US 10341421

Patent Overview — US10341421B2

Title: "On-device social grouping for automated responses"

Assignee / Inventors: Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. (current and original assignee). Inventors: Xuan Bao, Jun Yang, Zhixian Yan, Lu Luo, Evan Welbourne, Yifei Jiang.

Key dates: Priority date 2013-05-10; filing date 2015-03-19; publication date 2019-07-02. Application No. US14/663,147. Legal status listed as "Expired – Fee Related," adjusted expiration 2036-01-09. An earlier priority is claimed from US14/274,604 (2014-05-09, external priority, linked to US10402915B2). The source notes these dates and the legal status are assumptions, not legal conclusions.

Purpose: To organize a user's contacts or social connections by analyzing interaction data reflecting the user's interactions with those contacts on a mobile device (or across multiple devices of the user). The disclosure notes users interact differently with different social groups—e.g., professionals during work hours, friends and family outside business hours, acquaintances on intermittent occasions—and that such interaction patterns reflect traits about contacts.

Plain-language scope: A device determines a set of attributes associated with interactions between a user and a set of contacts (interactions related to the device), then organizes the contacts into multiple groups. The groups may be hierarchically ordered, with at least one group being a subgroup of another. Interaction data may include calls, SMS/IM, Bluetooth proximity, GPS co-locations, emails, and social network activities. Embodiments include an "L method" for determining group count and a multi-stage classifier. The disclosure is also framed as a system (processor-executed operations) and a computer program product.

Source: https://patents.google.com/patent/[US10341421](/patent/US10341421)/en

What the excerpt does not establish: The supplied text is an excerpt with figures and claims largely omitted or truncated. It does not provide the actual claim language, full specification, detailed embodiments, exact definitions, or the complete prior-art discussion. Nothing here establishes validity, enforceability, ownership transfers, or litigation. The "automated responses" aspect of the title is not explained in the excerpt beyond the title itself, so its scope cannot be confirmed from this text alone.

I'll search for litigation involving US patent 10341421 across patent litigation databases.

Neither initial search returned relevant litigation. Let me search more targeted litigation databases.

The initial searches produced mostly noise (including unrelated patents like the VoiceBox '341 patent). Let me query litigation-specific databases directly.

Summary of Findings

Based on the searches I was able to complete, I found no litigation involving U.S. Patent No. 10,341,421.

I was unable to identify any district court case (PACER), Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit appeal, ITC investigation, or PTAB proceeding naming U.S. Patent 10,341,421 ("On-device social grouping for automated responses," Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd.) as an asserted or challenged patent.

What the searches returned

• Keyword searches for "10341421", "10,341,421", and the patent title returned no relevant litigation hits. The only exact-number matches were false positives, e.g., a German offenlegungsschrift DE10341421A1 (a disk valve—unrelated) and various SEC/PTAB documents.
• I specifically observed and excluded near-miss distractors that a careless search could conflate with this patent:
  • U.S. Patent 10,510,341 (VoiceBox Technologies / VB Assets) — asserted in VB Assets, LLC v. [Samsung Electronics Co.](/litigations/by-defendant/Samsung%20Electronics%20Co.), Ltd., No. 2:24-cv-00828-JRG (E.D. Tex.), filed Oct. 9, 2024, with related IPRs (e.g., IPR2025-00866). This is a different patent number and must not be reported as litigation for 10,341,421.
  • The "700/768/582/679" patents in the Hanover v. Intellectual Ventures matter, the Stratasys v. Bambu patents, and the Harbour Antibodies v. Teneobio/Amgen patents — none involve 10,341,421.

Important caveats on confidence

• I was cut off before I could complete direct lookups on the litigation-specific sites you named (Unified Patents Portal caselist, CourtListener/RECAP, and Docket Alarm). My conclusion is therefore based on the searches I did complete, not an exhaustive docket-by-docket verification.
• U.S. Patent 10,341,421 is shown on Google Patents as "Expired – Fee Related" (adjusted expiration 2036-01-09), with Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. as current assignee and no recorded reassignments to a litigation-funder/NPE. A patent that never left a large operating company's portfolio, and that lapsed, is consistent with the absence of assertion activity—but this is contextual support, not proof of no litigation.
• Patent litigation databases and PACER dockets can lag or omit sealed/terminated cases, and some proceedings may not be indexed by general web search.

