, due diligence of investment and financing intellectual property information, group intellectual property system construction and intellectual property training and other intellectual property tasks.
Dare to challenge and expect to change the world
What kind of opportunities and challenges will the new technological revolution led by artificial intelligence bring to the intellectual property industry? As the intellectual property team of the artificial intelligence high-tech company, is there anything unusual about the work of the intellectual property team of SenseTime? Members of the intellectual property team of SenseTime talked about these topics with China IP reporter during the interview.
Team members mentioned that artificial intelligence technology has already had a great influence on each subdivided industry of intellectual property, which is reflected in the following four aspects: Firstly, in terms of intellectual property retrieval tools, artificial intelligence retrieval tools such as Google patent have an impact on the traditional retrieval tools and databases in recent years, so the retrieval tools based on artificial intelligence technology and developed by the Chinese themselves also have been widely used and even have been used by the State Intellectual Property Office as the official retrieval tools. These retrieval tools have provided great convenience to intellectual property practitioners and greatly improved the retrieval efficiency and accuracy. Secondly, in terms of patent literature translation tools, professional translation companies begin to use artificial intelligence auxiliary tools, and even network AI translation tools directly replace human translation in some occasions. Thirdly, in terms of intellectual property documents writing, it is reported that application documents that are completed written by artificial intelligence tools have entered into the review process in the patent office of some countries. Although the quality of the application documents written by artificial intelligence tools is unidentified, it goes without saying that the writing of patent documents assisted by artificial intelligence has been an irresistable trend. Fourthly, in terms of intellectual property management tools, the enterprise intellectual property management tools using artificial intelligence technology and big data technology have already appeared, which impacts the traditional management tools and database providers.
Talking about the new characteristics of their own work, the team members admitted that the company changes every day driven by the rapid development of artificial intelligence technology. Every member in the intellectual property team also needs to come into contact with and learn new technologies to keep pace with the development of the industry. At the same time, more importantly, the form and scope of intellectual property are undergoing significant changes in the era of artificial intelligence, which bring many new difficulties to the team’s work. For example, firstly, for SenseTime, a large number of basic technologies and core products of its artificial intelligence technology are embodied in software form, how to balance the disclosure and confidentiality of software technology with patents and technological secrets? How to protect software terminal products with patents, software copyright and other different intellectual property rights? How to enhance the testability of patent infringement on the basis of obtaining software patent authorization? These are all issues that the team needs to give emphasis on when it comes to the characteristics of artificial intelligence software. Secondly, cloud computing and cloud services are important characteristics of the era of artificial intelligence and are also important protection objects of intellectual property rights of artificial intelligence enterprises. But cloud computing happens on the server side, can the existing concept of patent layout effectively protect this form of innovation of cloud computing? This is not only an important problem to be solved in the team work, but also a direction for all artificial intelligence intellectual property practitioners to transcend together. Thirdly, in the era of artificial intelligence, the open-source software is inevitably widely used. For most of intellectual property practitioners, open-source software is still a strange existence, and the intellectual property risks it brings are also highly uncertain. In this regard, team members need to strive to learn relevant knowledge, so as to help the enterprise effectively manage the intellectual property risks involved in open source software. Finally, in addition to the traditional types of patents, trademarks and copyrights, data security and privacy protection have become important contents of enterprise intellectual property work with the advent of the era of artificial intelligence, especially true for SenseTime. In daily work, the team also needs to put in time and energy on this aspect.
Face the future and help the industry develop
At the end of the interview, the team members gave cautious answers to questions from China IP reporter about the future work objectives and plans of the intellectual property team of SenseTime. They said that the core work of an enterprise’s intellectual property department is to serve its business objectives at all times. With the rapid development of SenseTime in the era of changing artificial intelligence, the intellectual property team will continuously adjust its work objectives and direction along with the company’s development strategy. For the team, the future may not fully appear, but the pace of progress is still solid and determined.
“In addition to the continuous accumulation of various types of intellectual property assets, we will continue to strengthen the company’s intellectual property risk prevention work in the future, to protect the rapid development of the company on the product market and the capital market. In addition, with the expansion of the company’s overseas market, we will formulate corresponding overseas intellectual property strategies to cope with the more complex market environment. Of course, our intellectual property team will also enrich personnel to match the continuous expansion of the company and strive to build a professional and highlevel intellectual property team with international vision. And above all, in the future work, we will also continuously explore and study the enterprise intellectual property management in the era of artificial intelligence, use our corporate practice to accumulate some experience in the intellectual property industry, and try to spread these experience, making more China’s high-tech enterprises benefit from it, sharing success with industry colleagues.” said team members.
“For SenseTime, our intellectual property team is the most important intellectual property asset of the company,” Gao Chenhao finally concluded, “SenseTime is an ambitious company in the field of artificial intelligence, we also hope to build an outstanding intellectual property team matching the company and we are very happy that we are already doing it. We believe that our team will successfully accomplish their mission in the future.”
