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Domain: cognex.com

Stories and comments across the archive that link to cognex.com.

Comments · 5

  1. Re:I don't get it by OzPeter · · Score: 1 · on High Speed DIY M&M Sorting Machine Uses iPhone Brain

    They could use a PLC. Like they did 20+ years ago...

    These days you could run an application as simple as this directly in the camera from someone like Cognex. (of course such a camera is capable of doing way more processing)

  2. How about Jerome Lemelson? by baba_geek · · Score: 1 · on Location-Based Search Was Patented In 1999

    Can anyone site a successful patent-suing model as a sole means to wealth?

    How about Jerome Lemelson who made 1.5 billion (Yup that's a B) through Submarine Patents.

    Fortune had a pretty extensive article on him in the May 14th, 2001 issue. Here is a link to the article detailing his exploits...

  3. Re:Microsoft will lose the right to sue ... ever by fritsd · · Score: 1 · on Microsoft Will Not Sue Over Linux Patents
    Good question :-) I posted without actually being familiar with the machine vision field, sorry. So I looked it up a bit but could only find Lemelson's enemies' point of view. From here, I'd say the litigation was more about lack of detail in the patents than the actual invention (this website is probably from his opponents): That page claims:

    Despite the issuance of a dozen patents, it is far from clear what actual contribution, if any, Mr. Lemelson's work made to the field of machine vision. The particular machine vision system described in Lemelson's patents was never built as a practical machine in the real world.
    and

    The theory regarding the Lemelson machine vision patents is that no one using 1954 knowledge and technology could have built a machine vision system capable of functioning as described in Lemelson's patents.
    IIRC there was a lawsuit by a company called Cognex and they won it after 4 years of litigating (1998-2002). This is a very negative article from Cognex' website: (so again, info from an opponent of the late Mr. Lemelson): fortuneandlemel.pdf Another article says Cognex also won in appeal (2005): appeal so that's 7 years of lawsuits.
  4. AI in the real world? by possible · · Score: 4, Informative · on AI in Video Games vs. AI in Academia
    I'm sick of people asking "When will we see widespread commercial application of AI". AI researchers often quote the so-called "moving frontier" problem, that is, as soon as an AI application becomes useful enough to solve real-world problems, it ceases to be known as AI and looks a whole lot more mundane.

    For example, computer vision -- there are publicly-traded companies out there which have been doing machine vision for YEARS. These systems are used by all major chip manufacturers, most major paper and textile manufacturers, etc. to catch recognize and catch defects in products before they leave the assembly line. Cognex is a $1B a year company -- they exclusively do machine vision and visual pattern recognition for industrial applications.

    Another example of a company applying AI would be Virage, who has several patents relating to image/video searching and indexing.

    Many investment houses use neural networks to profile and model investments, and plenty of large financials use expert systems and neural networks to for data mining, employee profiling, and so on.

    Expert systems have been applied to computer security as well -- Rapid 7 (my company) sells a network security scanner which uses the Jess expert system from Sandia labs. The value of the expert system is, it allows the product to use discovered vulnerabilities to further exploit the network, discovering more vulnerabilities, which enable more probes to be performed, etc.

  5. Re:What about Ted Nelson? by klund · · Score: 2 · on British Telecom's Hyperlink Claims To Reach U.S. Court

    The patent was granted in 1989 but applied for over 10 years earlier. The patent application seems to have been amended after initial filing so I'm not sure which of the dates listed really counts, but if you're looking for prior art then you need something further back (unless Xanadu was mostly formed by 1974).

    Of course, filing a patent and then amending it to death is the great Lemelson patent-process-exploitation trick. There was an article in Fortune magazine about it.

    The book "Dream Machines" is a little fuzzy about what-was-written-when... The style of the book is a little disjointed (and it has been heavily revised) but that's not surprising, considering the author (Ted Nelson) coined the word "hypertext" in 1965.

    This link: Ted Nelson and Xanadu seems to imply that Ted had fleshed out most of the Xanadu system by 1974. The page talks about "xanalogical storage" (basically hyperlinking), unique-IDs for pages, and the "docuverse," a cool word we don't use often enough.