While Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) Chairman Bill Gates these days is more often seen engaged in philanthropic activities through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, he still dons his inventor cap from time to time.
Gates is one of the named inventors on a patent application published in the database of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office July 25.
One of Gates’s nine co-inventors is Nathan Myhrvold, former Microsoft chief technology officer and founder and chief executive officer of Bellevue, Washington’s Intellectual Ventures.
Application 20130188887 covers a technology to generate video from text.
According to the application, the technology could be used to aid students with dyslexia or other learning disabilities who have difficulty reading long passages of text. The video generated by the text would be a synthesized image sequence relating to the text.
The application was filed in January 2012. Myhrvold and others have acknowledged that some Intellectual Ventures patent applications are generated following “invention sessions” during which experts from a number of disciplines meet together to discuss problems and potential technological solutions.
The patent is assigned to Elwha LLC. Elwha is both the name of a river in Washington state’s Olympic Peninsula, and an Intellectual Ventures holding company.
