A University of New Orleans faculty member has been tapped by NASA’s Stennis Space Center to help the agency improve the way it manages and markets intellectual property. The agency awarded $100,000 to Md Tamjidul Hoque, associate professor of computer science, to enhance and expand an initial version of technology he has already developed for the agency toward this end.

In the course of carrying out its mission, NASA routinely develops new technology and often elects to protect its intellectual property by securing patents for its innovations. Patents allow NASA to share its technology through external partnerships related to the NASA mission or licensing to the public for commercial and social benefit. Hoque’s work aims to improve the centralized system used by NASA for organization and navigation of patent data and related documents so that marketing efforts based on opportunities for business partnerships and technology licensing become more efficient and effective.

With a previous grant, Hoque applied an advanced machine-learning tool to NASA’s intellectual property management system to sort and classify patent documents. A machine-learning approach uses software to perform the decision-making process of categorizing and naming each new innovation without the need for human oversight. The current award will fund the next phase of developing this technology, which involves fully automating the classification process on the document side and adding metadata to records to improve search results on the user side.

Hoque, who earned a doctorate from Monash University in Australia, researches machine learning, bioinformatics and optimization.