News

I would like to clarify the following points for the readers of the KDnuggets News of August 7, item 25 (www.kdnuggets.com/news/2001/n16/25i.html) summarizing Sabra Chartrand's New York Times article (July 30, 2001) about my patent "System and Method for Dynamic Profiling of Users in One-to-One Applications" (US Patent #6,236,978).

First, this patent is not a business methods patent per se, as many of the claims relate to profiling and recommendation technologies. The patent application resulting in the patent was filed on behalf of NYU in 1997 to protect certain personalization and recommendation technologies that I had been developing at NYU at that time. These technologies have been implemented in a working system and are described in articles published in scientific journals and conference proceedings since then.

Second, I would like to clarify that the NYU press release (http://www.stern.nyu.edu/News/releases/patent2.html) cited companies like Oracle, BroadVision, Clarify, E.piphany and PeopleSoft only as examples of some of the leading CRM companies, rather than as a list of companies that NYU intends to license this patent to.

Finally, regarding the statement that "many of the companies already engaged in consumer profiling might not agree that Mr. Tuzhilin's patent is as far-reaching as he contends," I would like to point interested readers to the claim numbers 1, 25 and 30 in the patent or at least to the NYT article which describes one of the claims to illustrate the breadth of the patent.

Regards,
Alex