archive for the ‘conferences & talks’ category

Finding inbox meaning in a time of overload

4 February 2011 | Victoria Bellotti

[Editor’s note: PARC contributed this post to Inbox Love (produced by 500 Startups).] Email is, for many knowledge workers, a habitat: the place where they spend most of their working day online. Indeed it can be thought of as knowledge work’s Grand Central Station as far as information distribution and workflow are concerned. A major part of knowledge worker information overload is trying to manage the influx of email content in terms of prioritizing obligations communicated via email and making sure they can always locate the resources they need within all the content in their inbox. In order to handle the demands being placed upon it, email needs to be far better integrated with its users’ content, communication streams, and productivity tools, and come pre-armed with powerful features to support things like content organization, project planning, workflow, content retrieval, analytics and so on...

Building an “ecosystem” to fulfill a novel technology’s promise

16 November 2010 | Jennifer Ernst

Just how do novel technologies evolve from concept to market? Let's take the example of printed electronics (and its evolution at PARC), which may provide some insight into this question. Besides displays, printed electronics enables new applications from lighting and photovoltaics, to RFID, batteries, memory, and sensors. Given the diversity of applications, how do we move from the fundamental research that unlocks new possibilities, to the market impact of addressing what's needed? Especially when you don't really have a market, but an enabling technology. Especially when each of the players in the market has different technical demands, different distribution and support requirements, and different adoption challenges. And especially when considering that for enabling technologies, there’s a special challenge – you have to choose which markets to concentrate your efforts on, while remaining flexible enough to change as market conditions dictate. So how does one move from establishing expertise and demonstrating feasibility, towards commercial impact?

It’s time to reap the context-aware harvest

21 September 2010 | Bo Begole

It's ironic that following the invention of the Personal Computer workstation and laptop computers at PARC, researchers would then turn toward making the computer disappear. To most people at the time, having a single “personal” computer was a dream, but Mark Weiser and many others envisioned that we’d soon all have more than just one personal computer in our lives... Today, context awareness isn't about devices and location - it's about people getting things done.

Shift Happens (at PARC)

3 March 2010 | Mark Bernstein

PARC hosted a fieldtrip for TTI/Vanguard attendees following their recent "Shifts Happen" conference in San Francisco. [Through private conferences that they describe as "part classroom, part think-tank, and part laboratory", TTI/Vanguard is a forum for senior-level executives that links strategic technology planning to business success.] Surprisingly, the questions I was asked before and after the demo-presentation tour weren’t that different. Basically, folks were looking for simple answers or replicable formulas to some pretty fundamental challenges: How do we do what we do? How do we do it differently than before? How do we make the right choices? There's no single formula, but...

Workshop on Technology-Mediated Social Participation: Reports

12 January 2010 | Sanjay Kairam

PARC recently hosted the first of two co-organized and NSF-funded workshops on Technology-Mediated Social Participation. Workshop reports addressing themes such as integrating theory across levels from the individual to the community; developing new methods of measuring social connections and social capital across networks; and building an infrastructure for reliable and responsible data collection are now available.

The Future of Technology-Mediated Social Participation

7 December 2009 | Pete Pirolli

Who would have thought that simple architectures for participation could rival the scale of results previously achieved only by massive private or public works projects? While we can get excited about the possibilities, we also have to be realistic. Most social technology efforts fail: for every Wikipedia, there are thousands of dead or dying wikis. The Workshop on Technology-Mediated Social Participation at PARC will bring together approximately 30 researchers from industry, academia, and government to draw up a scientific agenda and educational recommendations for a new era of social participation technologies. As individuals, we’re limited by how much we know or think about any of these things, which is why I’m hoping that participants on the panel and in the audience at this week’s PARC Forum can help. We see further when we stand on the shoulders of others.

Technology scouting and acquisition: what do YOU want to know?

9 September 2009 | Jennifer Ernst

Next week, I'll be moderating a panel on "Creating Value with a Smart Technology Scouting, Acquisition, and Licensing Strategy" at Growth, Innovation, and Leadership (a Frost & Sullivan global congress on corporate growth). Since I'll write up the discussion after the event (and, of course, post here what I can), let me know what questions you want answered -- what would like to hear more about? What questions about acquiring technology from external sources are top of mind for you?

The future of pervasive marketing: Scenarios

30 June 2009 | Bo Begole

"Responsive Media" applications are one of the most exciting areas of current research in human-computer interaction. Based on technologies that can detect human response using cameras and other sensors to glean demographic data (gender, race, age) and physiological states (eye gaze, orientation, pupil dilation, skin temp, expression), these applications can be used for human-robot interaction, marketing, gaming, digital concierge avatars, and more.