And the winners of CodeFest 2024 on generative AI are…

The European Patent Office (EPO) announced today the winners of its CodeFest 2024 at a live ceremony during the Patent Knowledge Forum.​ 

​​For the second edition of the public EPO’s CodeFest, talented coders and developers were invited to harness the transformative potential of generative AI to derive new insights from patent data. In total, 120 participants from 19 countries submitted 59 proposals, 33 of which were team efforts and 26 the work of individual contenders.  

​Fifty proposals made it through to the second round and after two months of coding, six finalists were selected by a jury of EPO experts in IT, data science, AI and patent information. At the  ceremony  the prizes were awarded to the following teams:  

​Winners: Nikos Gialitsis and Sevasti Papaioannou (Greece) 

​The InnoVisor team developed a platform that leverages patent data to visualise patent landscapes, assist users in drafting patent applications and evaluate patentability by automatically providing a similarity score between the intended subject matter and relevant prior art documents. InnoVisor received the top prize of EUR 20 000.  

​First runners-up: Segun Aroyehun (Nigeria); Giordano De Marzo, Enrico Maria Fenoaltea, Filippo Santoro and Andrea Tacchella (Italy) 

​This team, the Patent Embedders, hail from academia. They created a sophisticated visualisation tool to explore patent trends and predict future technology combinations. As the first runners-up, the Patent Embedders received EUR 10 000.  

​Second runners-up: David Burns, Stephen Hibbert, Oliver Manners and Ryan Pepper (UK) 

​To help users discover trends in a given technological area, the PatentTrends team created a platform to retrieve patents using natural language queries. As the second runners-up, PatentTrends received EUR 5 000.  

​A recording of the CodeFest 2024 prize ceremony will be published shortly. 

​Thank you to all of those who participated in CodeFest 2024 and developed proposals, with special thanks to our exceptional finalists for their hard work. 

​How patent data and generative AI accelerate innovation  

​This year’s CodeFest broke new ground in exploring how generative AI can be leveraged to foster innovation. The winning solutions have the potential to transform the way we access patent data and use it to support strategic decision-making. This is an important focus area for the EPO, as outlined in our Strategic Plan 2028.   

​In addition to their potential impact on innovation, the winners’ solutions stood out for their functionality, usability and technical merit, as well as their creative and original use of generative AI. To help them craft their solutions, the CodeFest participants who made it through to the second round were given access to EPO worldwide bibliographic data; EPO worldwide legal event data; EP full-text data; Open Patent Services; and the beta version of the Technology Intelligence Platform (TIP), which was publicly launched today during the Patent Knowledge Forum.  

​Democratising access to the EPO’s unparalleled patent data resources 

​The EPO’s unparalleled patent data resources are relied upon by inventors as well as governmental and international organisations around the world. Democratising access to this data, including by making it more easily navigable, is key to a sustainable patent system and society. Generative AI will be a powerful tool here, helping to facilitate data-driven decision making that accelerates the advancement of new technologies. A wide range of stakeholders use the EPO’s patent data resources, including the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), International Energy Agency (IEA), International Renewable Energy Association (IRENA) and European Commission, as well as researchers and patent information specialists. 

​Stay tuned for more information on CodeFest 2025, which will focus on classifying patent data for sustainable development. More details will be available soon on the CodeFest webpage.