Recommendation

To confirm the negative finding before relying on it, the following should be run directly:

1. Unified Patents Portal – https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation/caselist (search 10,341,421).
2. CourtListener / RECAP – docket text search for the patent number.
3. Docket Alarm – patent-number search (covers district courts, PTAB, ITC).
4. USPTO Patent Center / PTAB – for any IPR/PGR/CBM involving the patent (none surfaced here).
5. Samsung's 10-K/annual reports – for any disclosed assertion of this patent.

Bottom line: On the record available to me, I found no known litigation involving U.S. Patent No. 10,341,421. If you need a certifiable "no litigation" answer, the four database lookups above should be completed and documented, since my searches were not exhaustive.

I'll start by verifying the structured data against live sources, since the ODP block reports no proceedings.

Let me run additional targeted searches to make sure nothing is hiding under petitioner-name or third-party-challenge searches.

Let me do a final verification round targeting patent-specific docket aggregators.

Proceedings overview

Zero AIA trial proceedings are on file for US 10,341,421. The USPTO Open Data Portal returns no IPR, PGR, or CBM for this patent, and my independent web checks (patent number alone, patent number + IPR prefix, Samsung-as-petitioner queries, and Unified Patents/proxy-petitioner queries) surfaced no petition, institution decision, Final Written Decision, or Federal Circuit appeal naming this patent — so the breakdown is 0 active / 0 claims invalidated / 0 claims sustained / 0 settled / 0 institution-denied. Defensive posture: the patent is completely untested at the Board. There is no estoppel to exploit, no canceled claim to hand a plaintiff's counsel back, and no FWD reasoning to mine for claim-construction ammunition. Conversely, there is also no adverse PTAB precedent constraining your petition — the field is open. One important correction to the framing in the task prompt: this patent is owned by Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. (an operating company), not an NPE, so the "troll with no case" framing does not map onto this asset.

No proceedings to itemize

There is no {PROCEEDING_NUMBER} to report. I am deliberately not creating one. For completeness, here is the negative finding and how I reached it:

• Type / Filed / Status / Panel / Grounds / Institution / FWD / Settlement / Appeal: no data — none of these events exist for US 10,341,421.
• Sources checked: the structured ODP block supplied in the prompt (canonical, empty); Google Patents legal-status and "similar documents" metadata at https://patents.google.com/patent/US10341421/en; targeted queries combining the patent number with IPR2019/IPR2020/IPR2021, with Samsung as petitioner, with "PTAB proceeding," and with Unified Patents as a likely proxy filer. All returned results about other patents (e.g., Samsung v. Acorn Semi, IPR2020-01264; Samsung v. Mullen Industries, IPR2025-00124; Unified v. Realtime Adaptive Streaming, IPR2018-00883). None concerned US 10,341,421.
• Confidence caveat: I could not directly query PTAB E2E, Docket Alarm, or CourtListener by patent number within this session. "No PTAB activity" is my well-supported conclusion, but it is a negative finding from search rather than a direct docket read. A five-minute PRPS/E2E search on the patent number should be run to close that gap before you rely on this in a brief.

---

Strategic summary

Claims status: everything is UNTESTED. There is no cancellation, no affirmance, no certificate under 35 U.S.C. § 318(b). The full claim set as granted on 2019-07-02 stands untouched — nothing has been narrowed by a PTAB certificate. If an adversary tells you claims 1–5 are dead, that is false; no proceeding has ever put them at risk. Per the specification, the disclosure claims a method of determining attributes of user-contact interactions on a device and organizing contacts into hierarchically ordered groups with at least one subgroup nested under another group — including the specific hierarchy chain recited in the summary-of-invention text (first group = "important contacts," subdivided into family/non-family subgroups; significant other drawn from the family subgroup; friend vs. colleague drawn from the non-family subgroup).

Estoppel landscape: a blank slate. Because no IPR/PGR was ever instituted, § 315(e)(2) estoppel has never attached against anyone. No petitioner is barred, and no privity chain forecloses any ground. Every § 102/§ 103 ground built on patents or printed publications, and every § 112 ground available in a PGR (subject to the § 321(c) 9-month window, long since closed), is available to a first-time challenger. Note that this also means there is no Sotera or Fintiv-flavored history to argue about — you would be writing on a clean page.

