Daniel McFarland
Stanford University, CA·Social Science
A patent is not simply a description of an invention — it is the negotiated outcome of an argument. An inventor files claims; an examiner may reject them as obvious or as not new; the inventor rebuts, narrows, or redesigns.
- Fields
Social Science
Computer Science
Mathematics & Statistics
- Topics
patents
patent examination
innovation
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2028
What they work on
- Measure how patent claims are transformed during prosecution across all public U.S. Patent and Trademark Office applications, using natural language processing, machine learning, and qualitative coding of examiner and applicant documents.
- Characterize how examiners interpret prior art and application claims and how applicants offer counter-interpretations in rebuttals, combining natural language processing with qualitative coding.
- Model how examiner–applicant interactions reshape emergent technological claims and relate to the long-run value of patented technology, fitting panel multinomial logit models.
- Test whether examiners and inventors learn across repeated examinations, developing strategies that make patent execution more efficient and effective.
More about the research
This project asks how that back-and-forth shapes what technology ends up protected, how valuable it turns out to be, and more broadly how research gets translated into use.
Why it matters
The patent system is the main gate between laboratory research and usable technology, yet how examiner–inventor negotiation changes inventions is largely unmeasured. Quantifying this process could inform how patent offices train and assign examiners, how applicants draft and amend claims, and policy aimed at improving the translation of research into technologies that reach the public.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Janet Box-Steffensmeier
Ohio State University, OH·Social Science
Build the first comprehensive dataset cataloging the geographic origin, timing and issue areas of all writ of certiorari petitions asking the U.S. Supreme Court to review lower court cases.
Kenneth Joseph
University at Buffalo, NY·Computer Science·Early-career
Develop mixed methods combining graph-based and natural-language machine learning with qualitative analysis to identify dominant beliefs about social issues in large datasets from X and Parler.
Heike Hofmann
University of Nebraska-Lincoln, NE·Mathematics & Statistics
Measure how accurately U.S. adults interpret different data visualizations, such as bar and line charts, through an online survey of 2,000 respondents from a nationally representative, probability-based panel.
The school
Stanford University: 87 labs on PI Pages, $1.6B a year on research, 739 research doctorates a year.
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