But first: What’s an ARPA-E?

Organized by the the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy (“ARPA-E”), the inaugural Energy Innovation Summit brought together key players to spur the networks that will, according to the organizers, “bring about the next Industrial Revolution in clean energy technologies, in the way the U.S. has led previous revolutions in life sciences and information technology“.

• LA Times — “A federal effort to lead ‘green’ technology”: An energy research agency applies the same theory that led to the invention of the Internet: that government funding churns out radical innovations. Director Arun Majumdar talks about the challenges.
• Grist.org — “Obama’s ‘director of game changers’ talks energy breakthroughs”

My take: The technology showcase

The Transformational Energy Technology Innovation Showcase (I didn’t call it this, they did) was fantastic — everything from zaney new wind turbines to quantum tunneling thermal energy converters. [FYI, here's a list -- with links to downloads -- of what PARC shared in the showcase.]

Overall, the showcase displayed a diverse creativity that I found truly inspiring. Here’s a quick rundown of what I found noteworthy:

Photovoltaics (PV). Surprisingly (or not, given how saturated the space is) there were only a few things I saw on PV devices. We showed one idea on using laser ablation to make point contacts [PDF] — but we didn’t really emphasize it, given that the work is already funded by the Department of Energy, and honestly it’s more of an incremental improvement to silicon PV technology. While our technology is important in driving down manufacturing costs and increasing efficiencies, the mission of ARPA-E is to focus on the truly bold, new ideas. Meanwhile: there wasn’t much novel thin-film PV work visible at the meeting. That seems right to me, given how many companies are already awash in VC funding ($100M+) with the goal of making CdTe and CIGS a reality.

And Thermo-photovoltaics (TPV). Then there is the quantum-tunneling approach to TPV. Now this is a really cool idea: couple evanescent waves from the heat of a blackbody by placing a TPV receiver only a gnat’s eyelash away (at 100 nm). This way, you can extract more energy than the blackbody radiation law would seem to allow. It should work because within the evanescent field, you’re taking advantage of coupling to NON-radiative modes. But the big issue is how to maintain a very, very small gap over macroscopic areas. IF that can be done, the approach looks very interesting.

Wind power. I’m actually really impressed by the scale achieved by wind turbines made by companies like General Electric. So I have to wonder if some of the seemingly wacky ideas around wind capture that I saw at the showcase will, er, fly (pun not intended). Especially because I believe wind technologies should increasingly lower cost through manufacturing improvements and economies of scale. It’s not just the cool factor but the technology adoption that matters.

CO2 conversions. There were a number of ideas around converting CO2 to liquid fuels (including our own). In fact, there were specific ideas that would require high-pressure, pure, CO2 — which is exactly what the PARC air capture process produces [PDF]. From a partnering perspective, I think this is a solid opportunity where the sum of the parts might be much more interesting as a whole.

Thermoacoustic cooling. Wrapping up the list, the showcase displayed PARC technology on thermoacoustic cooling [PDF]. Another very interesting idea, although I’m admittedly biased. [The technology was also mentioned or covered by Technology Review, Greentech Media, and Scientific American. Nikkei Electronics too, though I can't read Japanese.] How it works: it uses thermoacoustics (high intensity sound waves to drive heat), but we have added some proprietary ideas to make it more efficient than what has been possible before at near-room temperatures. The result would be an air conditioner that is 2X more efficient (a COP as high as 9) than conventional compressors. Huge market.

If you were at ARPA-E, or simply interested in these technologies, we’d love to hear your thoughts…

For me, hosting this fieldtrip was an interesting proposition since it was 10 years ago that they had last visited what was then Xerox PARC. I knew it wasn’t going to be very difficult to show how different we were, but it wasn’t going to be easy to choose what to show. In the end, we provided a set of demo-presentations [agenda] that exposed the breadth of our competencies and the application spaces we’re exercising.

Yes, shift happens. The question is: how?

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?

Wouldn’t we all like to know?? Well, here’s what I (think I) said.

There’s no single formula, but…

PARC doesn’t commercialize its technologies into markets directly. When a technology from one of our research projects can demonstrate business value in an application, we look to partners who have the capability and market understanding to optimize the form and function for their customers. Those commercialization partners can be entrepreneurs, industrial clients, venture investors, or others. They’re our greatest asset because they help us bridge technology challenges and strategic business opportunities. How do we know what’s hot? I don’t know, but we can tell when it’s too early and we certainly know when it’s too late.

PARC is becoming a center for commercial innovation. We still do core research, but we need to generate business results to keep at it. Half of our revenue comes from sources other than Xerox, but we wouldn’t have arrived there without some leeway from them to do so. (This notion of leeway may also apply to government funding, which when aligned with our objectives gives us the breathing space to work on foundational research that’s too early for the commercial market.) How do we manage being an independent subsidiary? Our experience with other clients in other industries all over the globe has kept our relationship with Xerox clearer and better than ever. Moreover,

PARC doesn’t work with competitors in the same field of use. We maintain confidentiality unless we have permission to do otherwise. That’s how we manage all our research and our business relationships. We also take patenting seriously because it is one of the foundational assets we create from our research. With guidance from our intellectual capital management team to inform what and how much intellectual property (IP) to capture, we protect the interests of our clients who use our services and commercialize our technology. IP also allows us to continually grow our competency and asset base as we extend the scope and breadth of our research into new or competitive areas. But how do we manage the research decision-making process?

PARC manages its research investments from a portfolio perspective. We have deep scientific understanding that supports all our fields of research. And we make little research bets to test if big bets are warranted. We try to test assumptions quickly to learn fast and optimize our market timing. But it’s not a question of balancing basic vs. applied research here — we ascribe to Pasteur’s Quadrant of “use-inspired” basic/exploratory research. Value is created from what you can do with what you know.

We accept that failure is valuable. PARC still relies on its researchers for their passion, intuition, and insight to help guide resource investments. Only now, they are coupled with like-minded business development folks who work with them from concept ideation to technology prototype — pushing, questioning, informing, guiding… encouraging them to take risks and explore possibilities, but with purpose and urgency.