Pattern signals: none, and that is the story. The same petitioner has not filed multiple IPRs, because no petitioner has filed once. The patent owner has not pursued any PTAB appeal. There is no defensive aggregator (Unified Patents, RPX, AST, or similar) anywhere in the chain. The patent issued 2019-07-02 and has been in force for roughly seven years without attracting a single AIA challenge. Combined with Samsung being an operating-company owner holding this patent in its own portfolio, the most likely read is that this patent has not been actively asserted in a campaign — asserted patents of any commercial significance tend to draw IPRs, and this one has drawn none. If your adversary is asserting it, that assertion is either fresh or part of a small, one-off dispute.

Two threshold facts you should verify before spending money on prior art. First, Google Patents lists the legal status as "Expired – Fee Related" — i.e., a possible lapse for failure to pay a maintenance fee — while simultaneously listing an "Adjusted expiration" of 2036-01-09. That combination is internally odd, and Google expressly disclaims that its legal status is a legal conclusion. If the patent has in fact lapsed for non-payment, it cannot be asserted, and that ends the analysis without an IPR. Second, this is a continuation-in-part of application 14/274,604 (filed 2014-05-09), which in turn claims provisionals 61/822,272 (2013-05-10), 61/861,311 (2013-08-01), and 61/968,196 (2014-03-20). Priority date is therefore claim-by-claim and content-dependent, not a single date. Any § 102 art you locate must be measured against the correct priority date for the specific claim you attack — new matter added in the CIP may enjoy only the 2015-03-19 filing date.

---

Recommended next steps

1. Verify maintenance-fee status first — this is the cheapest possible win. Pull the fee history in USPTO Patent Center / E2E for US 10,341,421. If the 3.5-year (or later) maintenance fee was not paid and the grace period lapsed, the patent is unenforceable for the lapsed period and presumptively dead. Only if it has been revived under 37 C.F.R. § 1.378 (unintentional delay) does an IPR become worth the money. Do this before anything else.
2. Confirm the negative PTAB finding directly. Run a patent-number search in PTAB E2E (https://ptab.uspto.gov) and in the PTAB PRPS API for the number 10341421. The ODP block is the canonical structured source and it is empty, but close the loop so the negative finding is defensible in a brief.
3. Because no proceedings exist, there is no FWD to link to and no disposition to quote. I have deliberately not cited one. Any brief you file should state affirmatively that the patent "has never been the subject of an AIA trial proceeding" rather than implying a challenge history that does not exist.
4. Map your § 315(b) clock immediately. If you have been served with a complaint alleging infringement of this patent, the one-year bar under 35 U.S.C. § 315(b) runs from service. With no prior petition on file, you would be the first mover — which means you may also benefit from Fintiv/§ 314(a) discretion arguments being untested on this patent, and you face no General Plastic follow-on-petition risk.
5. Build grounds around the CIP priority problem. Given the CIP and three provisionals, the highest-leverage attack is often to find art falling between the earliest provisional date and a later claim's actual priority date, then argue the challenged claims are not entitled to the earlier date because the limitations at issue lack written-description support in the earlier filings. That is a § 112-based priority attack that also unlocks intervening art — and no prior petitioner has staked out that ground against this patent.

Bottom line for a defendant: nothing is invalidated, nothing is estopped, and nothing is pending. The patent is neither hardened by PTAB wins (there are none) nor wounded by PTAB losses (there are none). Your defensibility turns entirely on (a) whether the patent is even alive after the fee-status check, and (b) the priority-date structure of the CIP — not on any Board outcome, because the Board has never touched this patent.

I'll research the assignment record for US 10341421 using the available search tools.

Let me search for more specific assignment and legal-event data.

Let me look for the specific assignment reel/frame record and any post-issuance records.

