Dr. K’s first patent! :)

United States Patent 7,236,742

System and method for wireless data transfer for a mobile unit, patent No. 7,236,742, invented by Eric S. Hall of Provo, David K. Vawdrey of South Jordan, and Charles D. Knutson of Salem, assigned to Brigham Young University of Provo.

We’re pretty stoked. This is the first patent for Eric, Dave and me. We submitted this thing on June 12, 2002, back in the heyday of the Mobile Computing Lab when Eric and Dave were my M.S. students. So hey, only five years to find out we actually have something that the technology transfer office at BYU can license to somebody. Good thing the technology moves so slowly while we’re waiting for the patent process to pan out… πŸ˜‰

Anyway, I just wanted to share. Dave’s friend Ricky saw the announcement in the Salt Lake Tribune this morning, told Dave, who called me. Apparently this is how you find out that you’ve been awarded a patent. πŸ™‚

Congratulations are especially in order for Eric and Dave. They did most of the real work and deserve most of the credit.

In case any recruiters come across this posting while googling for Eric and Dave, Eric Hall is a Ph.D. student in Biomedical Informatics at the University of Utah. David Vawdrey recently received his Ph.D. in Biomedical Informatics from the University of Utah, and is heading off to his first faculty position at Columbia University in New York City. They both did their M.S. in Computer Science in the Mobile Computing Lab at BYU under my tutelage. Hiring either of these guys would be the smartest HR move your organization ever made.

One thought on “Dr. K’s first patent! :)

  1. Dr. K! I’m so glad to see your blog. This post really brought back some memories of some great times back at BYU. I took CS 240 from you the first time you taught it and loved all the tangential stories you told about testing at Novell and whatnot. I also spent a bit of time with Eric and Vawdrey (nobody used his first name) in the EE department. Thanks for the update on them. Not a big surprise that they are doing so well.

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