What’s the difference between Ubiquitous Computing (“ubicomp”) and Augmented Reality (“AR”)? I hear this question often, and you could replace “augmented reality” in that question with any of the following buzzy paradigms for people-interacting-with-computers: Virtual Reality, Pervasive Computing, Mobile Computing, Wearable Computing, Multi-Device Interaction, Cloud Computing, Intelligent Systems, Ambient Intelligence, Context-Aware Computing, Adaptive Systems, Machine Perception, Social Computing, Smart Environments, Everyware, and so on.

The perils of definition

Is ubicomp a superset or subset of <buzzy paradigm>? A fair question, but I’ve hesitated to propose a formal definition because they’re:

• Overly confining — I’ve heard people say “oh, but ubicomp doesn’t address x or y” …When it does.
• Often misused — I’ve heard people call the use of a browser on a smart phone “an example of ubicomp” “–no, that would be “mobile computing” …But do we care??
• Usually degrade into never-ending semantic or ontological debates — I’ve heard long discussions about how “ubiquitous” means literally “everywhere at once,” so ubicomp can only be equivalent to some kind of all encompassing artificial intelligence.  … Please. We’re not trying to write science fiction here, we’re trying to create systems that help people throughout their life.

For the most part, I don’t find formal definitions useful; you can call it whatever suits your fancy. All that matters is that I understand what you mean when you use a term and that you understand what I mean when I use it (whether we use that term in the exact same way or not is immaterial). So, here’s what my colleagues and I generally mean when we talk about ubicomp.

Ubiquitous Computing is…

The attributes of a definition that carry lasting meaning are not technological properties (performance, cost, size, distribution, latency), but the core capabilities that the paradigm enables for usage.

Ubiquitous is the property of being or seeming to be everywhere. Its synonyms: omni-present, pervasive, everywhere, universal.

Computing is the act of calculation or generation of an output based on input. It can be carried out by a person alone (“she is computing the result in her notebook”) or with the support of technology (“the teacher is computing their scores on the mainframe”). It’s also possible to think of computing as being carried out by technology alone (“the laptop is computing their scores”) but in fact those cases are directed by a human operator.  In all cases, “computing” involves a human (or some other autonomous intelligence).

Usefulness is actually a pretty important attribute of Ubiquitous Computing (or “ubicomp”). Just as the sound of the proverbial tree falling in the woods only matters when someone is there to hear it, the act of computing only matters when it is of use to someone. Usefulness differentiates ubicomp from terms like “artificial intelligence” or “ambient intelligence” or “smart environments” — where the intelligence or smartness could, theoretically, exist for its own sake, not necessarily for the usefulness of others or those in an environment.

• Synonymous (practically) with ubicomp are “pervasive computing” and “Everyware”, though the terms didn’t come into use until later.
• A common characteristic in ubiquitous computing systems is  “multi-device interaction”, but it is possible to create ubiquitous computing systems where the user is primarily interacting with one device (e.g., a smart phone, an electronic kiosk).
• Not necessarily (but often), ubicomp can involve “mobile computing”. This term implies that either the person or the computation is capable of being in motion, but  it would not necessarily be the case that such mobility spans all places (certainly my 3G network doesn’t go everywhere I do). So mobile computing is not necessarily wholly ubiquitous, nor does ubicomp wholly include mobility as a ubicomp system might be stationary (e.g., a home entertainment system).

So what’s the difference between Augmented Reality and Ubiquitous Computing?

Getting back to the question, Augmented Reality (like “mobile computing” as described above) is neither a subset or superset of Ubiquitous Computing.  Augmented Reality (AR) is the presentation of electronic information along with a real-world object, projected physically or as seen through an electronic display. Ubiquitous Computing (ubicomp) is the seamless integration of information services as we accomplish goals throughout our work and personal lives.

BOTH have to do with the use of information services in conjunction with real-world objects.
BUT one is about perceiving “reality”, and the other about the usefulness of the “computing” to our goals.

The key point of overlap, and the source of confusion to some, is that both AR and Ubicomp utilize machine perception to detect the state of the real world. AR systems typically use cameras, GPS, and electronic compass to detect the location and orientation of physical objects relative to each other. A Ubicomp system may also employ those same sensors along with others such as switches, thermistors, microphones, chemical detectors, strain gauges, accelerometers, and more. Such sensing technologies enable machine perception that is approaching the fidelity of human perceptions — of temperature, sound, sight, smell and taste, proprioception, balance, and motion,  respectively.

Cutting to the chase,

• AR depends on machine perception technologies to detect the identity and physical configuration of objects relative to each other. It aims to project information alongside a physical object.
• Ubicomp does not necessarily require that the information be displayed alongside one’s perception of the real-world items. Ubicomp uses machine perception to incorporate inputs that are not necessarily explicitly entered by human operators — such as physical states of motion (running, walking, driving, or riding?), attentional demands of the situation (driving in traffic or sitting on a train?), other people’s attributes (roles, demographics, or psychographics), and more. It further encompasses electronic information about things outside of one’s physical environment, perhaps adapting the presentation based on the attentional (driving in heavy traffic) and physical (arms full) demands of the user.

Ubiquitous Computing, like sands through the hourglass

In essence, Ubicomp research focuses on the use of information services throughout our everyday lives, which might include an AR-style of interaction. In that sense, Ubicomp might seem to cover everything; but then the term “Ubiquitous Computing” would be no more meaningful than “Computing” in general.

For PARC, ubicomp is not a superset or subset of anything, but deals with what exists in the interstices of other computing paradigms and research areas. For me, this includes:

• Device Network Interoperability, Implicit Interaction, Human Micro-Behavior Analysis, Contextual Behavior Modeling, and Activity Awareness;
• A growing number of applications such as: Secure Data Exchange, Persuasive Systems, Context-Aware Recommendation Systems, Behavior Modeling, Remote Monitoring and Troubleshooting; and
• Future advances that realize other capabilities not currently on the roadmaps of other paradigms such as: Responsive Media (similar to Human-Robot Interaction but without the anthropomorphic robot), Ubiquitous Digital Assistance (systems that make decisions modeled on your personal priorities and tradeoffs), Life Coaches (systems that monitor and advise you to help attain your personal goals), Hyper-Presence (the ultimate extension of digital presence we see of instant messaging and Social Computing), and of course all sorts of other things.

