June
1996
The CIIR embarks on a 4 year U.S. Patent and Trademark Office grant through DARPA on the project, "Browsing, Discovery and Search in Large Distributed Databases of Complex and Scanned Documents," to build the prototype for a next-generation search engine for the U.S. PTO corpus -- searching images as well as text.
![](https://ciir.cs.umass.edu/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/field/image/pto.png?itok=KE239KQQ)