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IBM Master Inventor Dan Kolz Keeps the U.S. Patent Office Busy

Last October, the Government Accountability Office reported that the U.S. Patent Office wasn’t hiring new patent examiners quickly enough to deal with a massive backlog of patent applications. How bad is it? Stephen Barr, columnist for the Washington Post, reported that if the patent office stopped taking new applications and just focused on dealing with existing applications, it would still take two years to clear the backlog.

At IBM in Rochester, Minn., project leader Dan Kolz is doing his best to make sure the patent office stays busy. In just the past four years, 28-year old Kolz has submitted more than 100 patent applications for IBM.

Kolz acknowledges his patent output is far from typical (moderately active IBM inventors might file six to eight applications in the time that Kolz has filed dozens), but he modestly attributes his prodigious output to being involved with the right projects at the right time. “If you get into a new technology area where there’s a lot of space for inventions, it’s possible to write quite a few patent applications,” he says.

Kolz started out at IBM in the Life Sciences group, working on the Data Discovery and Query Builder (DDQB) product, a tool to help clinicians and researchers build complex queries to find an ideal group of patients for medical studies. “This was a great project,” Kolz says. “And the technology was so new that a lot of my patents ended up coming from DDQB.”

From there, Kolz took up his current role as project leader on Secure Perspective, a product that helps users write and enforce a natural-language security policy. Though Secure Perspective was developed for System i*, Kolz and his team have just begun the process of transporting the software to the System z* platform. “We’re very excited about bringing this new functionality to some of IBM’s largest customers,” says Kolz.

Amazingly, the man IBM has honored as one of its Master Inventors almost chose a completely different career path in college. Kolz has several interests including economics, sociology and history. He had a difficult time deciding whether to major in history or computer engineering at Iowa State University.

Then one evening, he saw a TV program about genetic algorithms, a computer search technique intermingling elements from high-performing algorithms to evolve increasingly better solutions. “I just thought it was the neatest thing in the world,” Kolz says. He decided to focus on computers and set himself on the road to an inventor’s acclaim.

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