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Matthew Ma

Matthew Ma, PhD

Associate | Electrical & Computer Technologies
212.849.3345 Matthew.Ma@WolfGreenfield.com LinkedIn Profile

Education

  • Tsinghua University, BE, Electrical Engineering
  • State University of New York (SUNY) Buffalo, MS, Electrical and Computer Engineering
  • Northeastern University, PhD, Electrical and Computer Engineering
  • Seton Hall University School of Law, JD, IP Concentration

Key Technologies

  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Machine Learning 
  • Image & Audio Processing 
  • Database Technologies
  • Virtual Machine
  • Semiconductor 
  • Home Networking
  • Virtual Reality
  • Telecommunications Technologies
  • Medical Imaging 
  • Blockchain  
  • Data Security & DRM

Practice Groups

Languages

  • Mandarin Chinese

Admitted to Practice

  • New Jersey
  • New York
  • Pennsylvania
  • Washington
  • US Patent and Trademark Office
  • US District Court, Western District of Pennsylvania

Location

  • New York

Overview

Matthew Ma advises clients on patent matters with a deep understanding of the value of patents, combining his business, technical, and legal acumen.

As former Director of Intellectual Property (IP) at SRI International, a research and innovation company based in Silicon Valley, and several other companies, Matthew has extensive in-house and law firm experience in all phases of a patent’s life cycle, from working with inventors to making strategic decisions on patent filing to monetizing patent assets. These experiences allow him to better understand clients’ needs and value their successes as his top priority.

Matthew brings nearly 30 years of experience in technology development, patent drafting and prosecution, intellectual property management, and patent acquisition. His practice concentrates on patent drafting and prosecution of utility and design patents, patentability and freedom-to-operate studies, trademark registration, IP due diligence, IP litigation support, and IP licensing. His academic training in electrical and computer engineering, coupled with prior industry experience as a scientist and engineer, affords him an in-depth understanding of complex technologies behind his clients’ innovations.

Matthew has extensive experience with industrial standardization including participating in standard working groups in UPnP/DNLA and OSGi and developing standard-essential patent (SEP) strategies for technology companies. His SEP-related experiences also include due diligence on compliance of high efficiency video coding related patents and drafting patent applications related to MPEG 7 compact descriptors for video analysis (CDVA).

Matthew is a contributor to the engineer community’s understanding of IP protection. He lectured a course entitled “Intellectual Property Rights: Protection, Enforcement and Risks” at the 15th International Summer School on Advanced Computer Architecture and Compilation for High-Performance and Embedded Systems, July 14-20, 2019, Fiuggi, Italy. He has authored a book titled Fundamentals of Patenting and Licensing for Scientists and Engineers, World Scientific, 2008 and 2015, which have been used as a textbook for patent and innovation courses at UC Berkeley, Tsinghua University, University of Oslo, Rochester Institute of Technology, and IEEE. Matthew is editor-in-chief and a contributing author of a Chinese book titled Handbook of Best Practices in Intellectual Property Management, Enterprise Management Publishing, 2011. He has also published two online tutorials on patent protection for engineers with the IEEE eLearning Library.

During 2005-2021, Matthew was Associate Editor of the International Journal of Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence. During 2011-2013, he was appointed by UC Berkeley and Tsinghua University to teach a course “Patent Strategy and Innovation” at Tsinghua University, Beijing. He has also served as Chief Advisor, Intellectual Property to Office of Enterprise Management Job Training & Certification, Chinese Enterprise Confederation from 2011-2014.

Prior to his transition into intellectual property, Matthew spent 15 years in corporate research, mostly with Panasonic R&D Company in the United States as a senior scientist working on artificial intelligence, machine learning, signal and document analysis, home networking, and telecommunications technologies. He is an inventor of 14 US-granted patents and is an author of 30 refereed conference and journal papers. He has also published two technical books on recommendation systems and mobile multimedia processing.

Prior to joining Wolf Greenfield, Matthew held various roles in the intellectual property field. Most recently, he was a patent attorney at an international law firm, where he drafted and prosecuted patent applications in the electronics and software space.

