Patents by Inventor Thomas B. Hickey

Thomas B. Hickey 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: 7762039
    Abstract: An electric junction fixture is provided for preparing a wall or ceiling to accept an appliance such as an electric light fixture, inserted and mounted through a hole in the drywall or panel. Reduced stress levels in the drywall or panel are obtained by providing large areas of contact between the fixture and the drywall or panel.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: April 4, 2008
    Date of Patent: July 27, 2010
    Inventor: Thomas B. Hickey
  • Publication number: 20090249706
    Abstract: An electric junction fixture is provided for preparing a wall or ceiling to accept an appliance such as an electric light fixture, inserted and mounted through a hole in the drywall or panel. Reduced stress levels in the drywall or panel are obtained by providing large areas of contact between the fixture and the drywall or panel.
    Type: Application
    Filed: April 4, 2008
    Publication date: October 8, 2009
    Inventor: Thomas B. Hickey
  • Patent number: 6622395
    Abstract: A measuring device is used to orient and place portions of obstacles, such as pipes, conduits or the like and includes a framing square having an alignment bracket mounted thereon. The alignment bracket abuts one of the obstacles and one leg of the framing square is located adjacent to the other obstacle. The framing square then defines the location and path for a coupling element, such as an elbow or the like, used to couple the obstacles together.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: July 23, 2002
    Date of Patent: September 23, 2003
    Inventor: Thomas B. Hickey
  • Patent number: 5910805
    Abstract: An image font file is created containing compressed bitmap representations of the characters of one or more fonts utilized for a given text. These compressed bitmap representations are derived as character image templates corresponding with a font of an enlarged size. Upon being conveyed to client software, the individual characters of the image font file are accessed, and while remaining in a compressed format are selectively shifted in accordance with typesetting specification error values, then scaled and filtered to produce a display character in anti-aliased, sub-pixel position format.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: January 11, 1996
    Date of Patent: June 8, 1999
    Assignee: OCLC Online Computer Library Center
    Inventors: Thomas B. Hickey, Robert J. Haschart
  • Patent number: 5459739
    Abstract: Three OCR systems are employed for text conversion and the results generated from each of the three are merged using a edit distance algorithm to estimate a correct common text ancestor. To make the process computationally feasible for large strings such as pages of documentation with 3,000 characters, the method is executed in two stages. The first procedure is carried out with each page considered as a string of lines. Where differences exist using the edit distance between the lines on a page to find the optimal alignment of the lines. In the event that choice must be made among three non-null lines, the procedure then is invoked on the three lines , by using the edit distance between the characters on a line to find the optimal alignment. The number of computations required of the procedure is further reduced by comer-cutting that hueristically determines an upper bound on the edit distance and limits calculations to those which do not exceed the upper bound.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: March 18, 1992
    Date of Patent: October 17, 1995
    Assignee: OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Incorporated
    Inventors: John C. Handley, Thomas B. Hickey
  • Patent number: 4803643
    Abstract: A system and method for treating publisher's textual and graphical data and converting it to device independent digital form for retention in master memory. Once both textual and graphical data have been converted to digital form, the graphical data are inserted in appropriate locations as determined by a formatting routine. Formatted articles then are collected for retention in master memory, and eventual production of local memory. The formatted page files residing in master memory are in a device independent form such that they are outputtable with high quality on a variety of output devices. Additionally, an index is generated for every word retained in master memory enabling the user to peruse as many as 30,000 complex pages for the desired subject matter.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: August 10, 1987
    Date of Patent: February 7, 1989
    Assignee: OCLC Online Computer Library Center Incorporated
    Inventor: Thomas B. Hickey