Womble Bond Dickinson Partner Chris Mammen has established a reputation as a go-to source for discussing artificial intelligence and the law, particularly involving the legal question of “Can an AI be an inventor?”

The latest example of Mammen’s thought leadership in this field is his inclusion in a new book titled The Cambridge Handbook of Artificial Intelligence, published by Cambridge University Press. He is the author of the chapter on “AI as Inventor.”

The chapter analyses the impact of AI and IP Law. In August 2019, news reports carried stories about the first patent applications naming an AI algorithm, called DABUS, as an inventor on patent applications. Almost immediately, the United States Patent Office published a request for comments, asking questions about how it should approach AI and patent law. Less than a year later, the questions were seemingly definitively resolved. Mammen analyzes these developments and looks at where the concept of “AI as Inventor” may be heading.

The Cambridge Handbook of Artificial Intelligence examines the issues raised by AI and provides practical recommendations for regulatory, technical, and theoretical frameworks aimed at making AI compatible with existing legal rules, principles, and democratic values.

Mammen serves on the Advisory Boards for the annual Berkeley-Stanford Advanced Patent Law Institute, and for the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology, the top ranked IP program in the U.S.  For the past three years, he has been named to Law 360’s IP Editorial Advisory Board, and for the past five years he has been the principal author for the U.S. patent litigation chapter in Kluwer Law International’s Global Patent Litigation treatise.