Patents by Inventor Stephen Nickell

Stephen Nickell has filed for patents to protect the following inventions. This listing includes patent applications that are pending as well as patents that have already been granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).

  • Patent number: 7669188
    Abstract: A system and method for identifying viable refactorings of program code using a comprehensive test suite is presented. Program code is maintained, including program statements written in accordance with a programming language and defining operations executed following transformation into machine code. A test suite associated with the program code is specified and includes one or more additional program operations to determine satisfactory generation of expected results during the operations execution. A plurality of refactorings are speculatively applied to the program code by evaluating one or more of the program statements against a set of refactoring rules and restructuring the program statements pursuant to at least one refactoring rule. The test suite is executed against the program code following each restructuring of the program statements and each refactoring that passes the test suite is determined.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: December 3, 2004
    Date of Patent: February 23, 2010
    Assignee: Palo Alto Research Center Incorporated
    Inventors: Eric Stephen Nickell, Ian E. Smith
  • Patent number: 7451439
    Abstract: A system and method for automatically identifying compound refactorings of program code through quantitative metric analysis is presented. Program code is maintained, including program statements written in accordance with a programming language and defining operations executed following transformation into machine code. Compound refactorings are built. The program code is refactored by evaluating one or more of the program statements against a compound refactoring including a set of one or more individual refactorings. The application of the refactorings to the program statements is validated for each evaluated refactoring. A quantitative measure is analyzed against a threshold to reflect a relative difference between the program statements prior to and after application of the refactorings.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: December 3, 2004
    Date of Patent: November 11, 2008
    Assignee: Palo Alto Research Center Incorporated
    Inventors: Eric Stephen Nickell, Ian E. Smith
  • Patent number: 6418339
    Abstract: The invention relates to a method and a device for in vivo detection of the direction of Langer's lines in the skin. Light is irradiated into the skin as primary light at one defined site (7) identified through the epidermis (6) in such a way that it is transported in the skin (5) by scattering or absorption, while part of said irradiated light emerges from the skin as secondary light in the region surrounding the irradiated site. An amplitude-dependent property of secondary light emerging from the skin (5) around the irradiated site is measured in order to determine the preferential direction of the diffuse light transport in the skin (5) and, consequently, determine the orientation of Langer's lines thereof.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: November 16, 1999
    Date of Patent: July 9, 2002
    Inventors: Matthias Essenpreis, Stephen Nickell, Dirk Bocker