US 6832251

Patent Overview — US6832251B1

Title: Method and apparatus for distributed signal processing among internetworked wireless integrated network sensors (WINS)

Patent number: US6832251B1
Application number: US09/685,020
Inventors: David C. Gelvin; Lewis D. Girod; William J. Kaiser; William M. Merrill; Fredric Newberg; Gregory J. Pottie; Anton I. Sipos; Sandeep Vardhan
Original assignee: Sensoria Corp
Current assignee (as listed): Intellectual Ventures I LLC
Priority date: 1999-10-06
Filing date: 2000-10-04
Publication/grant date: 2004-12-14
Legal status (as listed): Expired – Lifetime, expires 2022-10-04

Purpose (from the title and metadata): The patent concerns distributed signal processing carried out among internetworked wireless integrated network sensors, referred to as WINS. The prior-art keywords supplied are "network," "data," "wins," "node," and "nodes," indicating a networked-sensor-node subject matter.

Plain-language scope (limited to what the source text supports): Based only on the supplied text, the patent appears directed to methods and apparatus in which signal processing is distributed across multiple networked wireless sensor devices rather than performed at a single point. The classifications list sensor-related and detection-related categories (e.g., B60R25/00, B60R25/30, B60R25/33 concerning vehicle anti-theft detection including GPS, and G01V1/22 concerning transmitting seismic signals to recording or processing apparatus), suggesting sensor detection and signal-transmission applications.

Source: https://patents.google.com/patent/[US6832251](/patent/US6832251)/en

What the excerpt does not establish:

• The actual claims, claim language, or claim scope are not present in the excerpt; no independent or dependent claims are quoted.
• The specific technical operation of "distributed signal processing" is not described in the supplied text.
• The description, drawings, and embodiments are absent.
• The excerpt does not establish the relationship of this patent to the many related priority applications and PCT publications listed.
• Classifications listed do not, by themselves, define the patented subject matter.

No litigation, ownership-transfer analysis, validity assessment, or prior-art comparison is provided.

I'll search for litigation involving US patent 6832251 across patent litigation databases.

Let me search more specifically for litigation records and the patent's assertion history.

Let me dig deeper with targeted searches on litigation databases and the patent's asserting entities.

Litigation Search: U.S. Patent No. 6,832,251

Bottom line

Based on the searches I was able to run, I found no record of any litigation (district court or Federal Circuit) specifically asserting U.S. Patent No. 6,832,251. I also found no PTAB proceeding (IPR/PGR/CBM) naming '251 as the challenged patent. I cannot affirmatively certify that no such case exists — see the caveats at the end — but nothing in the results matched a lawsuit involving this patent.

What I searched and what came back

I queried the web for combinations of the patent number with litigation-oriented terms ("6832251 litigation," "6,832,251 patent lawsuit," "Intellectual Ventures 6832251," "Benhov 6832251," "Sensoria 6832251," and a Unified Patents portal query). Results fell into these categories, none of which is litigation over this patent:

1. PTAB petition documents (e.g., petition 1558727 on ptacts.uspto.gov). The string US-6832251-$ appears only inside patent-search-strategy query logs (search strings like ... or US-6859831-$ or US-6832251-$ or US-6826607-$...). These are examiner/petitioner search queries, not case captions. This shows the patent was searched against, not sued upon.

2. Patent-family / citation pages (Justia, Google Patents, patentimages). The number appears as a cited family member of the Sensoria/WINS family — e.g., Justia pages for US 8,873,336; US 7,983,211; US 8,836,344, and the WO 2005/067231 and WO 2006/131573 search reports. These are citations, not litigation.

3. A Japanese patent numbered 6832251 (JP 6832251). Note carefully: this is Japanese Patent No. 6832251 ("作業用車両," a work vehicle with key-authentication), which is a completely different, unrelated document. It is not U.S. Patent 6,832,251. I flag this because it is an easy source of mistaken "litigation" hits.

4. Unrelated IV/NPE litigation. Searches surfaced many other Intellectual Ventures cases (e.g., IV v. Motorola Mobility, 0:13-cv-61358 (S.D. Fla.); IV v. Lenovo, 1:25-cv-00834 (W.D. Tex.); IV v. American Airlines, 4:24-cv-00980 (E.D. Tex.); Travelers v. IV, 1:26-cv-00397 (D. Del.)). None of these results identified '251 as a patent-in-suit. Asserting that any of them involve '251 would be speculation, and I will not do so.

Patent ownership / status context (from the authoritative patent text)

Although this is not litigation, it is the relevant background for an assertion history:

• Patent: US 6,832,251 B1, "Method and apparatus for distributed signal processing among internetworked wireless integrated network sensors (WINS)"; inventors Gelvin et al.; priority 1999-10-06; filed 2000-10-04; granted 2004-12-14.
• Assignment chain: Original assignee Sensoria Corp → (security interests) → Borgia/Cummins, LLC → Benhov GmbH, LLC (merger, 2015-12-06) → Intellectual Ventures I LLC (2021-10-14, current assignee).
• Legal status: Expired – Lifetime, with an adjusted expiration of 2022-10-04. (The patent has been expired for roughly 3.5 years as of today.) An expired patent can still be the subject of past/closed litigation or of a declaratory-judgment or damages action for the pre-expiration period, but it can no longer be infringed going forward.

This patent is one of a family of WINS patents (siblings include US 6,735,630; US 6,826,607; US 6,859,831), and the WINS family generally traces to DARPA/LWIM/AWAIRS work.

Important caveats — please read

• This is not a definitive "no litigation" answer. Free web search is a weak instrument for litigation history. A reliable clearance requires dedicated databases I could not query directly here:
  • Unified Patents Portal (portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation/caselist and the patent page /patents/patent/US-6832251-B1)
  • Docket Navigator and Lex Machina (sealed/complete docket coverage)
  • PACER (all district courts) and CourtListener/RECAP
  • CAFC docket search for any appeal naming '251
  • USPTO PTAB (IPR/PGR/CBM) and USPTO Assignment records
• I was unable to complete additional targeted searches (I hit a tool step limit before returning the Benhov-specific, PACER, and Unified-portal results). The absence of a hit above therefore reflects incomplete searching, not affirmative clearance.
• Because the current assignee is Intellectual Ventures I LLC — a well-known litigating entity — and the patent sits in a large sensor-network family, the possibility of historical assertions (including cases that settled quietly or that named sibling WINS patents rather than '251 itself) cannot be ruled out without the databases above.

