2012 Golden Acorn Awards Recognize PARC Innovations

In 2012 PARC celebrated 10 years of practicing open innovation, a major milestone since being incorporated as an independent subsidiary of Xerox in 2002. That same year PARC also instituted the Golden Acorn Awards, an annual award program to recognize excellence in patenting. The awards reflect the significance of intellectual property to PARC’s business model and the importance of individual leadership in its creation.

PARC is a place where the “entrepreneurial scientist” thrives — people with that rare combination of a passion for deep research, a pioneering spirit, and the business savvy of an entrepreneur. Nominated by a peer-based group and then selected by PARC’s senior team, the recipients of the 2012 Golden Acorn Awards truly embody our culture with their groundbreaking and industry-leading work.

The following PARC inventors have made considerable contributions to PARC’s intellectual assets and demonstrated excellent patent practice and are recipients of the 2012 Golden Acorn Awards:

Rong Zhou
Patent# 8234233: System and Methods for Combining Breadth-First and Depth-First Search Strategies with Applications to Graph-Search Problems with Large Encoding Sizes
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Rong’s novel search strategy effectively combines breadth-first and depth-first traversals in the same graph-search algorithm for the first time. Previously thought to be incompatible search strategies, it creates a new class of hybrid search algorithms that can combine the complementary strength of both search strategies, improving speed, memory efficiency, and scalability of large-scale graph analytics.

Tse Nga Ng, Robert A Street (Ana C Arias, Sanjiv Sambandan, Jurgen H Daniel)
Patent# 8158973: Organic Memory Array With Ferroelectric Field-Effect Transistor Pixels
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Their invention provides the means to build a large area printed memory array, each memory bit based on ferroelectric polymer gated transistors (FeFET) and organic addressing/readout transistor (OFET). As a result, it makes it possible to increase the array size and provide a scalable system for commercial development of printed electronics with increased memory.

Norine E Chang , H Ben Hsieh, Kai Melde (Meng H Lean, Joe Zuback, Nitin S Parekh)
Patent# 8268169:  Membrane Bioreactor (Mbr) and Moving Bed Bioreactor (Mbbr) Configurations for Wastewater Treatment
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To ensure clean effluent, especially for wastewater treatment, this patent uses the distinctive advantages of PARC’s breakthrough clean water platform technology, Hydrodynamic Separation (HDS), as a front end to a very low cost membrane that does not require intensive maintenance. It is a creative and breakthrough way to augment conventional membrane-based bioreactors by using membranes which are substantially lower in cost.

Oliver Brdiczka (Maurice Chu)
Patent# 8086548:  Measuring Document Similarity by Inferring Evolution of Documents Through Reuse of Passage Sequences
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With the increasing information generated and managed by knowledge workers, there is a high demand for a way to calculate similarities between documents. This patent provides a general measure for document similarity based on the amount of content re-use between two documents by a knowledge worker. A core patent for the startup Meshin, claims are formulated very broadly covering document passage re-use so it can be applied and used in a large number of other areas and applications, such as compact techniques to store data, social networking, and more.