More about these some other time.

V2G in theory

What’s not to love? Imagine millions of electric vehicles (EVs) and plug-in hybrids (PHEVs) connected to the power grid, storing excess energy generated by wind farms at night and selling power back to the grid during peak demand hours.

It seems to be a win-win-win story. V2G helps accommodate renewables in the grid; curbs CO2 emissions by reducing peak power demand; and provides a financial benefit to owners through time-of-day pricing.

Recently, U.S. Department of Energy Secretary Steven Chu expressed his praise for the concept:

“It has always been my goal to do energy arbitrage with plug in vehicles… If you get half the cars with 50 to 60 kilowatt-hours of energy storage, it’s an incredible amount of energy storage… and if you’re willing to sell half the energy storage back to the company, much of our energy storage problems will be taken care of.”

V2G in practice

But. Is V2G truly a win-win-win? Specifically, does it make economic sense for PHEV/EV owners and manufacturers?

I believe that engaging a PHEV/EV in V2G transactions would chip away at the remaining useful life of a lithium-ion (Li-ion) battery — and hence the residual value of the vehicle –  in a substantial manner.

Do the math

Let’s consider the following scenario based on Li-ion cells that will power the next generation of PHEV/EVs like the Chevy Volt (while owners of the first-generation Volt will not be allowed to engage their vehicles in V2G programs, I will nevertheless use the Volt battery pack as an example).

• The average cycle life of a Li-ion cell (down to 80% of initial energy storage capacity) is less than 1,000 full charge-discharge cycles.
• US$450/kWh is a reasonable estimate for the cost of automotive Li-ion battery packs.  These costs will come down with volume, but not by much.
• The Volt will sport a 16 kWh Li-ion battery pack, of which only 8.8 kWh will be usable (the battery will be cycled between 30% and 85% state-of-charge levels).
• We will ignore losses due to heat and assume 100% round-trip efficiency in and out of the battery.

Let’s assume that a PHEV/EV could buy (charge) or sell (discharge) up to 20% of its nominal capacity in one V2G transaction. For the Volt, that amounts to 3.2 kWh of energy. For the sake of argument, let’s assume that the vehicle is able to buy energy on the cheap, say, at 8 cents/kWh and sell it at a 25% premium (10 cents/kWh). That one V2G transaction (3.2 kWh bought and then sold back to the grid) would yield a net profit of 6.4 cents.

Now, let’s calculate the depreciation on the battery due to this V2G transaction. At $450/kWh, the Volt battery pack would cost around $7,200. With an optimistic cycle life estimate of 1,000 full cycles, the depreciation cost of each full (100%) cycle is $7.20 — or $1.44 per each 20% charge-discharge cycle!

The argument isn’t much better for larger EV batteries. The same 20% capacity V2G transaction yields a net profit of 21.2 cents for the 53 kWh Tesla battery pack, and results in a depreciation of $4.77 assuming a similar replacement cost of $450/kWh!

Bottom line

The miniscule gains from V2G transactions would not come close to compensating the owner for battery depreciation.

Furthermore, it’s not even clear yet whether PHEV/EV manufacturers will honor the warranty on batteries if the batteries are used for purposes other than driving. While the jury is still out, it won’t be a surprise to anyone if PHEV/EV manufacturers decide to void battery warranties on PHEV/EVs that participate in V2G programs.

Chemistry matters

V2G is a brilliant concept, but Li-ion may not be the right chemistry for V2G.  Eventually, there will be new energy storage methods with minimal degradation due to normal use and extraordinarily high cycle life.

Until then, it might be wise to focus our attention on more feasible ways to integrate renewables into the grid.

Energy efficiency advances in data centers: what’s missing?

© Michael Schmeling | Dreamstime.com

Most notably, the EPA-predicted growth in power consumption is likely to occur despite two waves of advances that have already occurred in data center energy efficiency:

1. The first wave was hardware. It involved advances in cooling (e.g., HVAC) and compact server form factors (e.g., blade servers).

2. The second wave was software. It focused on virtualization to allow data centers to consolidate software processes on fewer servers.

On average, servers in a data center run at 20-30% of peak capacity in order to accommodate occasional peak demand like viral videos, breaking news, ad campaigns, or periodic data processing tasks.  An idle server consumes about half its peak power requirement since it still needs to keep the disks spinning, fans running, and the circuits energized.

So approximately half the energy consumed by data centers today is simply wasted.

While a future generation of servers would be capable of throttling power consumption down to zero as computational loads decrease, it’s beyond the state-of-the-art available now. The best we can do today is consolidate computational loads on the smallest possible hardware footprint, operate the hardware at peak efficiency (in terms of computations per watt), and shut down unused hardware resources. With these types of efficiency improvements, it’s possible to recover up to half the energy consumed in data centers today.

3. The third wave is software managing the hardware. It uses model-based optimization and control to “adapt” energy use to resource needs.

Adaptive Energy

Over the last few years, PARC has developed a suite of energy management concepts and innovations that we refer to as Adaptive Energy. The Adaptive Energy suite is based on PARC competencies in control, optimization, and model-based planning — many of which we developed to optimize the reliability and adaptability of complex production printing systems for Xerox. The model-based approach requires multidisciplinary expertise because it incorporates software and particularly artificial intelligence reasoning into hardware/physical systems.

We have applied the model-based control and optimization approach in different industries including transportation, factory automation, aerospace, and of course, cleantech.

This first application of the Adaptive Energy suite:

• monitors virtual machines (VMs) in real time;
• optimizes VM resource utilization based on current and forecast demand; and
• works through a hypervisor to consolidate virtual machines on the smallest possible hardware footprint.

The consolidation enables active servers to be run at high loads — and thus at peak efficiency — while allowing unused resources to be shut down to save electricity. Better still, the Adaptive Energy suite allocates server resources based on task priorities, thus ensuring that high-priority tasks (such as sales transactions) satisfy their Quality-of-Service (QoS) requirements at all times.