Recommendation

Run the specific patent number 6,832,251 through Unified Patents Portal, Docket Navigator/Lex Machina, and PACER (party search on "Sensoria," "Borgia/Cummins," "Benhov," and "Intellectual Ventures I LLC"). If those return no case naming '251 as a patent-in-suit, it is reasonably safe to conclude the patent has never been asserted in a publicly docketed infringement action. Do not rely on the Japanese JP 6832251 results as evidence of U.S. patent litigation.

I'll verify the structured-data default with targeted searches before writing up.

Let me confirm the context of that lone PTAB hit and check the sibling WINS patents for any parallel PTAB history.

Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings ever instituted or filed against US 6,832,251: zero — 0 active, 0 with claims invalidated, 0 with claims sustained, 0 settled, 0 institution denials — so the correct defensive posture is neither "the patent survived IPRs and is hardened" nor "claims 1–5 are canceled," but rather the third and least-discussed posture: US 6,832,251 has never been tested at the PTAB at all; it expired on 2022-10-04 with all 61 original claims standing exactly as issued, and your invalidity case is an empty ledger — no favorable FWD to cite, but also no adverse FWD, no narrowing amendment, and no estoppel tying your hands.

Sourcing note, per the operating rules: the structured "PTAB proceedings on file" block (USPTO Open Data Portal) is the canonical list and returns no AIA trial proceedings for this patent. I treat that as the answer. I ran web searches to see whether anything predating or outside the ODP ingest contradicts it; nothing did, and the searches are useful mainly for documenting what the near-misses were so you don't mistake them for proceedings. I did not invent any proceeding number.

Because there are no proceedings to report, the per-proceeding template is inapplicable. Below I give the verified adjacent PTAB activity instead, clearly labeled as not an AIA trial against '251, because a defendant's counsel will otherwise find these hits and over-read them.

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No proceedings to report

I searched for IPR/PGR/CBM challenges naming US 6,832,251 as the challenged patent, by patent number and by patent-owner name (Sensoria Corporation, Intellectual Ventures I LLC, Intellectual Ventures II LLC). Results:

This is a negative finding from available sources, not proof of a universal negative — but the canonical ODP block agrees with it, and for a patent that issued on 2004-12-14 (i.e., AIA trials available from 2012-09-16 through expiration) the absence of any petition across a full decade-plus window is a substantive signal, discussed below.

Adjacent PTAB activity — NOT a proceeding against '251 {#adjacent}

US-6832251 appears in PTAB filings only as a prior-art citation / art-search target, never as the challenged patent.

• Where: PTAB petition document set 1558727 at ptacts.uspto.gov, in the petitioner's prior-art search-strategy tables. The literal strings retrieved include: (US-8140658-$ or US-7844687-$ or US-7797367-$ or US-7020701-$ or US-6859831-$ or US-6832251-$ or US-6826607-$ or US-6735630-$).did. against US-PGPUB; USPAT.
• What that is: a Patent Family / Related-Patent style query spanning the entire Sensoria/WINS family (US 6,732,251's siblings US 6,826,607; US 6,735,630; US 6,859,831; US 7,020,701; and IV's later US 7,794,367 / US 7,844,687 / US 8,140,658). It is evidence that a petitioner considered the family as art — not that anyone challenged '251.
• Source (retrieved): https://ptacts.uspto.gov/ptacts/public-informations/petitions/1558727/download-documents?artifactId=IdacCPbBJJIysq95Jz5UMDGFZ0imwGl0O0_Cw0iQsN-_V0m7pefS_EA (search-result snapshot; I could not re-open the underlying paper set to identify the petitioner, the challenged patent, or the proceeding number).

Discrepancy to flag against the earlier-generated summary section. The prior section of this analysis stated that PTAB petition 1558727 "appears associated with IPR2023-00078 (American Honda Motor Co., Inc.)." My searches do not support that mapping and I flag it rather than repeat it:

• IPR2023-00078 is American Honda Motor Co., Inc. v. Intellectual Ventures I LLC (later captioned against IV II), filed 2022-10-26, challenging claims 68, 70, and 73 of US 7,891,004 B2 under pre-AIA § 102/§ 103. The Honda petition verifies in its own caption and text. IPR2023-00078's status: Terminated–Settled, joint motion to terminate filed 2023-02-01, Pre-Institution settlement termination decision 2023-02-09, and petitioner's post-institution fees (USD 22,500) refunded 2023-04-20 — the refund confirming institution never occurred. No FWD. No estoppel.

• The Honda IPR2023-00078 petition papers carry a different PTACTS petition identifier (1550473) in the documents I retrieved. So the earlier section's association of 1558727 → IPR2023-00078 is unverified, and I am not carrying it forward as fact. What is verified is the narrower point: both the Honda IPR2023-00078 exhibit set (file history of US 7,891,004; declaration of Dr. Stephen Wicker) and petition 1558727 involve IV/Sensoria WINS-lineage subject matter, and '251 shows up in neither as the challenged patent.

• Family context, for completeness (not a '251 proceeding): US 7,891,004 is a same-day sibling filing (application 09/684,388, filed 2000-10-04) to '251's application 09/685,020 — the "vehicle internetworks" member of the same Sensoria/IV family. Honda's IPR2023-00078 arose against a parallel N.D. Tex. assertion (complaint cited as 3:22-cv-761; consolidated Honda/Toyota EDTX matters appear as an exhibit). I did not find any docket text identifying US 6,832,251 as an asserted patent, so do not treat '004's litigation history as '251's.

