Jerry Ma honored with prestigious Samuel J. Heyman Service to America Medal® for excellence incorporating artificial intelligence at the USPTO

"Over the years, the USPTO's had several finalists who demonstrate the public service excellence celebrated via this award, but Jerry Ma is the first individual from our agency to win the medal," said Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the USPTO Kathi Vidal. "In only four years, the work he and his team have put forth has moved our agency forward technologically. Jerry has become an indispensable asset to our agency, to the inventors and entrepreneurs who rely upon us, and to our nation. We are delighted Jerry is receiving this recognition!"

Reviewing a patent application is a complex process that involves scouring hundreds if not thousands of documents, in many languages and across multiple systems. Ma guided the agency in understanding how AI should be considered in the development and protection of inventions and in developing a portfolio of AI tools to improve the patent examination process for more than 9,000 examiners.

One of these tools, an AI-powered search, goes beyond traditional keyword-based search methods to identify relevant information, and now processes thousands of searches per day. Another tool sifts through the USPTO archives to point examiners toward the documents most similar to the patent application they are considering, ranking the results to help them home in on the most relevant and most important information.

Ma also co-chairs the agency's AI and Emerging Technology Working Group, leading an interdisciplinary group of professionals from across the USPTO to address legal and policy issues at the intersection of AI, emerging technology, and intellectual property. Under Ma's leadership, the USPTO has provided key policy guidance to agency stakeholders and personnel, facilitated the responsible exploration of new technologies in agency operations, and reinforced the USPTO workforce's readiness to handle AI through new employee development opportunities.

"AI innovation and policy is a team sport at the USPTO," said Jerry Ma. "I hope that this incredible honor will uplift the achievements of our all-star AI and emerging technology team, whose diverse and complementary talents enable the USPTO and the nation to meet this crucial moment of technological transformation."

Ma emigrated to the United States from China with his family at a very young age and grew up in West Lafayette, Indiana. He graduated from Harvard with a major in economics. Prior to joining the USPTO in 2020, Ma worked as a Silicon Valley technologist, leading the development of the first open-source champion-level Go bot and the first AI language model trained on the universe of known protein sequences.

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