Résumé de EPC2000 Art 056 pour la décision T0183/21 du 29.09.2023

In T 183/21 the application related to controlling a recommender configured to provide up-to-date predictions of user preferences for products within a large set, for example within a Video on Demand (VOD) catalogue. The claim defined a method of automatically controlling the performance of a recommender system in a communications system, the communications system including a client device associated with a user to which the recommendations were provided. The board noted that recommending products is not generally recognised as having technical character (T 1869/08, T 306/10) and the appellant had thus argued that the purpose of the invention was rather to limit the amount of resources used. The board found that the technical effect of the distinguishing features was that the use of network bandwidth required to provide the training data to the recommender system was minimised, as was the amount of storage necessary for storing said training data in the communications system including the client device and the recommender system. The amount of training data was indirectly limited via the tendency/convergence of the measured performance metric towards, or oscillation around, the predetermined level of recommendation performance, which was not necessarily the maximum achievable level of recommendation performance. The board came to the conclusion that this technical effect was achieved, on average, over substantially the whole scope of the claim.