Hi Tom
Not in the slightest Spam, and the patent is there mostly to protect the date and since is now public (i.e. license free).
The technique is in production in automotive research and explains which part of batch normalisation is actually useful (the mean subtraction and scaling) but that minibatches per se are not useful though not excluded.
The option is there for single sample SGD that saves a lot on memory footprint and more than a year’s use of the AGC technique suggests that single sample is the most accurate and allows me to get top results on the automotive datasets I use beating all other techniques, so there must be something useful