Assignment / Ownership Analysis — US 10,341,421 B2

Patent: US 10,341,421 B2 — "On-device social grouping for automated responses"
Application: 14/663,147 (filed 2015-03-19) · Issued: 2019-07-02 · Priority: 2013-05-10
Current assignee of record: Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. · Status: Expired – Fee Related (adjusted expiration 2036-01-09)

Sourcing caveat (read first): I confirmed the ownership chain from the patent face, Google Patents legal-events data, and third-party patent indexes (uspto.report, Patent Leaderboard). I was not able to retrieve the specific reel/frame number or the correspondent of record for the single assignment below through the searches available to me. I therefore do not state a reel/frame, and I do not state a correspondent. Both should be pulled directly from the USPTO Assignment Center for a certifiable record. Per the user's constraint, I am not fabricating either field.

---

Inventors

All six named inventors, with residence of record and probable employer at filing:

Employer determination: The application names Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. as applicant. The residences cluster in the San Francisco Bay Area (San Jose / Milpitas / Sunnyvale / Santa Clara) plus Seattle — both established Samsung US research locations (Samsung Research America / Samsung Information Systems America). Evan Welbourne is independently indexed as holding 7 US patents "while listed as an inventor at Samsung" (Patent Leaderboard), confirming his employment relationship. I could not independently verify each inventor's exact corporate entity (Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. vs. a US subsidiary such as Samsung Research America) from the available sources — flagging that as not fully determinable.

Unusual-pattern check — NOT present. There is no evidence of all inventors departing the original assignee within 12 months of filing. Welbourne in particular remains associated with Samsung filings through July 2025 (per Patent Leaderboard), i.e., ~10 years after this filing. No pre-fire-sale attrition signal.

---

Original assignee

Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. (Gyeonggi-Do, Republic of Korea) — named on the issued patent and current assignee of record.

• Primary line of business: Consumer electronics and semiconductor manufacturing (smartphones, tablets, wearables, appliances, displays, memory).
• Did they ship a product embodying the claims? Yes, consistent with the record, though not proven by a specific product mapping in my sources. The specification itself names Samsung products (GALAXY NOTE®, GALAXY TAB®, GALAXY GEAR™, GEAR FIT) as the target "device 100," and the disclosed functionality (automatic contact grouping, per-group ringtones, per-group auto-responses, group-labeled incoming calls) maps to Galaxy Phone/Contacts application behavior. This is a plausible product embodiment, not a verified claim-chart.
• Current status: Operating. Samsung Electronics is a going concern; no bankruptcy, dissolution, or acquisition of the assignee.

---

Assignment timeline

The chain contains exactly one recorded assignment — the original inventor→employer assignment executed at filing. There are no post-issuance assignments on record (no reassignment to an LLC, no security agreement, no merger, no change of name, no license recordation).

• 2015-03-19 (executed; execution date not independently verified — presented as recorded) / recorded 2015-03-19 — Reel not retrieved (see sourcing caveat)
  • Conveyance: Assignment ("ASSIGNMENT OF ASSIGNORS INTEREST (SEE DOCUMENT FOR DETAILS)")
  • Assignor: Bao, Xuan; Yang, Jun; Yan, Zhixian; Luo, Lu; Welbourne, Evan; Jiang, Yifei
  • Assignee: Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd.
  • Correspondent: not retrieved (not fabricated)
  • Context: Standard initial employment assignment — inventors conveying rights to their employer simultaneously with filing. Not a fire-sale, reorg, securitization, or transfer-to-asserter.

Related-family note (ownership context only): This patent is a continuation-in-part of 14/274,604 (filed 2014-05-09), which issued as US 10,402,915 B2. A separate assignment record likely exists for that parent, but it is a different patent and is outside the scope of this chain.

Finding: Because the only recorded assignment is the original one, the record affirmatively indicates Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. has owned US 10,341,421 continuously from filing to present. No third party — NPE or otherwise — has ever appeared as assignee of record.

---

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 10341421
    2013 : Priority provisionals filed
    2014 : Parent application filed
    2015 : CIP application filed
         : Inventors assign rights to Samsung
    2019 : Patent issued to Samsung
    2036 : Adjusted expiration

---

NPE / troll-pattern signals

Aggregate: Zero of the eight NPE/troll signals are affirmatively present. One signal (#3) is moot/unclear due to an unretrieved correspondent field. This is a clean, no-transfer ownership picture.

---

Verdict

Insufficient data — strictly because the entire recorded chain consists of only the original assignment (2015-03-19, inventors → Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd.), which is the exact condition the "Insufficient data" bucket defines.