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Strategic summary

Canceled vs. sustained vs. untested: all 61 claims are UNTESTED. There is no Final Written Decision, no certificate of cancellation or correction, no reexamination certificate, and no IPR-driven amendment on US 6,832,251. Claim 1 as published remains the operative claim 1 — the specification's dual-processor teaching (WINS preprocessor / Sensor Interface Processor + control processor for continuous real-time vigilance, versus the WINS processor running a standard OS) is exactly where it was on 2004-12-14. Practically this means two things at once. Against you: there is no PTAB-narrowed claim set to build your non-infringement story on, and no prosecution-history or IPR-history disclaimer to hold IV to. For you: there is also no adverse record — nobody at the Board has ever signed off on IV's claim construction, so you are free to run a broad-vs-narrow construction fight on your own terms, and IV cannot point to a panel having blessed its reading.

Estoppel landscape: essentially nil, which cuts both ways. § 315(e)(2) estoppel attaches to a petitioner only after an FWD (or after institution plus settlement — here there was no institution). Because no IPR was ever instituted on '251, no petitioner or privy is estopped on '251's claims, and the full statutory universe of IPR-eligible art under § 311(b) — patents and printed publications — remains available to any defendant. Conversely, no one has burned through art on this patent, and the family's own publications are not a shortcut: the sibling PCT/foreign publications (WO 2001/026335 A2 and the WO 2001/0263xx group, filed 2000-10-05) and the sibling US patents published or issued after the 1999-10-06 priority date, so they cannot be § 102(b)/§ 102(a) art against a 1999 priority. Your art has to be genuine pre-1999-10-06 material — and the specification itself hands you the roadmap by expressly describing the pre-filing state of the art (WINS development from 1993, LWIM demonstrations and 1996 live-fire exercises, the 1995-genesis AWAIRS program, and the cited Bult et al. LWIM/WINS literature). That is a rich, published, pre-priority art field, and it is entirely unexploited in any post-grant proceeding.

Pattern signals: no petitioner ever filed, no patent-owner appeal exists, and no defensive aggregator is in the chain. On the record I retrieved: (i) no repeat petitioner — there are no '251 petitions at all, so no serial-petition or General Plastic story; (ii) no IV appeal to the Federal Circuit arising from a '251 PTAB case, because there is no such case; (iii) no evidence of Unified Patents or another defensive aggregator having targeted '251 (the number only surfaces in third-party prior-art citation lists, e.g. a later patent's IDS citing US 6832251 B1). The likeliest explanation for the empty ledger is structural rather than merits-based: IV monetized the WINS family in litigation, and its PTAB exposure landed on other family members (IPR2023-00078 on '004, settled pre-institution), while '251 itself reached its 2022-10-04 adjusted expiration without ever drawing a petition. Note also that today's institution climate is materially less petitioner-friendly than the 2013–2024 window in which a '251 IPR would have had to be filed: as of 2025–2026 the Director has centralized IPR/PGR institution authority, procedural denials hit a record 607 in 2025, and October 2025 proposed rules would (among other things) make denial mandatory where a claim was previously upheld and require petitioners to abandon § 102/103 defenses elsewhere — all of which makes a newly filed petition on an expired patent a poor bet. (Sources: Unified Patents, "2025 in Review"; John A. Squires, Director Institution of AIA Trial Proceedings; Malikie Innovations Ltd. v. Nintendo Co., W.D. Wash. 2:24-cv-01490, Dkt. 60 declaration collecting these.)

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Recommended next steps

1. Say it plainly in your file: there is no PTAB invalidity hook on this patent. Do not represent to a client or a court that US 6,832,251 "has been invalidated," "has been narrowed by IPR," or "survived IPRs." All are false. The patent expired 2022-10-04; post-expiration exposure is back-damages only, subject to the § 286 six-year lookback.
2. If your demand letter cites claims 1–61: verify that with the Office, not with me. The canonical ODP record shows no AIA trial activity, and my independent searches found none. Confirm directly before relying on it: PTAB E2E / PTAB API (https://ptab.uspto.gov; https://developer.uspto.gov/ptab-api/) and the Board's decision library (https://www.uspto.gov/patents/patent-trial-and-appeal-board/ptab-decisions). A CourtListener docket sweep for "6832251" (https://www.courtlistener.com/?q=%226832251%22) is the fastest way to catch any late-breaking assertion or appeal — I found none, but that is a negative finding from available results, not a warranty.
3. If you want a post-grant vehicle anyway, reexamination now outranks IPR. With no FWD and no estoppel on '251, the pre-1999 art field (WINS/LWIM/AWAIRS era publications, the Bult et al. references the specification itself cites, and 1990s sensor-network and multi-hop literature) is untouched — and ex parte reexamination requests hit an all-time high (726) in 2025 precisely because IPR institution has become harder. Expect a reexam to be the only economically rational route if the matter is worth pursuing; weigh that against the fact that a reexam cannot be abandoned once ordered and confers no litigation stay by itself.
4. Treat IPR2023-00078 as family context, never as '251 precedent. Honda v. IV I on US 7,891,004 was terminated on 2023-02-09 by pre-institution settlement (joint termination motion filed 2023-02-01; USD 22,500 post-institution fees refunded 2023-04-20; no FWD, no estoppel, settlement terms confidential). Cite it, if at all, only to show how the family has been monetized and settled — not as invalidity evidence against '251.
5. Do not rely on the sibling family publications as § 102 art. WO 2001/026335 A2 and the rest of the 2000-10-05 PCT/AU group, plus the sibling US patents, post-date the 1999-10-06 priority and are therefore unavailable against a 1999 priority date absent an independent earlier-art date. Build your grounds from pre-priority third-party art, which is where the unexploited value in this file actually sits.

I'll reconstruct the assignment record. Let me search the USPTO Assignment Center data and cross-reference sources.

Let me dig deeper into the specific assignment records, reel/frame numbers, and correspondents.

I hit the tool-step ceiling before I could query the Assignment Center interface directly, so the following is built from (a) the authoritative legal-events block in the patent text supplied, (b) the corrective-assignment recitals that quote underlying reel/frame numbers, and (c) the assignment/file-history evidence I retrieved from the IPR2023‑00078 exhibit set and Unified Patents. I mark every field I could not verify rather than filling it in.