We recently announced this approach to preventing energy waste in data centers with our commercialization partner for this application, PowerAssure, a developer of power management solutions for data centers. The work is partially funded by a U.S. Department of Energy grant focused on lowering energy use by data centers and telecommunications systems, which was funded by the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act (ARRA) of 2009. The PARC side of the effort is led by Dan Greene.

*[By the way, I borrowed the term "energy vampires" from a song by Peter Hammill (of Van Der Graaf Generator fame)]

The term has been co-opted, though, to mean any form of change that causes a major shift in the status quo. It’s not uncommon, especially when you run in innovation circles, to hear debates about whether a new technology is disruptive or not.

Scott got it right:  “I really don’t care” –

“Disruption is a means to an end. The goal is to build a sizable business with defensible competitive advantage that earns attractive returns. It just so happens that the disruptive innovation models and tools provide a great means to foster the creation of businesses that transform companies and markets, unlocking substantial value….”

Disruptive innovation is about market impact. No business model or new technology is intrinsically disruptive. It’s the application in the market, and the reaction of the consumer, that determines whether something is disruptive or not.

This isn’t meant to be a plug, but I have to say industry crossover is something I enjoy most about PARC. We’re able to help companies discover new opportunities and use similar core technologies across different industries, creating different types of market impact. For example, we’ve used model-based control and optimization in printing systems for Xerox, in designing a new food packaging solution, and in energy management (see our recent news about a partnership with Power Assure regarding data center optimization).

Be sure to read Scott’s HBR article, Why Do We Care about Disruption? It’s short and spot on.

© Scanrail | Dreamstime.com

I’ve been reading many different predictions about the Social Web to see how they relate to our research agenda. Several points in Dion Hichcliffe’s ZDNet piece on emerging technologies to watch for the Social Web in 2010 resonated with what PARC has been doing, and I especially respect his viewpoint because he is focused on making “Enterprise 2.0” a reality for businesses.

Location services

First, Dion pointed out that one problem we have is poor integration between social media and location services:

“…while there’s already some location awareness in social networking services today, there’s a long way to go before it’s integrated meaningfully into the social experience to provide real utility.”

I agree wholeheartedly. A few years ago I participated in a PARC research project called Magitti, an activity recommender that modeled your content interests, schedule, location, and personal history on a mobile device. You can read the full paper here, watch a streaming PARC Forum video here, and/or the read the client case study here.

I too believe the integration of personalization and social features with location-aware services will be a significant trend in 2010. There will be a lot of good research and products in this area.

Aggregation and filtering

Second, Dion observed that people are having difficulties in:

“…coherently engaging in social activity across many channels. Tired of the day-long round-robin between your e-mail, SMS, Twitter, Facebook, and any other services you use to keep up with what’s going on? You’re not the only one. While aggregation services such as Friendfeed potentially cut down on the manual effort of using the social Web, it’s still not mainstream despite being a good example of what’s possible. Notably it’s often the big (and closed) social silos that are causing the problem.”

My research team adopted FriendFeed early on, because we realized that many of the issues relating to social annotation, commenting, and other interactions were due to the distributed nature of social media. It is hard to keep track of who said what, and the aggregate reactions to that content.

We’ve invested some of our team’s efforts towards this problem, which for us relates to aggregation and the ability to browse and filter the feeds. You can read our paper on faceted browsing techniques to partially address this problem here.

Summarization, recommendation, and personalization

Finally, the most important point I believe Dion made was people’s needs in:

“…coping with and getting value from the expanding information volume of social media. We’re all learning how to deal with the firehose of information that flows out of social media on a minute-by-minute basis. Sometimes it’s hard to remember that this flow of transparent and open information is actually good and often useful and creates important conversations. But the simple fact is that much of it isn’t meant for non-stop, instantaneous consumption [emphasis added]; it simply isn’t practical. Rather, social media leaves behind artifacts and information that we can find and use later when we need them. But at the moment the process of sorting through, aggregating, and filtering the vast volume of information cascading through social media today remains a real and growing challenge.”

Our efforts have been focused on understanding how to apply summarization, recommendation, and personalization techniques in social media. [PARC has been working on recommendation for years, beginning with collaborative filtering, as well as personalization (including relevance for online information now part of Google)]. Social media, of course, offers new contexts, user interface and information visualization possibilities, and stream data mining techniques to the problems of online summarization, recommendation, and personalization.

Research-wise, we will be pushing on this effort the most, as I believe it is the area most likely to extract user value. You can read some of our selected papers here: on livestream (Twitter) recommendations and feed winnowing.

My role at PARC (part management consultant, part matchmaker) and encounters with various organizations have given me a unique vantage point into the strategies and common pitfalls of technology scouting functions. I’ve shared here some advice for effective technology scouting, including defining the Why and the What. The followup post will tackle the When, Where, Who, and How.

THE WHY: Why are we doing technology scouting?

This is the first question anyone involved in technology scouting needs to answer. It sounds obvious when I write it here. In reality, though, this is not a straightforward question.

Inconsistent answers to the “why” question are a recipe for frustration

When I asked audience and panel participants at Frost & Sullivan’s Growth, Innovation, & Leadership 2009 why they cared about technology scouting, the diversity of the answers was telling:

• Speed — let’s create new offerings by integrating or adapting technology that has already been used elsewhere
• Aggressive growth objectives — with corporate growth goals too high to achieve through purely organic growth, let’s mine earlier stage technologies that might not yet be on competitors’ radars
• Resource restraints – let’s work with partners to amplify what can be done with limited internal resources such as funding, people, or facilities
• Access to expertise — let’s work with innovation partners to gain access to market or technical expertise not present in the company
• Diversification/ back-up plans for internal programs — let’s treat external technologies as the most viable sources of a Plan B
• Trading cards — let’s buy patents for defensive use
• Freedom to practice — let’s keep out of trouble with non-exclusive rights in intellectual property

Each of the above answers sets different requirements for the technology scouting function. Unfortunately, many scouting organizations are set up with vague mandates such as “not all smart people work for us, so…” and “90+% of research relevant to us is done outside our walls, so…”  These may be useful motivations for adapting open innovation practices, but they don’t help the corporate scouting organization direct their activities.