Justifying the substantive finding: the single reel entry (2015-03-19 employment assignment) leaves Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. as the continuous owner of record from filing to the present, with no post-issuance reassignment, no shell-entity transfer, no known asserter, and no defensive-aggregator termination. The absence of any third-party assignment — coupled with the earlier finding of no litigation involving US 10,341,421 — affirmatively indicates this patent was never weaponized as an NPE asset; it is an operating-company patent that simply lapsed for failure to pay maintenance fees (status: Expired – Fee Related).

Why not "Operating-company assertion": that bucket requires the current assignee to be suing actual competitors, and no suit was identified. Why not "Defensive / non-asserting": that bucket requires the chain to terminate at a defensive aggregator, which it does not.

Verification links

• USPTO Assignment Center (primary): https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ — search patent 10341421
• USPTO Assignment legacy search: https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html — search 10341421
• Google Patents legal events: https://patents.google.com/patent/[US10341421B2](/patent/US10341421B2)/en
• USPTO Patent Center (PEDS/ODP): https://patentcenter.uspto.gov/ — application 14/663,147

Open items to close before relying on this as a certified record: (1) pull the exact reel/frame for the 2015-03-19 assignment; (2) capture the correspondent of record for that frame; (3) confirm via the Assignment Center that no additional records (e.g., an unindexed security interest or name-change) exist after 2015.

I'll research US Patent 10,341,421 and its cited prior art references.

Let me get the detailed "References Cited" (56) section from the patent's front page.

Let me find the complete examiner-cited references (front page "(56) References Cited").

I've hit tool limits. Let me try one final targeted search to complete the reference list.

I'll research the prior art landscape for this patent before building the obviousness analysis.

Let me pull the exact claim language and the full prior-art reference list.

Let me get the full cited-reference list and the granted claims verbatim.

Obviousness Analysis — U.S. Patent No. 10,341,421 B2

On-Device Social Grouping for Automated Responses (Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd.)

35 U.S.C. § 103 — Combinations of Prior Art Rendering the Claims Obvious

---

0. Scope, Sources, and a Necessary Caveat

Claim set analyzed (verbatim from the pre‑grant/granted text surfaced in this session):

Strict sourcing disclaimer. The authoritative full text supplied for this task truncates before the printed claim set, so the claim wording above is taken from the disclosure's summary paragraphs and the US 2015/0227611 A1 reproduction surfaced in patents‑review.com. I was able to retrieve the front‑page "References Cited" from the granted‑patent PDF, but I was not able to retrieve full verbatim text of each cited reference within this session. Accordingly, all pass/fail conclusions below are stated as technically reasoned expectations ("this is the art you look for and why it maps"), not as verified element‑by‑element quotations. Anything I could not verify is flagged [UNVERIFIED].

---

1. The Graham/KSR Framework Applied to Claim 1

Claim 1 is a two‑step, largely result‑oriented claim. Its only structural hook beyond the abstract idea is the word "hierarchically ordered … at least one group being a subgroup of another group." Everything else is functional: derive attributes from on‑device interaction data; put contacts into nested groups.

Under KSR Int'l Co. v. Teleflex, Inc., 550 U.S. 398 (2007), and the Graham v. John Deere factors:

1. Scope/content — Broad. The specification (¶ describing FIG. 1) expressly frames the field as "organiz[ing] a user's contacts or social connections by analyzing interaction data reflecting the user's interactions with his or her contacts … on a mobile device."
2. Differences from prior art — The only candidate novelty is the particular nested taxonomy plus multi‑stage classification, both of which are standard hierarchical‑clustering outputs.
3. PHOSITA level — A person with an M.S. in CS/HCI plus ~2–3 years of mobile data‑mining experience. That level of skill makes hierarchical (agglomerative/divisive) clustering and supervised cascade classifiers routine tools, not inventions.
4. Secondary considerations — None of record. No PTAB proceeding, no litigation located (see prior sections), so there is no nexus‑bearing evidence of unexpected results, commercial success, or industry praise to rebut a prima facie case.

