Purdue Research Foundation is taking Google to trial over an alleged patent infringement.
PRF’s attorney Mark Siegmund filed a lawsuit in Texas on Tuesday claiming that the software in the Android Studio and Android Lint programs infringed U.S. Patent No. 10,379,925, which was grant to PRF in 2019.
PRF is a private nonprofit foundation that manages research at Purdue University. The program allocates funding and resources to faculty and students conducting research.
Patent ‘925, titled “Systems and Methods of Detecting Power Bugs,” covers software that detects “power bugs” in smartphone apps that reduce battery length.
Purdue professors Y. Charlie Hu, Samuel Midkiff and then-doctorate students Abhilash Jindal and Abhinav Pathak developed a method to detect the bugs, which are programming errors that cause smartphones to use unnecessary amounts of energy.
Hu, Midkiff and the co-inventors reverse-engineered a number of publicly available mobile apps to discover twice as many power bugs than they initially expected. To solve the issues, they created technology that could detect the bugs during the development phase of an app.
Hu, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Purdue, researched smartphone profiling and debugging extensively, according to the lawsuit. Midkiff, also an electrical and computer engineering professor, specializes in debugging parallel programs and compiling for low power applications.
Hu gave a presentation at the 10th International Conference on Mobile systems in 2012, to announce the researchers’ invention.
One Google engineer, Angana Ghosh, who was aware of Hu’s presentation, posted an article discussing Hu’s work to a developer forum prior to the presentation, the lawsuit alleges. The engineer brought the presentation “to the attention of other developers involved with Android Studio and Android Lint,” on June 13, 2012.
Tor Norbye, another Google engineer, allegedly attempted to start solving some of the problems outlined in the article using Android Lint two days later. Several months after Hu’s conference presentation, Norbye added the code containing the patented invention to the Android Lint codebase, the lawsuit alleges.
Android Studio is the official development environment for all Android Apps. Android Lint is an accompanying software package that helps debug and optimize code. A majority of Android app makers use Android Studio and Lint to code. In Texas alone, Google has more than 1,100 employees that work across Android, G Suite, Google Play, Cloud, etc.
The Purdue inventors assigned their rights and interests in the software to PRF on Nov. 21, 2016. It was then that Patent ‘925 was officially filed — it was legally issued on August 13, 2019.
The lawsuit alleges that Google, even after being made aware that Android Studio and Lint infringed the patent, continued to promote the software to consumers.
Smartphones’ varied purposes, numerous components and portable nature necessitate large amounts of energy in comparison to typical computers, according to the lawsuit. As such, battery life is an important concern for developers creating new applications.
Enabling the detection of power bugs in code prevents errors from draining smartphone battery life and limiting device usage.
“In order to conserve battery power, modern mobile device operating systems employ aggressive power management policies which place individual components such as the screen, CPU or device sensors in low or zero-power ‘sleep’ modes,” the lawsuit reads. “For example, most smartphone screens will turn off after a period of inactivity.”
To program software that helps a device go to sleep or save battery, developers have to explicitly request which components should remain active. However, if a developer misses selecting an object to put to sleep, it can unnecessarily drain the battery.
The process of debugging and analyzing code is “intrinsically complex and is impossible for human beings to perform effectively by hand for even moderately sized applications,” according to the lawsuit.
The technology allowed power bugs that would previously be detected only after a program is written, by quality assurance testing or customer reports, to be detected while the code is being written.
PRF demanded in the lawsuit that Google pay royalties, enhanced damages and fees for willfully infringing the patent, for the cost of PRF’s lawyer and any other money the court deems appropriate.
Midkiff declined to comment and said he wants to avoid making statements that might be later used in court.
Hu, the Purdue Research Foundation and a Google media representative didn’t respond to requests for comment.
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