Lack of organizational alignment

The result of lack of focus is conflicting objectives among technology scouting team members and acquisition functions. For example: picture Bob, a technology scout who is attempting to serve multiple objectives at the same time. He thinks he’s looking to help the company enter new markets, and therefore looks for things outside the domain of current businesses. Bob brings some opportunities in for review, but Amy, the technical leader, thinks she’s evaluating Plan B options for the company’s major technical programs. Her criteria will be almost exactly the opposite of Bob’s.

Next, imagine both Bob and Amy have somehow identified something they want to pursue.  They end up in negotiations with the technology’s inventors. Bob thinks he’s trying to corner a new market, Amy thinks she’s negotiating options for something they may or may not use, and they’re both working with a legal team that thinks the goal is amassing patents to use as trading cards.

Can you see a problem emerging?

THE WHAT: What technologies are we are looking for? What characteristics do they need to have?

Scope is a tricky thing. If a scouting team’s “find”  mandate is too narrow, you’re likely to miss valuable options.  If it’s too broad, you end up exploring too many options that are never going to fly.

Pragmatism wins.

In addition to technical needs, the following factors should define what technology scouts should consider:

1. Organizational capacity to absorb external options

A smart technology scout focuses his or her efforts on the parts of the organization that can best absorb new technologies, based on a combination of timing and individual personality. For example, a business unit in the middle of an aggressive product launch is probably going to be less able to incorporate new technology than a division that is stable and looking to expand.

Because of intrinsic time factors in the technology acquisition process, a technology scout needs to be looking ahead. At the same time, he or she has to be realistic about when an internal team can pick up new options, or even has the bandwidth to consider them. A  few of the more progressive companies I’ve worked with have started incubation functions, often to pilot small projects that integrate internal and external technology. These provide an interim holding tank, so the time matching can be better managed.

Another piece of this is individual personality.  Some people are wired to see opportunity. They look at new ideas and are continually thinking, “What could I do with that?”  Others are wired to be heads-down focused on executing what’s at hand.

At the practical level, this translates into questions like, “How mature does the technology need to be for our company to pursue it?”  Some organizations are better at seeing exploratory concepts and molding them; others are better at taking proven technologies and executing quickly.  There is no right or wrong.  A smart technology scout, though, knows the players and strengths/weaknesses in his or her company and selects opportunities accordingly.

2. Expected time horizon for intended impact of investment

If a scouting organization’s mandate is to “keep a pulse on what’s out there”, the team will need to build a very different network than if they are looking for products to fill gaps in a near-term roadmap. They will invest their time differently.

I have come to believe there are natural fits between sources of technology and the time horizons for impact — each of these comes with a different threshold for investment. Smart technology scouting includes scouting the right sources that are matched to the delivery horizon.

Horizon 1 – specific short-term needs for existing products or near-term launches: The needs can be clearly defined and succinctly communicated. The need is also unlikely to be a primary source of competitive differentiation. Good resources tend to be companies within your existing value chain (suppliers, partners, customers) and intermediaries like NineSigma, Innocentive, and Yet2.com.  I’ve seen a few companies begin to create relationships with companies in “Sister Industries”. These are usually informal channels of communication between key individuals, in organizations that tend to have similar problems but different ways of solving them.  Because technology scouts generally have broad organizational context, they are good people to have as the interface between companies.

Horizon 2–needs for the mid-term horizon, evolving product opportunities: Commercial intent is present, but the shape of the final offering can still be shaped. The field of options can be wider. You’re less likely to find an existing technology that’s an exact match, so an investment in co-development may be necessary. The solution may, itself, provide a source of competitive advantage.  This is an area where PARC has proven valuable, having developed an arsenal of technology and bringing experience in migrating technologies between industries. National labs are another alternative. Partnerships with start-ups can sometimes provide opportunities to address these needs, but the scouting company’s needs can’t become a diversion from the start-up’s primary revenue track.

Horizon 3–exploration: The charter here is simply to ”keep a pulse” on what’s possible. Universities and pre-competitive consortia are among the most popular resources.

The technical needs

The most obvious aspect of defining what you’re scouting for is technology needs, which vary depending on what horizon the scouting organization is focused on. Fortunately, every scouting organization I’ve worked with has some methodology for identifying needs, though they are varied in how they prioritize. Three common approaches:

• Go out to all the different groups of the business and ask what they need. I’m not a fan of this approach, as it tends to generate lists of many small, non-strategic needs and has a lower success rate.
• Use broad corporate strategy.  In theory, corporate strategy should be a better starting point than the individualized needs of technical leaders. In practice, strategy is often too amorphous to be useful to a technology scout.
• Use strategic product roadmaps. This is where rubber meets the road. I’ve come to believe this is the most effective approach. Internal teams know what they are committed to developing themselves and what they are willing to depend on partners for. Companies and scouting organizations that start from their roadmaps are usually better at engaging partners in how the pieces of a puzzle can come together.

The best opportunities are created when internal and external parties are willing to have candid discussions about what they are trying to accomplish and what each party believes they can contribute. This degree of openness does not come easily for many companies, but I believe it’s an essential factor when dealing in emerging technologies. [See my earlier post on "Opening communication for open innovation: Should you share your strategy?"]

I’ll follow up soon with the popular “Want/Find/Get/Manage” model for technology acquisition, including how to acquire the appropriate rights and manage the technology once acquired…

Then: a face without a brain

In the early days the Web felt like a face without a brain. It quickly became a pretty face with colors and fancy images, but it still didn’t have much common sense. That was fine if you just wanted to view some information, assuming you could figure out what links to click on. But interacting was painful. In a typical session you might fill out a form, not quite sure you were answering correctly or which fields were required. Then you’d submit the form and wait. Eventually you’d find out that you were supposed to enter the date with dashes (1-19-10) instead of slashes (1/19/10). Or the form would choke because you’d entered a space before your address, but it would just say your entry was “invalid.” You’d futz around trying to guess the problems and submit again. Then wait. After a few tries you might get to move on to the next confusing stage, or you might just give up in frustration.

This was a big step backward from installed or desktop applications, which didn’t have to send requests to a server and wait for a response. When you entered a calculation or changed the text size, you saw the results immediately. When you filled out a form, a desktop app might immediately convert the date format for you. It might even change subsequent options based on your earlier input, all before you submitted the form. Although there was plenty of room for improvement, these applications at least gave you the feeling that someone was behind the curtain.