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Inventors

Patterns / flags:

• No individual (inventor-level) re-assignments are recorded. Every named inventor appears exactly once, as an assignor on the 2001-01-31 blanket assignment to Sensoria. There is no evidence of any inventor retaining or later transferring a personal interest. The classic fire-sale precursor — inventors peeling off within 12 months of filing — is therefore not visible in this record.
• That absence is a limit of the record, not proof: the assignment is a standard pre-issuance employment/obligation-to-assign instrument, and the Assignment Center does not capture when each individual left Sensoria. I could not verify departure dates for any inventor.
• Government-funded origin: the 2004-02-06 U.S. Air Force confirmatory license (consistent with the DARPA/LWIM/AWAIRS lineage recited in the specification, and the SensIT program) confirms federal sponsorship. This is relevant to any Bayh-Dole/Government-interest analysis but is not an NPE signal.

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Original assignee

Sensoria Corporation, San Diego, CA (original assignee on the face of the patent).

• Line of business: commercial spin-out commercializing Wireless Integrated Network Sensors (WINS) — sensor nodes, gateways, and the WINS NG software stack. The specification places its products in DARPA/USMC live-fire exercises (five) and a Navy condition-based-maintenance deployment (USS Rushmore).
• Shipped a product embodying the claims? Yes, on the record presented. The specification describes fielded, physical WINS NG nodes and gateways (Sensor Interface Processor, RF modem, processor platforms), and the 2004 U.S. Air Force confirmatory license is consistent with a delivered government program. Note, however, that the claim-1-verified subject matter (remote high-level-API programming of a node's real-time layer) is a method/software capability; whether a commercial product practiced it is not established by the documents I retrieved.
• Current status: appears to have ceased independent operation. Sensoria transferred the entire WINS patent family to a non-operating holding entity (Borgia/Cummins, LLC) in 2006 and did not appear as assignee thereafter. I found no Chapter 7/11 filing for Sensoria and cannot confirm a bankruptcy — do not state one. Treat "ceased operation / IP sold off" as the supportable characterization.

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Assignment timeline

Records are drawn from the Google Patents legal-events block (authoritative here) plus reel/frame numbers quoted inside the corrective assignments. Where a reel/frame is not shown, it is because the Assignment Center was not directly queryable in this session — those cells read not retrieved, not "none."

1. Exec. date not shown / recorded 2001-01-31 — Reel not retrieved

• Conveyance: Assignment of Assignors' Interest
• Assignors: Newberg, Fredric; Gelvin, David C.; Girod, Lewis D.; Kaiser, William J.; Merrill, William M.; Pottie, Gregory C.; Sipos, Anton I.; Vardhan, Sandeep (all eight inventors)
• Assignee: Sensoria Corporation
• Correspondent: not retrieved
• Context: Original inventor-to-company (employment) assignment.

2. Exec. date not shown / recorded 2002-11-06 — Reel not retrieved

• Conveyance: Grant of Security Interest — Patents
• Assignor: Sensoria Corporation
• Assignee (secured party): Hummer Winblad Technology Fund, IV, L.P.; Hummer Winblad Venture Partners (collateral agent and secured party); Bruggere, Thomas (as secured party)
• Correspondent: not retrieved
• Context: Securitization — venture-debt collateral assignment against the WINS portfolio.

3. Exec. date not shown / recorded 2004-02-06 — Reel not retrieved

• Conveyance: Confirmatory License
• Assignor: Sensoria Corporation
• Assignee: United States Air Force
• Correspondent: not retrieved
• Context: Government interest (federal sponsorship confirmation), not a title transfer.

4. Exec. date not shown / recorded 2006-02-24 — Reel 017286/0142 (reel/frame derived verbatim from the corrective recital in entry 7)

• Conveyance: Termination and Release of Intellectual Property Security Interest
• Assignor: Hummer Winblad Venture Partners IV, L.P. (later corrected to add Hummer Winblad Technology Fund IV, L.P. and Thomas Bruggere — see entry 7)
• Assignee: Sensoria Corporation
• Correspondent: not retrieved
• Context: Release of securitization — the 2002 lien is cleared.

5. Exec. date not shown / recorded 2006-05-19 — Reel 017636/0792 (reel/frame derived verbatim from the corrective recital in entry 6)

• Conveyance: Assignment of Assignors' Interest
• Assignor: Sensoria Corporation
• Assignee: Borgia/Cummins, L.L.C., 2711 Centerville Road, Suite 400, Wilmington, DE 19808
• Correspondent: not retrieved
• Context: Transfer to a non-operating holding entity — the operating company exits the chain; this is the pivotal monetization step.

6. Recorded 2010-07-23 — corrects Reel 017636/0792

• Conveyance: Corrective Assignment (city spelling "WILLINGTON" → "WILMINGTON")
• Assignor: Sensoria Corporation
• Assignee: Borgia/Cummins, LLC
• Correspondent: not retrieved
• Context: Change of name only / clerical correction — no title movement.

7. Recorded 2010-10-01 — corrects Reel 017286/0142

• Conveyance: Corrective Assignment (adds two executing conveying parties)
• Assignors (as corrected): Thomas Bruggere; Hummer Winblad Technology Fund IV, L.P.; Hummer Winblad Venture Partners IV, L.P.
• Assignee: Sensoria Corporation
• Correspondent: not retrieved
• Context: Clerical correction only — adds the missing release signatories.

8. Exec. date not shown / recorded 2015-12-06 — Reel not retrieved

• Conveyance: Merger
• Assignor: Borgia/Cummins, L.L.C.
• Assignee: Benhov GmbH, LLC
• Correspondent: not retrieved
• Context: Internal reorg / merger into an entity that Unified Patents' portal identifies with parent company Intellectual Ventures LLC. (A merge — not an arm's-length sale — is consistent with the two names being under common control.)

9. Exec. date not shown / recorded 2021-10-14 — Reel not retrieved

• Conveyance: Assignment of Assignors' Interest
• Assignor: Benhov GmbH, LLC
• Assignee: Intellectual Ventures I LLC (current assignee of record)
• Correspondent: not retrieved for this record. Flag: IV's other merger/assignment recordings carry correspondents Meyertons Hood Kivlin Kowert & Goetze (Austin, TX) and Baker & Hostetler LLP (Philadelphia, PA). I could not confirm either firm on the '251 recording, so I do not assert it here — see Signal 3.

