Arthur M. Keller, Ph.D.

Managing Partner

Dr. Arthur M. Keller is Managing Partner of Minerva Consulting. Dr. Keller serves as a technical expert witness on patent infringement litigation, as advisor and board member to startups, and as a lecturer and researcher at the University of California at Santa Cruz. He was previously a researcher and lecturer at Stanford University. His expertise includes databases, electronic commerce, software, web and Internet technologies. (He can also help you find another expert if your case is not within his expertise.) He has worked on both plaintiff cases, testifying on both validity and infringement, and defense cases, testifying on both invalidity and non-infringement. He has testified at deposition, Markman tutorial, and trial, including videotaped testimony, testimony before a judge, and testimony before a jury, including in the Eastern District of Texas. He has written expert reports on infringement and validity, and invalidity and non-infringement, as well as declarations in support of motions and claim construction. He has already participated in inter partes review (IPR) with declarations and deposition testimony. His testimony has never been subject to a Daubert sanctions. He has also worked on declaratory judgment cases. His expert work has often resulted in favorable settlements without the need to go to trial.

In a recent Internet web patent case, the judge in his Markman ruling said, "Dr. Keller's description of the invention is perhaps the clearest and most comprehensive (to this lay reader, anyway) that I have encountered (meaning no offense to counsel, who have labored mightily to explain the invention to the court)."

In a patent case on database systems, his Markman tutorial was instrumental in getting the case dismissed in a motion for summary judgment following a favorable Markman ruling. This dismissal was mostly affirmed on appeal, with the one remaining issue later resolved.

In an e-commerce patent case, eBay Inc. v. MercExchange, LLC, he was initially responsible for one out of the three patents-in-suit, and wrote the declaration in support of the motion for summary judgment that resulted in this patent ruled invalid. Later in this case, he testified as both a fact and expert witness on the invalidity of another of the patents-in-suit. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit's ruled that this patent was invalid. The issue of whether an injunction can be requested by a non-practicing entity for the infringement of the third patent was ultimately decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.

In a recent Inter Partes Review case on visual design for which Dr. Keller wrote a declaration in support of the petition, the patent challenged was found invalid on all grounds, citing him.

Dr. Keller was the plaintiff's technical expert in DDR Holdings, LLC, v. Hotels.com, L.P., et al. The Federal Circuit decision cites his testimony, as "DDR's expert," as justification for a computer software-implemented invention being patent-eligible subject matter.

Please email Arthur Keller or call 650-424-0202 to discuss your case.

Dr. Keller has over 75 publications and have given over 125 lectures at conferences, companies and universities on several continents. His recent technical papers are available online in PostScript and Adobe Acrobat form.

Dr. Keller's current consulting practice is to help startups establish and grow. His client list includes Globallinx Network, Serus Corp., Unspam, Target Mining, Persistence Software, and Mergent Systems.

Dr. Keller is also a researcher and lecturer at the Baskin School of Engineering of University of California, Santa Cruz, having served in the departments of Computer Science, Technology and Information Management, and Computer Engineering. Dr. Keller invented technology for a "do not spam" registry with four students while a Visiting Associate Professor at University of California at Santa Cruz. This technology was licensed to Unspam, where he is an advisor and wrote the patent application for U.S. Patent 7,925,704 for this technology. This technology is now used for the Child Protection Registries for Michigan and Utah. He continues as an advisor of Unspam and as a researcher and lecturer at the University of California at Santa Cruz.

Dr. Keller was profiled in TechWeb on March 10, 2000.

Dr. Keller provides technical and business strategy advice to e-commerce startups. He sometimes provides some seed funding, but only to the startups he works with directly.

He was Chief Technical Advisor (and was formerly on the Board of Directors) of Persistence Software and still advises them on advanced technical strategy. Persistence Software is the technology leader in the Transactional Application Server market, providing a foundation for distributed computing. Persistence accelerates the development and deployment of high-performance distributed systems. The Persistence PowerTier family of Transactional Application Servers includes PowerTier for Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) and PowerTier for C++. Over 200 Global-1000 companies have accelerated the delivery of applications and ensured scalability using PowerTier's patented object-relational technology. Persistence Software went public on June 25, 1999.