Now: the unobtrusive and helpful butler

Over the years the Web has slowly improved, but over the past year or so, I’ve noticed a marked difference. It’s starting to feel like there’s a thoughtful intelligence behind many of the websites I use, one that understands what I’m trying to do and offers just the right options or information at just the right moment.

I’ve talked in the past about how technology should behave like a butler, quietly supporting users’ tasks and anticipating their needs without complaining or getting in their faces. Happily, I’m starting to feel like there are more butler-like websites today.

The butler who helps you log in

Let me start with a basic example most of us have experienced. Most websites that require you to log in offer a “Forgot your password?” link, conveniently located right where you enter your information. You don’t have to go to the customer service page and search around to find the entry for that problem. You just click and follow the instructions. (Some do a better job than others at helping you recover from the problem, but at least it’s easy to get started.) A related example is Google’s suggestion of spelling corrections when you mistype a search term: “Did you mean…?” It’s usually just what you meant.

In a subtler example, Firefox helps you remember your login information as you return to websites. It used to be that when you entered your name and password into a website, Firefox interrupted to ask if you wanted it to remember your login information for the next time — thoughtful, except that it asked before you found out if you got into the site. So if you entered the wrong login information, Firefox would faithfully fill it in every time you returned to that site. Since then, Firefox has improved this interaction. It now inserts a strip along the top of the page that persists as you go through the login process, allowing you to wait until you get in before telling Firefox to remember your information. Now that’s a helpful butler.

The butler who supports information seeking

Firefox also acts like a butler in helping you return to websites you’ve previously visited. Most Web browsers automatically complete a Web address once you start typing it. That’s handy. But Firefox takes it further and doesn’t require you to start with the beginning of the address but instead matches any part of it. The other day I wanted to look up the hours of the Saratoga library (whose website I’ve visited before). All I did was type “sar” and it offered “www.santaclaracountylib.org/saratoga” as its first suggestion. Why yes, that’s right, thank you!

The Safari and Chrome browsers do something similar in a visual way: When you open a new tab they show you thumbnail images of the websites you’ve recently visited. If you want to go to one of those, you can get there in one click. (On the other hand, Safari seemed pretty dumb when I entered “sar” to return to the Saratoga library site. It sat there waiting for more input, cursor blinking stupidly.)

Besides such improvements to Web browsers, many websites are becoming similarly helpful. The American Airlines website, like many travel websites, is smart about text entry. It lets you indicate your destination with either the name of an airport (Dallas) or the airport code (DFW) — just as you might use either when speaking to a person. Better yet, it disambiguates between airports in the same city by showing you, as you type, both the name and the code of any matches. For example, if you enter Dall, it shows both “DFW – Dallas Forth Worth International, TX” and “DAL – Dallas Love Field, TX.” It used to be that you’d have to interrupt your flow to go to an airport lookup page and then come back to enter the code.

Some other examples of simple but helpful interaction improvements:

• Google completes your text with possible searches, which is not just a time saver. Sometimes I’ve found that it offers me useful search terms that I wouldn’t have thought of. Other times, it’s just reassuring to see that my query is reasonable.



• Hulu takes text completion one step further by offering likely options for that search term. When I entered the name of a TV show into the search box, it offered two options: “go to show page” or “watch latest episode.” This showed a refreshing understanding of what people do on the site and a willingness to support that task — in one click I was watching the episode I’d missed.
• Many ad-supported video sites indicate how many seconds until the video  begins — much like a responsive waiter letting you know your food will be out in just another minute. How considerate.

The butler who really understands the task

Web technology has advanced to the point that Web applications can be as interactive as desktop apps, no longer having to wait for responses from a server. I recently created a photo book using Snapfish’s web application, and it allowed me to drag and drop my photos onto pages, smoothly rearrange page layouts, change background colors, insert pages, and so on, all with smooth animations that made it easy to understand what was changing. It’s an impressive application, partly because it provides the real-time responsiveness typical of desktop applications inside a Web browser, but more because it presented the right options just as I needed them, and it interpreted my actions appropriately. An example that particularly pleased me was when I dragged a fifth photo onto a four-photo page layout and it automatically changed the page to a five-photo layout — no complaints that I must first switch to a five-photo layout and then add the photo again.

Just as impressive to me are websites that don’t use a lot of animation but still truly support the user’s task. I have admired the Hawaiian Airlines website, whose design reflects the understanding that choosing flights depends on many interdependent factors, such as price, date, time, airport, seat availability, and number of connections. It does an impressive job of showing you the relevant information in a compact display, and especially of letting you change one variable to see how it affects the others. For example, once you enter your dates (which you can easily select from a calendar without figuring out the required format), the website shows not just the fares for that date, but also the cheapest fares for the three dates before and after it. With one click, you can shift your departure date and see the flights available.

Another way the website feels more like a human butler is that it doesn’t make you start over every time you want to change an option.

• When you initially enter your destination, it shows other nearby airports and asks if you’d like to see results from them as well. If you don’t notice this option, you can always add it to your results later without changing context.
• It lets you see a map of the area with the airports noted in a popup overlaid on the page.
• As you make your choices, a receipt of sorts builds up on the left side so you can see your flight info and the price so far, all in place.
• You can even log in at any point and you’ll return right back to the page with your current flight choices, this time with any member discounts applied.

How nice it is to feel like there’s a helpful intelligence guiding you as you make your reservation rather than a rigid robot forcing you to follow its sequential process. (If only the airlines treated us so well once we’re traveling.)

[UPDATE: Hawaiian Airlines recently updated its website to add more animation and make it more visually appealing, but in doing so it hid some of the key functions that let you easily change your flight criteria. The airline also added some marketing material that keeps flashing as you move your cursor around. So the website is now more dynamic but less usable, proving that good interaction design is not about using cool features but about supporting the user's task.]

But what about desktop applications?

It seemed that while the Web world was going through infancy, the world of desktop applications was stuck in adolescence. But now, as if urged by the Web’s level of interactivity, desktop apps are starting to become more responsive as well.

