New opportunities for patent information offered by technology trends were the focus of the 27th Patent Information Conference that took place recently in Sofia, Bulgaria. In the presence of the Bulgarian Deputy Minister for the Economy, Lachezar Borosov, EPO Vice-President Raimund Lutz outlined in his opening speech the key role of patent information services in the promotion of innovation.
The conference was attended by some 350 participants coming from 45 countries. Those attending heard how the EPO is increasingly focusing on usability to enable more users to search data efficiently and easily, while ensuring the reliability and correctness of the data.
The high quality of the EPO's data was highlighted by Google in their presentation on the development of the neural machine translation engine. Over the course of the last year the technology has been deployed in in the EPO's free machine translation tool Patent Translate to produce more accurate translations than ever before. Participants also learnt about the developments taking place in the EPO's international cooperation projects which were helping to provide more accessible and up to date patent information to the EPO's users.

Source: SIPO