Post-chain: 2022-10-04 — record shows adjusted expiration (patent now expired).

Two discrepancies to flag against the earlier sections:

1. The earlier summary listed the Sensoria→Borgia/Cummins transfer as 2006-05-19 (recorded). But the sibling application 09/684,388 (US 7,891,004) file history shows a Borgia/Cummins assignment executed 2008-10-10, recorded 2008-10-13, docket 078700-020113/US, signed by authorized persons Brian Burpee and Robert J. Irvine III. Those are the '004 sibling's dates, not necessarily '251's — I flag the possible cross-contamination rather than harmonize. Do not attribute the 2008 dates to '251 without pulling the '251 record.
2. The reel 017636/0792 and reel 017286/0142 figures are verified only indirectly — they appear inside the recitals of the 2010 corrective assignments quoted in the legal-events block. They are reliable as the reels of the underlying 2006 recordings, but I could not open the reel images themselves.

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Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 6832251
    1999 : Priority date
    2000 : Application filed
    2001 : Inventors assign to Sensoria
    2002 : Security interest to Hummer Winblad
    2004 : Patent issues
         : USAF confirmatory license
    2006 : Security interest terminated
         : Sensoria assigns to Borgia Cummins
    2010 : Two corrective assignments
    2015 : Merged into Benhov GmbH
    2021 : Assigned to Intellectual Ventures I
    2022 : Patent expires

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NPE / troll-pattern signals

1. Shell-entity transfer — PRESENT.
The patent moved from Sensoria Corporation (operating; fielded products, government contracts) to Borgia/Cummins, L.L.C. at Reel 017636/0792 (recorded 2006-05-19). The assignee address — 2711 Centerville Road, Suite 400, Wilmington, DE 19808 — is a registered-agent service address, not an operating facility: the identical address appears as the mailing address of Callahan Cellular L.L.C., Aprolase Development Co., LLC, WWRD Ireland IPCO LLC, NeuroQore, Inc., and Intellectual Ventures I LLC itself across unrelated assignment/PTAB records I retrieved. Borgia/Cummins shows no products in commerce in any source. This is a concrete pairing of (a) operating→non-operating transfer, (b) registered-agent address, (c) no commercial activity — not a naming inference.

2. Known asserter in the chain — PRESENT.
Current assignee of record is Intellectual Ventures I LLC (2021-10-14) — IV is on every public NPE list. The intermediate Benhov GmbH, LLC is identified by the Unified Patents portal as having parent company Intellectual Ventures LLC, and Benhov itself appears as Patent Owner in IPR2017-00934 (petitioned 2017-02-21 by K/S Himpp, on US 8,768,147) — i.e., Benhov functioned as an asserting vehicle, not a passive holder.

3. Repeat correspondent across the chain — UNCLEAR; not verified.
I was unable to retrieve the correspondent of record for any '251 assignment. I will not manufacture one. This is the field the task flags as most diagnostic and it is precisely the field the Assignment Center returns that I could not reach directly. Adjacent evidence only, clearly labeled: IV's recordings on other patents use Meyertons Hood Kivlin Kowert & Goetze (Austin, TX) and Baker & Hostetler LLP (Philadelphia, PA) as correspondents; Foley & Lardner (Madison, WI) recurs for Callahan Cellular/Aprolase-type entities. None of these is confirmed on a '251 reel, so this signal stays UNCLEAR. → Action item: pull the correspondent field for reels 017636/0792 and 017286/0142 and for the 2015 and 2021 recordings.

4. Cascading transfers (<24 months through chained LLCs) — NOT PRESENT.
The chain is long, not fast: Sensoria→Borgia (2006), Borgia→Benhov (2015, ≈9.5 years), Benhov→IV I (2021, ≈5.9 years). No sub-24-month cascade, and no sharing of a single correspondent address across consecutive links that I could verify. The 2015 merger and 2021 assignment are both into the IV structure, which is a reorg/consolidation pattern rather than a staccato shell cascade.

5. Pre-litigation transfer — NOT PRESENT (no underlying suit located).
Per the earlier-generated Litigation and PTAB sections, no docketed infringement action naming US 6,832,251 was found, so there is no "assignment within 6 months before first suit" to identify. Important negative: the 2021 Benhov→IV I transfer is not tied to a '251 complaint on the record I retrieved. (IV's litigation activity generally is documented — e.g., IV v. American Airlines, E.D. Tex. 4:24-cv-00980; Travelers v. IV, D. Del. 1:26-cv-00397 — but none identifies '251.)

6. Bankruptcy fire-sale — UNCLEAR.
Sensoria divested the entire family in 2006, which is consistent with either a wind-down or an ordinary asset sale. I found no Chapter 7/11 proceeding for Sensoria or for Borgia/Cummins. Do not assert.

7. Privateering — UNCLEAR.
Sensoria itself did not appear to assert the patents against competitors, and I found no SEC 10-K/8-K disclosure tying Sensoria to an assertion campaign. The IV relationship is via a holding/merger chain (2006 → 2015 → 2021), which is monetization, not classic single-patent privateering.

8. Defensive aggregator — NOT PRESENT.
The chain terminates at Intellectual Ventures I LLC, an asserter — not RPX, AST, LOT Network, Unified Patents, or OIN. The patent has not been neutralized by defensive aggregation.

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Verdict

NPE — high confidence. Two strong signals are present on the face of the record, not merely inferred from names: (i) Signal 1 — the operating-company-to-non-operating-L.L.C. transfer at Reel 017636/0792 / Reel 017286/0142 (2006), where the assignee sits at a registered-agent service address shared with numerous unrelated shell entities and shows no products; and (ii) Signal 2 — the present owner of record is Intellectual Ventures I LLC (recorded 2021-10-14), reached through Benhov GmbH, LLC (2015 merger; Unified Patents lists IV LLC as its parent; Benhov appeared as patent owner in IPR2017-00934). One caveat keeps this from being a pure assertion story: no suit naming '251 itself was located, and the patent expired 2022-10-04, so this is a chain-level NPE finding on an expired, apparently never-asserted patent — the classic monetization pipeline that simply did not reach a courthouse on this member of the family.

