Elkington + Fife LLP

UK and European patent attorney and UPC representative

Partner

Rob specialises in inventions involving signal processing; however, he has broader experience right across the fields of electronics and mechanical engineering. In his research career, prior to becoming a patent attorney, Rob was actively involved in international standardisation through the ISO/IEC’s “MPEG” working group. This background gives him a special understanding of the relationship between Intellectual Property (IP) and technical standards. Much of Rob’s time is spent drafting and prosecuting patent applications – for clients ranging from small UK businesses to multinational corporations. As such, he is experienced in advising clients who have different levels of knowledge about the patent-system and different strategic goals. He has broad experience of patent prosecution internationally, including less common procedures such as post-grant re-examination in the USA. Rob also has an active practice in contentious work – mainly opposition proceedings at the European Patent Office. When he qualified as a Patent Attorney, Rob was awarded the Strode Prize for the highest mark in Paper P2 (Patent Agents’ Practice) of the UK examinations.

Publications of note: R.J. O’Callaghan and T. Haga, “Robust Change-Detection by Normalised Gradient-Correlation”, Proc. IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)/Seventh International Workshop on Visual Surveillance, 2007; J.J. Lewis, R.J. O’Callaghan, S.G. Nikolov, D.R. Bull and C.N. Canagarajah, “Pixel- and region-based image fusion with complex wavelets”, Information Fusion, Vol. 8, No. 2, Special Issue on Image Fusion: Advances in the State of the Art, pp. 119-130, April 2007; R.J. O’Callaghan and M.Z. Bober, “MPEG-7 Visual-Temporal Clustering for Digital Image Collections” Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Volume 3689/2005, pp. 339-350, 2005.

English and German

University College Cork, Ireland (B.Eng. (1st Clas Hons)); University of Bristol (Ph.D).