On May 20-21, 2019, negotiations on cooperation between EAPO and WIPO in the field of ICT were held on the margins of the 23rd session of the WIPO Development and Intellectual Property Committee in Geneva.

EAPO delegation, headed by EAPO Vice-President Emil Mammadov, discussed the current areas of cooperation and agreed on further enhancement of collaboration.

Yo Takagi, Assistant Director General of WIPO, noted the high level of automation at EAPO, the participation of the Eurasian Office in the use of WIPO digital platforms and patent information standardization activities, and spoke about the state of play in the implementation of artificial intelligence in machine translation, imaging and speech recognition.

Mr. Takagi informed about the development of software for the representation in XML format of lists of nucleotide and amino acid sequences within the framework of WIPO ST.26 and encouraged EAPO participation in testing the developed tools for compiling and checking the correctness of the lists contained in the Eurasian applications.

The delegation of the Eurasian Office, for its part, reported on recent changes in technological processing of materials of Eurasian applications, on the results of implementation of the WIPO Standard ST. 37 related to the authority file of published patent documents, on plans of mastering the WIPO Standard ST.27 containing recommendations on the exchange of data on legal status of patents. EAPO delegation expressed interest in using information technologies based on artificial intelligence developed by WIPO, including the transition to an improved version of the machine translation system WIPO Translate.

The Parties exchanged views on the importance of bilateral cooperation and readiness to continue and strengthen it.

Technical and organizational aspects of the interaction on implementation of automated text recognition technology and training of EAPO specialists in this technology were discussed at the meeting with Christophe Mazenc, Director of Global Databases Division of the WIPO Global Infrastructure Sector.

The forthcoming signing of WIPO-EAPO Memorandum of Understanding on alternative dispute resolution in the area of intellectual property was discussed with Heike Wollgast, Head of IP Disputes Section of the WIPO Arbitration and Mediation Center.

The forthcoming visit of WIPO experts of the IP Office Business Solutions Division to EAPO for participation in negotiations and delivering lectures in the training session conducted by EAPO for national IP offices of EAPC Member States were worked out with Mr. Adel Baccouche, Project Manager of the mentioned Division. The parties also considered the possibility of implementing the IPAS automated system at EAPO in relation to industrial designs.