He was also a Co-Founder (with Prof. Michael Genesereth) (and was formerly COO and CFO) of Mergent Systems, Inc., which commercialized Infomaster, later called iMerge. Mergent Systems was originally called Epistemics, Inc. Mergent develops applications for the business to business e-commerce market. Its applications address the challenge of creating, operating, and maintaining industry catalogs for Internet market makers. Mergent is unique in its ability to deal with the issues facing net market makers including sourcing data from distributed sites, dealing with unstructured, missing or incomplete information, and providing fast and easy access to catalog and related information. Mergent Systems was acquired by Commerce One in January 2000 for what was then about $200 million in cash and stock.

Dr. Keller was an advisor to Serus Corp. prior to its acquisition by E2open. The Serus Integrated Demand Profit Management System captures real-time demand data and through patent-pending applications determines optimum inventory allocation and replenishment drivers in high velocity value chains.

Dr. Keller was co-founder, Interim CEO, and chairman of the Board of Directors of Globallinx Network, which provided free Internet web access to hotel guests through their in-room Internet Appliance with proprietary software using a custon advertising delivery system. Globallinx Network ceased operations.

Dr. Keller served on the Technical Advisory Board of Propel Software Corp.. Propel has a product that accelerates dialup Internet web access.

Dr. Keller was Co-Founder (along with Dr. Sanjai Tiwari) and served as Chief Technical Advisor and a member of the Board of Directors of Target Mining Corp., formerly known as buyermail.com and as ccRewards.com, a startup that offered targeted promotions based on its patent-pending purchase mining technology. Target Mining ceased operations. Dr. Keller co-invented their technology.

Dr. Keller was a visiting associate professor of Computer Science at the University of California at Santa Cruz during the 2001-2002 and 2002-2003 academic years, where he continues as a lecturer and researcher, and has taught undergraduate and graduate courses in databases and systems analysis and design.

Dr. Arthur M. Keller until 1999 managed Stanford CIT's efforts on collaborative engineering, workflow, and database security and coordinates relationships with companies. There he was project manager for Stanford's efforts on CommerceNet, including research on searchable online catalogs, providing services over the Internet, and concurrent engineering. He collaborated with the Tsimmis project on integration of heterogeneous databases for information finding and distributed constraints, and collaborated with the CEDB project on version and configuration management and distributed constraints for collaborative design. He previously managed the Penguin project on interoperability of object-oriented and relational databases, the Fauve project on federated autonomous databases, the Paradata project performing research on databases on parallel computers, and the development of DADAISM, a formally specified, modular database system in Ada that includes multiple interfaces at multiple levels as well as support for database security and integrity.

His research interests include electronic commerce, distributed systems, Internet technologies, interoperability of heterogeneous databases, database integration, object-oriented databases, database implementation, databases on parallel computers, federated autonomous databases, database views including updates, incomplete information and nulls, software integration and reuse, electronic mail and reducing spam (unsolicited commercial email), electronic voting systems, and large system integration.

He received his B.S. summa cum laude with honors in both Mathematics and Computer and Information Science from Brooklyn College (CUNY) in 1977, his M.S. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1979, and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1985. He was a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow. He was previously an assistant professor in the Computer Sciences department at the University of Texas at Austin.

He has taught over three dozen classes at Stanford University, Western Institute of Computer Science, University of California at Santa Cruz, University Blas Pascal (Cordoba, Argentina), Helsinki University of Technology (Finland), The University of Texas at Austin, Brooklyn College (City University of New York), and TeX Users Group annual conferences.

Dr. Keller was a member of the Planning and Transportation Commission of the City of Palo Alto, California between 2006 and 2014, including serving as its Vice Chair. He was also co-chair of the Environmental Affinity group of the Silicon Valley Social Venture Fund (SV2) of the Community Foundation Silicon Valley. He is also a member of Environmental Entrepreneurs (E2). He served on the board of the Electric Auto Association.

Dr. Keller is a Senior Member of the IEEE, and the IEEE Consultants Network of Silicon Valley, and a member of the ACM.

Dr. Keller is listed in Marquis' Who's Who in America, Millenium Edition.