Verify directly: USPTO Patent Assignment Center — https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ (search patent number 6832251) and the legacy index — https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html. Pull the correspondent fields for Reel 017636/0792 and 017286/0142 and for the 2015 and 2021 recordings; that single field would convert Signal 3 from UNCLEAR to a firm call and is the highest-value remaining datum in this file.

I'll search for the patent's cited references and prior art. Let me run several targeted queries.

The generic searches returned the patent's own record but not its cited-reference list. Let me pull the front-page references directly.

Important scope limitation (read first)

I was unable to retrieve the front-page "References Cited" list (the examiner-cited U.S. Patent Documents / Foreign Patent Documents) for US 6,832,251 B1 in this session. I ran targeted searches against Google Patents, Espacenet/patentimages, PTAB/PTA CTS filings, and litigation docket PDFs. What came back was mostly (a) the patent's own bibliographic page in fragmentary form, (b) forward citations (later patents that cite '251), and (c) many numerically similar but different patents that the strict-literal rule requires me to exclude. I am not going to manufacture a reference list to fill the gap.

Below I separate what is verified, what is associated but directionally different, and what I cannot verify, and I confine any § 102 statement to what the evidence actually supports.

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A. Identity confirmation (authoritative, from the full patent text supplied)

This matches the previously generated section; no contradiction found.

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B. References I could verify in association with 6,832,251

Critically, the direction of citation matters for a prior-art analysis, and the sources returned here are overwhelmingly forward citations (i.e., '251 used as art/background against others), not the art cited against '251.

What this tells us, carefully: Every verifiable instance treats '251 as background or forward-cited art. I found no source in this session that identifies the art cited against '251 during its own prosecution.

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C. Applicant-acknowledged prior art (from the '251 specification itself)

The specification expressly frames FIGS. 1–7 as prior art, and this is the only "prior art" set I can cite from the authoritative document:

The specification also names the LWIM/LWIM-II programs (DARPA, 1993–) and AWAIRS (UCLA/Rockwell, 1995) as the genesis of WINS. These are described, not cited by patent number, in the text supplied.

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D. § 102 assessment — what I can and cannot say

Legal framing: Under 35 U.S.C. § 102, anticipation requires that a single prior-art reference disclose every element of a claim, arranged as in the claim. Combining two references is a § 103 (obviousness) analysis, not § 102. Because I was unable to obtain (i) the examiner-cited references for '251 and (ii) the full text of all 61 claims, I cannot responsibly assign any specific reference to any specific claim as an anticipatory § 102 reference.

What I can state, grounded in the record:

1. No single piece of art was classified as anticipating '251 in the search reports I found. The only category assignment I located for '251 as cited art is category "A" (technological background) in WO 2007/034281 A1 — i.e., not X or Y. This is weak, jurisdiction-specific evidence, but it is the only classification evidence available and it points away from a clean single-reference § 102 hit.
2. The patent's own claim 1 (the only claim text verified in the prior section) requires a specific dual-processor architecture: real-time processes running on a real-time processor that is below an operating system, where the OS runs on a distinct application processor, all reachable by a remote user through a high-level API. Generic multi-processor sensor-node art (e.g., the AWAIRS background of FIG. 3, which teaches multiple processors and layered signal processing) does not, on its face, disclose the real-time-processor-below-the-OS / separate-application-processor limitation. Mapping any reference to this element requires the reference text, which I do not have for the cited references.
3. Therefore: insufficient basis to name an anticipatory reference. I decline the invitation to guess.

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E. Numerical look-alikes I explicitly excluded (strict-literal rule)

The searches returned many numbers that are not US 6,832,251 and must not be conflated with it: US 2003/0182251 A1, US 6,986,251 B2, US 2011/0216695 A1, EP 4 246 231 A1, EP 1 384 463 A1, US 2011/0182251, and various "6,832…"/"…2251" strings. None of these is the target patent.

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F. How to obtain the definitive cited-reference list (recommended next step)

Because my retrieval failed on this specific field, the authoritative route is:

1. USPTO Patent Public Search / PatentCenter — application 09/685,020 ("References Cited" tab; "Patent References" and "Non-Patent References"). This is the controlling USPTO record the task asked for.
2. The granted patent PDF front page (US 6,832,251 B1), which carries the printed "References Cited" list.
3. The '251 file wrapper for Form PTO-892 (Notice of References Cited) and any IDS submissions — this captures both examiner-cited and applicant-submitted art.
4. If the goal is § 102 mapping: pull all 61 issued claims at the same time, since claim-by-claim anticipation cannot be done from claim 1 alone.

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G. Explicit uncertainties / flags

1. Cited-reference list: NOT retrieved. I could not verify a single examiner-cited reference for '251. Any list I produced would be fabrication, so I produced none.
2. Full claim set: NOT verified (consistent with the prior section's uncertainty note).
3. Directional substitution risk: several search hits put '251 in another patent's References Cited section. Those are forward citations and are not prior art to '251; they must not be reported as such.
4. Priority date: prior section flagged 1999-10-06 (Google) vs 1999-10-05 (Unified Patents). Unresolved; it materially affects which references qualify as § 102(b) art.
5. Date inconsistency: the task header states "Current Date: April 26, 2026," while the environment timestamp is 2026-09-27 and the prior section used "April 2026." I flag rather than harmonize, per the literal-interpretation rule. This does not affect the expired status (2022-10-04).
6. No contradiction with the previously generated section was found; the bibliographic facts align.

Bottom line: I confirmed the patent's identity and found only forward/background uses of it, plus the applicant's own acknowledged prior art (FIGS. 1–7, AWAIRS/LWIM). I could not obtain the examiner-cited prior-art references for US 6,832,251, and I therefore cannot name any reference as anticipating a specific claim under § 102. The definitive list must be pulled from USPTO PatentCenter/Public Search for application 09/685,020 or the printed front page of the patent.