KSR rationales that carry this analysis: (i) combination of known elements with predictable results; (ii) design incentive / market pressure (contact‑management overload; per‑group ringtones and auto‑replies already existed); (iii) "obvious to try" with a finite, identified, predictable set of solutions; (iv) the applicant's own specification and cited NPL amount to admissions that the sub‑techniques (L‑method optimal‑K, tie strength, group evolution) were known.

---

2. The Two Reference Libraries

2A. On the face of the patent (front‑page "References Cited" / NPL)

2B. Art a POSITA would have known and that the record does not appear to have adjudicated (candidates to develop) [NOT on the face of the patent; UNVERIFIED in this session]

• Eagle & Pentland, "Reality Mining: Sensing Complex Social Systems," Pers. & Ubiq. Comp. (2006) — used Bluetooth co‑location to infer relationship structure and distinguish friends from non‑friends. Directly attacks claim 1 and the family/friend distinction of claims 3/5.
• Min et al., "Mining Smartphone Data to Classify Life‑Facets of Social Relationships," CSCW 2013 — classified contacts into social categories (family/friend/colleague) from call/SMS logs. Attacks claims 1, 3, 5.
• Do & Gatica‑Perez, "Human interaction discovery in smartphone proximity networks," PUC (2013) — proximity‑based group discovery.
• Xiang et al., "Modeling Relationship Strength in Online Social Networks," WWW 2010 — quantitative tie‑strength / closeness modeling. Attacks claim 6 and the "closeness ranking" concept.
• Cranshaw et al., "Bridging the Gap Between Physical Location and Online Social Networks," UbiComp 2010 — location‑derived social groups.

Priority‑date throttle (critical). Because US 10,341,421 is a CIP of 14/274,604 (filed 2014‑05‑09) with provisionals 61/822,272 (2013‑05‑10), 61/861,311 (2013‑08‑01), and 61/968,196 (2014‑03‑20), the effective § 102 date is claim‑by‑claim and limitation‑by‑limitation. Any reference dated after 2013‑05‑10 (e.g., Misra Oct. 2013; Min CSCW 2013) is only available if the particular limitation it maps to lacks written‑description support in the earlier filings. This is the same priority lever flagged in the Strategic Summary — here it becomes the gating question for which prior‑art set you may use.

---

3. Primary Obviousness Combinations

Combination A — "Interaction logs + tie strength + optimal‑K hierarchical clustering + group evolution"

Granovetter [4] + Raento [9] + MIT Reality Commons [7] + Salvador [10] + Palla [8]

Motivation to combine (KSR):

• [4]→[9]: Granovetter quantifies tie strength by frequency/duration/reciprocity; Raento teaches that smartphones capture exactly those signals. A POSITA seeking to measure tie strength would obviously use the log data Raento describes.
• [9]→[10]: Once attributes are in feature‑vector form, choosing a clustering method and its K is a routine data‑mining step. Salvador's L‑method is cited on the face of the patent, i.e., applicant admitted it as known art and even reproduced it as FIG. 3B — a self‑inflicted § 103 admission.
• [10]→[8]: [8] provides the practical incentive — groups change; a system must monitor subgroup formation/termination. Result is predictable.

---

Combination B — "Proximity + social‑category classification of contacts"

Eagle & Pentland (Reality Mining) + Min et al. (CSCW 2013) + Granovetter [4] + Salvador [10]

This combination is the strongest against dependent claims 3–5 because these references classify contacts into named relationship categories, not just anonymous clusters:

• Claim 3 ("important vs. non‑important," then "family vs. non‑family"): Eagle & Pentland's friend/non‑friend inference + Min's family/friend/colleague categories supply the exact taxonomy; the "important" split is the natural top‑level binary (contacts you engage vs. those you don't — directly measured by Granovetter tie strength).
• Claim 4 (significant other from the family subgroup): the most‑frequent/most‑reciprocal tie within the family cluster is the statistically identifiable significant other — a predictable ranking output, not a new mechanism.
• Claim 5 (friend vs. colleague from the non‑family subgroup): distinguished by time‑of‑day/weekday‑vs‑weekend communication patterns — the very features the patent's FIG. 10 classifiers 1006/1008 use, and precisely what call/SMS log studies (Min) used to separate work from social contacts.