A good example comes from the latest version of Lightroom, Adobe’s photo management tool. For many years, Photoshop has offered a “healing brush” that allows you to blend the texture from one part of an image with the colors of another, useful for removing pimples from a face, for instance. But it was always tricky to choose which part of the image to use as the source for cleaning up the blemish. You had to choose a spot and blend it to see how it came out, repeatedly “undoing” until it looked right. Now Lightroom helps you see what you’re doing and adjust on the fly: when you choose the source, you see a preview of the blended pixels as you move your cursor around even before you click. Once you do click, you can move the source location to adjust the blend after-the-fact.

Again, it feels like the software understands your task and supports it gracefully.

The thing about butlers is that the more effective they are, the less likely you are to notice them. So it’s worth taking a moment to appreciate that many websites have evolved from frustratingly rigid to pleasantly cooperative, sometimes delightfully so. It might have taken us a long time to get here, but I look forward to seeing, over the next 15 years, how our software butlers learn to support and anticipate our activities in more sophisticated ways.

Workshop themes

Specifically, the workshop addressed three major themes:

1. How to integrate theory across levels from the individual to the community.
2. How to develop new methods of measuring social connections and social capital across networks.
3. How to build an infrastructure to collect data reliably and responsibly.

The primary goal of the workshop has been to produce reports on these three topics — now available on the public TMSP wiki. The reports address participants’ government, academic, and education recommendations, and implications for each of the topics.

Motivations and timing

Amy Bruckman of Georgia Tech reminded us of the need for such a cross-cutting initiative, commenting that “Right now it’s harder than it should be for academia and industry to work together. I think that’s a key place where a government-funded initiative can help — making it easier to form industry-academia collaborations.” Ben Shneiderman enthused that the workshop was a “remarkable gathering of leading academic and industry researchers and that it served as a big step forward in realizing the goals set out in my letter in AAAS Science (13 March 2009).”

Preece (serving as the Principal Investigator for the NSF grant supporting the workshop) spoke to the timeliness of this effort, observing that “A few people have been investigating this topic since the 1990’s, but now that billions of people worldwide are using Web 2.0 social media, such as Facebook, wikis, blogs, microblogs, and discussion forums, substantially increased research is needed to understand the benefits and dangers.” Throughout the workshop, one theme that emerged was how a more thorough understanding of social participation could affect users at all levels of participation in a variety of domains; Preece noted, “If community managers knew how to increase participation, then this technology could be more successful for patient support, citizen science contributions, and changing behaviors for energy conservation.”

PARC Forum and audience participation

The workshop also featured a special PARC Forum panel discussion on the Future of Technology-Mediated Social Participation, which discussed patterns of attention in social media, the potential of peer-produced content, and leveraging social network data to model and understand behavior. Bruckman (who served as a panelist along with Shneiderman, HP Labs’ Bernardo Huberman, and Facebook’s Cameron Marlow) shared, “Aside from joking about avocados and bison…I do think the panel opened some questions that fed into the discussion we had the next day,” highlighting the impact that public participation can have on driving this initiative.

How can you get involved?

For those interested in helping to support this initiative — or curious about technology and social systems — the final reports will provide a glimpse into the ongoing discussion. In addition, the TMSP website also features a growing list of relevant resources, such as books, courses, and research groups (compiled, in part, by U. Maryland graduate student Dana Rotman, who has been instrumental in the planning and execution of these workshops).

What’s next?

Shneiderman hopes the effort will “catalyze the research community and encourage the U.S. National Science Foundation to dramatically increase its support for Technology-Mediated Social Participation, which is aligned with national priorities such as healthcare, energy conservation, disaster response, community safety, and more.”

The next event, the East Coast Workshop, will take place 11-12 February in Virginia (more information will be available at the TMSP East Coast Workshop website.)

And, we welcome you to read the reports, watch the Forum, and add your insights!

© Gines Valera Marin | Dreamstime.com

You can’t avoid the cloud computing topic these days. The latest is that the City of Los Angeles decided to switch its email to Google.

As with many buzzed-about topics, the extreme viewpoints are the most visible:

• Cloud computing is either “worse than stupidity: it’s a marketing hype campaign” (Richard Stallman), or, “likely to have the same impact on software that foundries have had on the hardware industry” (UC Berkeley RAD Lab).
• If you turn to the security experts, it’s either “nothing new” (Bruce Schneier), or, a “focal point in our work” (Ron Rivest).

By the way, if you haven’t heard Larry Ellison’s famous rant on this topic, it’s worth a listen:  http://www.youtube.com/v/0FacYAI6DY0.

Security as the biggest concern?

While there’s some truth in each viewpoint, it’s a little hard to untangle what’s really going on. An oft-quoted survey from IDC reports security is the biggest concern with cloud computing. As a security technologist, I care most about the security and privacy aspects of cloud computing, and “security” in the IDC survey may have meant different things to different people. So we tried to dig a little deeper.

We did our own series of interviews (in early 2009) with different members of the cloud ecosystem, and asked them to identify the security/privacy issues and the concerns of their customers.

The key findings:

• The major worry:  loss of control of data in the cloud.  The fact that a third party now controls the data introduces new concerns, such as legal and audit.
• Larger enterprises are still cautious about the cloud. They’re not putting their most sensitive information in the cloud, such as customer SSNs, but they are willing to put confidential yet less sensitive information such as product launch spreadsheets.
• There’s a lot of uncertainty as to what the regulatory and security issues are going to be with cloud computing. It’s still considered the early days of cloud computing.

Security issues with the cloud

Many of the security issues people talk about aren’t really “new”, but have become more acute with the advent of cloud computing.

VM-Level attacks.  These are potential vulnerabilities in the hypervisor or VMM.  It’s a problem as old as virtualization, and yet clearly a bigger problem in the multi-tenant architectures common in clouds.  Vulnerabilities have appeared in VMware, Xen, and Microsoft’s Virtual PC and Virtual Server.  An interesting recent paper (“Hey, you, get off my cloud”) illustrates the potential problems of multiple VM tenancy in an Amazon EC2 environment.  One solution for the cloud user is to simply rent the whole physical machine, eliminating threats from other tenants.