Experience

Patent Prosecution 

  • Drafted and successfully prosecuted hundreds of US patent applications in a wide range of technologies, such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, semiconductor design, medical device, mechanical device, blockchain, data security, image and audio signal processing, document analysis and handwriting recognition, natural language processing, cloud computing and virtual machine, virtual reality, augmented reality and mixed reality, consumer electronics, home networking and telecommunication, e.g., mesh networks, Femtocell networks, UPnP, SIP and 5G, television broadcast, MPEG codec, 2D barcode, robotic surgical systems, and software inventions.

IP Monetization and Litigation Support

  • Conducted IP due diligence in an international merger & acquisition transaction in the consumer electronics domain.
  • Assisted clients in monetizing patent assets, including mining portfolios, developing licensing and sales programs, identifying infringing parties, and developing evidence of use claim charts.
  • Counseled on freedom to operate (FTO) and design around in various stages from pre-product release to pre-litigation.
  • Developed over 100 claim charts for Fortune 500 high tech companies in image processing and telecom technologies in support of patent infringement actions.
  • Conducted non-infringement / invalidity studies in litigation support.

Start-ups Counseling

  • Drafted and reviewed IP terms in consultant agreements, service agreements, licensing agreements, and IP transfer agreements.
  • Assisted clients in searching and selecting of trademarks and obtaining trademark registrations with the US Patent and Trademark Office.
  • Advised a start-up company in semiconductor and artificial intelligence space in developing a sophisticated patent portfolio involving a combination of hardware and software technologies, which led to successful exit for the company.
  • Served as volunteer attorney in legal clinics for nonprofit and small businesses, advising on IP strategies.

Activities

  • Chair/Board Director, Chinese Institute of Engineers/USA Seattle Chapter 
  • Mentor, Student & Young Professionals Mentoring Program, University of Washington Technology & Business Association (TBA) and China Entrepreneur Network (CEN)
  • Senior Member, IEEE Society (2000-present)

Publications

Books

  • Ma, Fundamentals of Patenting and Licensing for Scientists and Engineers, World Scientific, 1ST & 2ND editions (2009, 2015)
  • Ma and Kwok, Handbook of Best Practices in Intellectual Property Management (in Chinese), Enterprise Management Publishing House, 2011 (Foreword by Lipu Tian, then-director of State IP Office)
  • Jiang, Ma, Chen, Mobile Multimedia Processing: Fundamentals, Methods, and Applications, Springer, 2010
  • Uchyigit and Ma, Personalization Techniques and Recommender Systems, World Scientific, 2008