I'll build on the prior-art section. First, let me attempt to retrieve the actual examiner-cited references and the applicant-acknowledged literature, since a § 103 analysis lives or dies on whether those references are real and date-qualified.

Obviousness Analysis Under 35 U.S.C. § 103

U.S. Patent No. 6,832,251 B1 — Gelvin et al., "Method and apparatus for distributed signal processing among internetworked wireless integrated network sensors (WINS)"

Prepared: April 26, 2026 · Analyst: Technical patent analyst
Basis: The Prior Art section generated earlier on this page, plus new searches run for this task.

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1. Verification status — read before relying on anything below

The Prior Art section concluded that the examiner-cited front-page reference list for '251 was not retrieved, and that the only citable prior art was (i) the applicant's own acknowledged prior art (FIGS. 1–7, LWIM, AWAIRS) and (ii) forward/background citations. That conclusion still holds — I did not retrieve the PTO-892 / front-page "References Cited" list in this session either, and I will not reconstruct it.

What changed in this task: I ran new searches that surfaced independently verifiable, date-qualified, pre-priority publications in the same technical lineage. These are not the examiner-cited references (and I flag that they are not), but they are real, published, and citable as § 103 art. That materially improves the analysis; it does not upgrade my confidence in the front-page list.

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2. Governing law and the critical date

'251 is a pre-AIA patent (filed 2000-10-04, priority 1999-10-06). The controlling statute is pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. § 103(a), applied through the Graham v. John Deere Co., 383 U.S. 1 (1966), framework as elaborated by KSR Int'l Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 550 U.S. 398 (2007).

• § 102(b) critical date: on or about 1999-10-04/1999-10-06. A reference published before that date is statutory prior art regardless of who published it — pre-AIA § 102(b) contains no exception for an inventor's own publication. That single point is the engine of the analysis below, because the '251 inventors (and their UCLA/Rockwell collaborators) published extensively in 1996–1999 and the specification itself celebrates that work as the prior art.
• Pre-AIA § 103(c) (common ownership) is inapplicable: it excepted only commonly-owned patents and applications, not printed publications.
• MPEP 2129 — statements in the specification describing the prior art are admissions usable as prior art.

Corollary: the sibling family publications the Prior Art section correctly excluded (WO 2001/026335 A2 and the WO 2001/0263xx group, filed 2000-10-05; US 6,826,607; US 6,735,630; US 6,859,831; US 7,020,701) remain unavailable — they post-date the critical date. They must not be used.

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3. The available art universe

3.1 Verified pre-critical-date references

Note on R4: the retrieved text recites: "A real-time, preemptive, multi-tasking kernel has been ported to the processor module that is based on the MicroCOS [7], and designed to run on top of the AWAIRS 1 HAL." This is a pre-critical-date description of a working multi-module wireless sensor node with a real-time kernel, a hardware abstraction layer beneath it, a processor module, sensor modules and a radio module. That is the single most important new reference for this analysis.

3.2 Art expressly unavailable

• Pottie & Kaiser, "Wireless Integrated Network Sensors," Comm. of the ACM 43(5):51–58 (May 2000) — post-dates priority; excluded.
• Pottie & Kaiser, "Wireless Integrated Network Sensors (WINS): Principles and Practice" (2003) — excluded.
• WO 2001/026335 A2 and all WO 2001/0263xx siblings; US 6,826,607; 6,735,630; 6,859,831; 7,020,701 — excluded (family, post-priority).
• All forward citations ('251 appearing in another patent's References Cited list — e.g., US 9,439,126 shown in SIPCO LLC v. Emerson Electric, S.D. Tex. 4:18-cv-02689 Doc. 1-12; RE48090; US 10,154,569; US 11,113,950) — excluded; wrong direction. These are not art against '251.
• IEEE doc 879313 ("…distributed in situ sensing for mission and flight systems") and doc 1470957 ("…Low power systems on a chip") — date not verified in this session; if they are the 1998–1999 IEEE Aerospace / ESSCIRC papers they would qualify, but do not cite them until the dates are pulled.

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4. Person having ordinary skill in the art (PHOSITA)

As of October 1999: a B.S. or M.S. in electrical engineering or computer science with 2–5 years' experience in embedded wireless sensing, low-power digital design, RF networking, and real-time operating systems, or equivalent. Such a person was reading R1–R10, was familiar with duty-cycling and power partitioning as the central design constraint in battery-operated sensor nodes, and knew standard 1990s practice for layered firmware (HAL / kernel / application) and remote configuration of networked devices via web pages and management protocols.

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5. Claim 1, element by element

Claim 1 (verbatim, carried forward from the earlier section) has three elements:

The entire § 103 dispute collapses to element C. A and B are admitted or near-admitted; C is a system-partitioning choice, and partitioning is exactly what the 1996–1999 WINS/AWAIRS literature is about.

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6. Grounds of rejection

Ground 1 — § 103 over R4 (Agre et al. 1999) in view of R1/R2 and R10, and the FIG. 1–4/FIG. 7 admissions

Motivation to combine (KSR-recognized rationales):

1. Known problem, known solution. R1/R2/R3/R7/R8 all state the field's central problem: sustained operation on a tiny battery requires that most of the node's silicon most of the time consume almost nothing, while expensive processing runs rarely. The '251 specification admits the same problem: "conventional approaches would yield a system where a platform operating with a conventional embedded operating system would require excessive operating power."
2. Predictable result. Putting the always-on real-time acquisition/trigger path on a separate, micropower processor while a heavier OS-bearing processor sleeps is a routine partitioning step with a predictable result (lower average power). KSR ("combination of familiar elements according to known methods … when the prior art elements are combined to achieve a predictable result").
3. Explicit design incentive. R4 shows a modular node already split across sensor/processor/radio modules with a kernel/HAL hierarchy. A PHOSITA seeking lower duty cycle has an express reason to push the real-time path down into the always-on layer and leave the OS layer to wake on demand.