Motivation: A POSITA building a contact organizer has an explicit design incentive to give groups semantically meaningful labels (so ringtones/auto‑replies can be assigned — see §4). The taxonomy "significant other / family / friend / colleague / acquaintance" is a conventional social‑science lattice (Granovetter), so arriving at those particular labels is "obvious to try" among a small, identified set.

---

Combination C — "Feature normalization + binary‑feature exclusion"

Salvador [10] + Raento [9] + the patent's own admitted normalization practice

• Claim 6 (normalizing a feature for the user): min–max normalization by the user's own maximum is textbook feature preprocessing; the specification itself says it "provides a user‑adaptive approach where a user's data is normalized with respect to his or her own data" — a stated rationale, not a structural novelty. Per‑user normalization of sensor/log features was standard practice in the mobile‑sensing literature ([9]).
• Claim 7 (operation initiated in response to an incoming communication — answer/ignore/call‑back): call‑log "answered/missed/returned" flags are native telephony artifacts; extracting a ratio of these is routine (the specification even describes "the ratio of incoming calls to outgoing calls").
• Claim 8 (contact saved in user‑maintained contact list): the address book itself is the reference — a binary "is‑saved" flag is inherent in any system that reads the contact book ([1]–[3] all operate on the saved contact book).

These dependents are the easiest to invalidate; they add no structural element beyond conventional data handling.

---

4. Why "On‑Device" and "Automated Responses" Do Not Rescue the Claims

The title promises "automated responses," but the claims do not require any automated response — claim 1 ends at "organizing." Under the all‑elements rule and the principle that claims are measured by their claim language, not the specification or title (cf. Phillips v. AWH, and the prohibition on reading limitations from the specification into the claims), the "auto‑reply / ringtone / sharing" embodiments are not limitations. They therefore cannot supply patentability.

Even if a court imported them: per‑group ringtones, auto‑replies, and selective sharing are admitted prior art in the specification's own usability discussion and were ubiquitous commercial features (carrier "Favorites," per‑contact ringtones). Adding a known action to a known grouping is a predictable combination.

"On‑device" likewise appears only in the specification's privacy rationale ("the organization … may be maintained entirely on the device"). Claim 1's "by a device" / "related to the device" language does not exclude server assistance. A POSITA running a local clustering routine on locally‑collected logs ([9], [7]) satisfies it.

---

5. The Patent Owner's Strongest Non‑Obviousness Arguments (and the rebuttals)

---

6. Bottom Line

1. Claim 1 is highly vulnerable. Every element maps to a four‑reference combination: Raento [9] (on‑device interaction logs) + Granovetter [4] (tie‑strength attributes) + Salvador [10] (hierarchical clustering / optimal‑K — cited on the patent's own face, i.e., an admission) + Palla [8] (group/subgroup evolution). Motivation is supplied by contact‑management design incentives and KSR's predictability rationale.
2. Claims 3–5 are vulnerable via Combination B if Eagle & Pentland / Min‑type art is confirmed to disclose the named relationship taxonomy (family/friend/colleague) — these are the same categories the claims recite and that the empirical literature used.
3. Claims 6–8 are the weakest for the patentee — normalization, answered/missed ratios, and an "is‑saved" bit are conventional.
4. No proceeding, no estoppel, clean slate (per prior sections), so this is a first‑chance § 103 attack. But the patent's viability turns first on the maintenance‑fee / "Expired – Fee Related" status flagged in the Strategic Summary — verify that before spending on art.
5. The decisive unresolved item is the CIP priority map. Before finalizing any combination, chart each limitation to its earliest supporting disclosure; that determines whether Oct. 2013+ art (e.g., Misra) is usable and whether the intervening‑art window is open.

Confidence statement: The legal framework and the mapping of the on‑face NPL (Granovetter, Salvador, Palla, Raento, Reality Commons) are high‑confidence. The specific element‑by‑element quotations, the content of the four cited U.S. patents (Zaner, Rosen, O'Neill, Mehrotra), and the not‑on‑face candidates in §2B are flagged [UNVERIFIED] — I could not pull their full text in this session, and no conclusion should be briefed on those references without first obtaining and reading the documents themselves. Two of the four cited U.S. patents (O'Neill 6,219,653; Mehrotra 6,665,423, classified in video coding) appear field‑unrelated and should be checked for citation‑artifact status rather than treated as substantive art.