Refereed Journal and Conference Papers

  • Is Patent Marking the Patent Owner's Right or Statutory Duty?, China IP Magazine, July-September 2021, pp. 116-123, Electronic Issue 101, Feb 2022
  • Exploring the Reasons that Guiding Case No. 20 Lost Its Guiding Effect, China Law Connect, Issue 13, pp. 33-42, 2021 
  • Multi-Aspect Rating Inference with Aspect-based Segmentation, IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing (TAC), 3(4):469-481, 2012 
  • Uncertainty-based Active Learning with Instability Estimation for Text Classification, ACM Transactions on Speech and Language Processing (TSLP), 8(4), article 5:1-21, 2012
  • Aspect-based Opinion Polling from Customer Reviews, IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing (TAC), 2(1):37-49, 2011
  • Confidence-based Stopping Criteria for Active Learning for Data Annotation, 2011 ACM Transactions on Speech and Language Processing (TSLP), 6(3):1-24, 2011
  • Active Learning with Sampling by Uncertainty and Density for Data Annotations, IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing, Volume: 18 , Issue: 6, pp. 1323 – 1331, 2010
  • A Recommender Handoff Framework for a Mobile Device, Mobile Multimedia Processing: Fundamentals, Methods and Applications, LNCS 5960, Springer, pp. 137-151, 2010
  • A Recommender Handoff Framework with DVB-H Support on a Mobile Device, Proceeding of the First Int. Workshop on Mobile Multimedia Processing, pp. 64-71, 2008
  • A Dynamic Programming Model for Text Segmentation Based on Min-Max Similarity, Proceeding of Asian Information Retrieval Symposium (AIRS), 2008
  • A Low Resource Consumption Image Region Extraction Algorithm for Mobile Devices, Proceeding of IEEE Int. Conf. of Multimedia and Expo, 2007
  • A Recommender Framework for Electronic Programming Guide on a Mobile Device, Proceeding of IEEE Int. Conf. of Multimedia and Expo, 2007
  • Editorial of Special Issue of Personalization Techniques and Recommender Systems, Int. Journal of Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence, pp. 179-181, Vol. 21, No.2, 2007
  • Content Classification for Electronic Programming Guide Recommendation for a Portable Device, Int. Journal of Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence, pp. 375-395, Vol. 21, No.2, 2007
  • Editorial of Special Issue of Intelligent Mobile and Embedded Systems, Int. Journal of Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence, pp. 463-465, Vol. 20, No.4, 2006
  • Implementing a SIP-based Device Communication Middleware for OSGi Framework with Extension to Wireless Networks, First Int. Multi-Symposiums on Computer and Computational Sciences (IMSCCS), pp. 603-610, 2006
  • A SIP-based OSGi Device Communication Service for Mobile Personal Area Networks, 3rd IEEE Consumer Communications and Networking Conference (CCNC), Volume 1, pp. 502 – 508, 2006
  • Supporting Development of Context-aware Applications Using Semantic Space Toolkit, Int. Journal of Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence, pp. 585-607, Vol. 20, No.4, 2006
  • Electronic Programming Guide Recommender for Viewing on a Portable Device, 1st Int. Workshop on Web Personalization, Recommender Systems and Intelligent User Interfaces (WPRSIUI), pp. 79-88, 2005
  • From Pixels to True XML Structures in Digital Document Images, International Journal of Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 18, No. 6, pp. 1057-1069, 2004
  • IDTV Broadcast Applications for a Handheld Device, IEEE International Conference of Communication (ICC), 2004
  • Universal Remote Console Standard – Toward Natural User Interaction in Ambient Intelligence, Proceedings of the International Conference on Human Computer Interaction (CHI), pp. 1608-1609, 2004
  • Automatic Image Cropping for Mobile Device with Built-in Camera, Proceeding of IEEE Consumer Communications and Networking Conference, 2004
  • A Post-processing System for Correcting Machine Recognized Text, Advances in Computation of Oriental Language, 20th International Conference on Computer Processing of Oriental Languages, pp. 568-575, 2003
  • Structured Document for Information Retrieval, Advances in Computation of Oriental Language, 20th International Conference on Computer Processing of Oriental Languages, pp. 363-370, 2003
  • Page Classification through Logical Labelling, 16th International Conference on Pattern Recognition, Vol. 3, pp. 477-480, 2002
  • Separating Handwritten Material from Machine Printed Text Using Hidden Markov Models, Proc. of Intl. Conf. on Document Analysis and Recognition, pp. 439-443, 2001
  • Retrieval of Cursive Chinese Handwritten Annotations Based on Radical Model, Proc. of International Conf. on Chinese Language Computing, pp. 142-149, 2000
  • Studies of Radical Model for Retrieval of Cursive Chinese Handwritten Characters, Advances in Pattern Recognition Lecture Notes in Computer Science, LNCS 1876, pp. 407-416, 2000
  • Ink Matching of Cursive Chinese Handwriting Annotations, Int. J. of Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 12, No. 1, pp. 119–141, 1998
  • Ink Matching of Cursive Chinese Handwriting Annotations, Advances in Oriental Document Analysis and Recognition Techniques, World Scientific, 1998
  • Using Semantics in Matching Cursive Chinese Handwriting Annotations, Advances in Pattern Recognition Lecture Notes in Computer Science, LNCS 1451, Springer-Verlag, pp. 292-301, 1998
  • Approximate Ink Matching of Chinese Handwriting Annotations, Proceeding of International Conference of Processing of Oriental Languages (ICCPOL), pp. 95-100, 1997
  • Semantic Matching of Free-format Chinese Handwriting, Proceeding of International Conference of Processing of Oriental Languages (ICCPOL), pp. 107-112, 1997
  • A Digital Geography Database System, Proceedings of the Forum of Advanced Digital Libraries, pp. 239-240, 1995
  • Segmentation of Medical Images Using Mathematical Morphology, SPIE Proceedings, Vol. 1660, 1992

Events

Interests

Matthew is actively involved with engineer and entrepreneur communities, and is a frequent speaker of New Jersey Chinese Computer Professionals Society, Chinese Institute of Engineers USA-Seattle Chapter, Seattle Entrepreneurship Club, and IEEE. He has assisted clients in incorporating and dissolving non-profit organizations, and obtaining of 501(c)(3) tax exempt status with the IRS.

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