Ground 2 — § 103 over the Applicant's own admitted prior art alone, plus R1/R6

The strongest structural point: the specification's FIG. 4 is captioned "prior art sensor network using distributed signal processing" and describes a node becoming a fusion center to which data and decisions flow. The patent's title claim — distributed signal processing among internetworked WINS nodes — is therefore an admitted prior-art concept. FIG. 3 admits the prior AWAIRS node had "multiple processors of differing types" that "progress through several levels of signal processing." Combined with R1/R6 (low-power system partitioning), the only remaining gap is the remote-API access to the below-OS real-time layer — supplied by the FIG. 2/FIG. 7 admissions and by routine 1990s remote-management practice.

This ground is attractive in litigation because it requires no third-party reference at all — admissions are prior art under MPEP 2129, and the applicant cannot dispute that the specification says what it says.

Ground 3 — § 102(b) on the inventors' own pre-critical-date publications

Separately from § 103, R1 (1996), R2 (1997), R3/R6/R7/R8 (1998) and R4/R5 (April 1999) are printed publications published more than one year before the U.S. filing date. Pre-AIA § 102(b) has no self-publication exception. These references do not, standing alone, disclose element C — but they disclose the entire operative context of the patent (WINS architecture, low-power partitioning, event recognition, layered node processing) and therefore remove the "unexpected results"/inventive-insight argument the patent owner would otherwise make. A § 103 ground built on them is stronger than a bare § 102 challenge, because R4 + R1 + the admissions together reach every element with a stated motivation.

Ground 4 — the means-plus-function apparatus claim

The earlier section flagged an independent apparatus claim in means-plus-function form ("network element means … monitoring means … processing means … trigger component means …"). I cannot confirm its claim number (claims 2–61 unverified), so treat this as directional only. Two observations, each of which needs claim-text confirmation:

• § 112(f) means-plus-function elements are construed to the corresponding structure in the specification and equivalents — here, the SIP (sensor preamplifiers, anti-aliasing filters, analog muxes, converters, dedicated processors), the Z180-class control processor, and the trigger/threshold functions. Generic prior-art sensor-node circuitry maps more readily to these than to the structural "distinct processor, real-time below the OS" limitation of claim 1.
• "Trigger component means" maps to threshold/energy-detection triggering, which R7/R8 (Haar wavelet and wavelet-packet classifiers) and FIG. 7 (seismic-triggered camera with remotely set trigger level) squarely address.

Do not file or argue this ground without the actual claim text.

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7. The patent owner's best rebuttals, and the answers

Owner: "The art taught away from a general-purpose OS at the node." The low-power literature emphasized custom minimal kernels (MicroCOS); nothing suggests putting Windows CE-class OS on a node. Answer: The disparaged prior practice was an OS on a single, always-on processor — which is the problem, not the solution. Splitting the problem into an always-on real-time layer and an on-demand OS layer resolves the very teaching the owner cites, rather than contradicting it. Under KSR, "teaching away" requires that the reference criticize, discredit or otherwise discourage the claimed solution; R1–R10 criticize only the single-processor architecture that the claim replaces.

Owner: "Remote programming of a below-OS real-time layer from a node's own application layer is not suggested." This is the owner's best argument, and it is the argument the record does not yet defeat. Nothing in R1–R11 that I retrieved expressly discloses a remote high-level-language API that reaches through/around the node OS into the real-time layer on a separate processor. The FIG. 2 and FIG. 7 admissions establish remote reprogramming and remote parameter control generally, but neither is addressed to a two-processor node. This gap is where the case lives.

Owner: "Secondary considerations." See § 8.

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8. Graham factors / objective indicia

Net: objective indicia are weak and, on the present record, do not overcome a well-motivated § 103 combination.

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9. Two parallel theories that are not § 103 but are stronger — flag them

1. § 102(b) public use / on-sale. The specification admits 1996 live-fire fielding and 1998–1999 demonstrations of the platform. R4 (April 1999) describes a working prototype development platform. If that platform embodied forerunners of element C and was publicly used or offered in the U.S. more than one year before 2000-10-04, a § 102(b) statutory bar arises independent of any reference. This is a factual-development theory, not something I can assert on this record.
2. § 112 written-description / enablement. Given that the specification's own FIG. 4 is captioned as prior-art distributed signal processing, there is a legitimate question whether the claimed two-processor remote-API arrangement is described with the specificity needed to distinguish it from the admitted art. Requires the full claim set.

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10. Bottom line

The combination that a PHOSITA in October 1999 would most plausibly have made is: the modular multi-processor wireless sensor node of R4/R5 (with its real-time kernel over a HAL, per R10), partitioned for micropower operation as taught by R1/R2/R6, with the remote reprogramming and remote parameter control that the applicant itself admits in FIGS. 2 and 7. That combination reaches claim 1 with a stated, documented motivation.

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11. What must be verified before this is filed or relied upon

1. The front-page "References Cited" of '251 — USPTO PatentCenter / Patent Public Search, application 09/685,020; also the PTO-892s and IDSs in the file wrapper. (Still outstanding; unchanged from the Prior Art section.)
2. The full text of claims 2–61, and a firm identification of every independent claim. Without this, no complete § 103 opinion exists.
3. Exact publication dates and public-availability dates (not just conference dates) for R4, R5, R9 — under In re Klopfenstein-style accessibility analysis, the relevant fact is when the paper became publicly accessible, not when it was presented.
4. The contents of R1, R2, R4, R5, R6, R7, R8 in full. I have abstracts, snippets, titles, dates and citation lists — not full texts. The element-C mapping in §6 is a framework, and each mapping must be confirmed against the actual reference text before it is asserted. I have not fabricated any disclosure; where I have inferred, I have said so.
5. IEEE documents 879313 and 1470957 — verify dates before using; do not cite them as art until then.
6. Whether the 1996–1999 live-fire and SPIE demonstrations occurred in the U.S. and were accessible to the public — for the § 102(b) public-use theory.

Explicit non-findings I will not paper over: I have no § 102 anticipation of claim 1; I cannot name a single reference that discloses the "remote user programming, through a high-level API, real-time processes running on a real-time processor below the OS that runs on a distinct application processor" element; and I have not verified claims 2–61. Any assertion to the contrary would be unsupported by the record retrieved to date.