Cloud application vulnerabilities. Fundamentally, there are similar vulnerabilities for any web application, but the architecture might be different and might require you to trust some cloud infrastructure.  For instance, you may be building an app on top of a cloud platform, and that platform may have vulnerabilities which you may not understand and over which you don’t have much control.

Cloud provider attacks. How much do you really trust the cloud provider?  Corporate users who keep proprietary information in the cloud run the risk of the cloud provider peeking at their data. And, the cloud provider is an attractive new attack target for phishers. For example:

“We learned that a salesforce.com employee had been the victim of a phishing scam that allowed a salesforce.com customer contact list to be copied. To be clear, a phisher tricked someone into disclosing a password, but this intrusion did not stem from a security flaw in our application or database. Information in the contact list included first and last names, company names, email addresses, telephone numbers of salesforce.com customers…” (Washington Post)

More network surface area for an attack. Network security becomes more complex because enterprises need to protect the infrastructure used to connect and interact with the cloud (including their authentication and authorization framework). The cloud is outside the firewall in many cases. It’s even possible for the cloud to attack you.

Other concerns with the cloud

Audit. The paradox is that clouds relieve responsibility for operations, yet auditing requires transparency in operations.  As Neil Roiter asks, “How do you perform an on-site audit when you have a distributed and dynamic multi-tenant computing environment spread all over the globe?” There are multiple standards (SAS 70, SOX, HIPAA, FISMA, NIST, FIPS), but none were written for the cloud — an uncertainty hanging over the industry.

Legal. Cloud users are now dealing with a third party, so need to spell out SLAs and responsibilities. Of course, it’s hard to put everything in a contract, and with such a young industry it’s even more difficult to determine what needs to go in.

By the way, the contractual obligations might be surprising.  Here’s a passage from http://aws.amazon.com/agreement:

“10.4. Non-Assertion. During and after the term of the Agreement, with respect to any of the Services that you elect to use, you will not assert, nor will you authorize, assist, or encourage any third party to assert, against us or any of our customers, end users, vendors, business partners (including third party sellers on websites operated by or on behalf of us), licensors, sublicensees or transferees, any patent infringement or other intellectual property infringement claim with respect to such Services.”

Cloud security means new techniques, and opportunities

Cheap data and analysis. Cloud computing yields enormous data sets monetized by things like advertising. Companies holding the data are under intense pressure to anonymize their data, and fear bad publicity or subpoenas from data breaches. But anonymizing data and retaining utility is difficult.  See the 33Bits of Entropy blog dedicated to the topic.

Increased demand for authentication. If cloud computing takes off, personal, financial, and medical data will be hosted in the cloud.  Software applications hosted in the cloud will require usable and secure access control, both for consumers and enterprises. We’ll need higher-assurance authentication techniques outside the firewall, including semi-automated authentication from mobile devices.

For more on cloud computing security problems and opportunities, download our paper on “Controlling data in the cloud: outsourcing computation without outsourcing control”.

Related news: on “other ways that clouds could help provide security” in Technology Review November 2009

Enterprise competitiveness can often depend on the efficiency with which important news travels to the right people at the right time — especially in today’s knowledge economy. Knowledge workers now depend heavily on communication channels both outside and inside the enterprise to keep abreast of the most important information: the latest news on competitors, status of business proposals, progress of workflows, and more.

Impact of news

The efficiency of news spread in an organization determines not just how the organization might absorb and make sense of the information, but also how it might decide to respond and react.

For example, one study [IDC multimedia whitepaper] showed that one piece of email may create a 30x organizational footprint. A large body of literature surrounds the issue of news flow in organizations, including information seeking, organizational memory, and expertise location. Sociological research shows that there is greater homogeneity of information within groups of people than between groups of people [see for example Ronald Burt on structural holes (pdf)].

News is about the communication of current events, where “timeliness” of the information is key — but might not necessarily be limited to just up-to-the-minute, “breaking” news. For example, one interviewee in one of our studies recently said: “It’s about the leading edge of something. Staying current in a professional sense, I go through bouts of finding information. And I share it”. In the organization, this constitutes keeping up with information for knowing-what-is-happening and knowing-how-to-do-things.

How can organizations better respond to the complex social and technical situation involved in staying current in their areas of business? With respect to news at work, what roles, tools, and practices might we expect in the brokering of news? We recently conducted a small interview study within PARC, which  is a medium-size organization with intense collaboration. Many employees use project wikis that show brief but intense activity and then lapse into occasional use. Internal blogs receive infrequent use for general information sharing on topics of wide interest, and while microblogging was tried early it did not persist.

How news moves

People rely on the communication channels most commonly used at work, such as email and face-to-face. News not only travels along social networks in the organization, but also there is a strong effort in passing along news that known to be relevant (though people are conservative in their choices). Moreover, people tune their social network to ensure they receive news appropriate/relevant to them.

Email is indeed the channel and medium of choice for news

[See also my colleagues' work on Email as Habitat:  An exploration of embedded personal information management.]

The figure below shows the frequency with which various ways of passing news back and forth are mentioned in the interview study. Although we find that news arrives and is diffused by many channels, with different levels of timeliness and audience, the primary means of communication is email (either directly or via company mailing lists) and face-to-face conversations in offices, hallways, and at lunch.

News follows peoples’ social/work networks, and there is a strong effort to pass along only news seen as relevant to others

People filter news streams for their peers as a part of their ongoing conversations at work. The filtering includes quality assessments, time investment appropriate for relaying the news, uniqueness of the news:

“I have to read it [news-related email] to find out if it is unique enough. I do try to filter if it is worth forwarding. There is a huge quality assessment thing, because I would hate clogging peoples’ streams. I would probably send it to people who are actually engaged in a conversation of this type. Theoretically I could send it to someone at [company] but I don’t have that kind of relationship, and there are political implications of doing that. So I avoid that”.

People structure their news networks to get news conveyed in short paths of only the “necessary but sufficient’” recipients.

They do this by structuring the channel so that it produces quality news, finding ways to avoid unnecessary communication, or setting up shortest paths.

For example, a on who to follow on Twitter:

“I went through [lots of] phases. Imagine a spiral. I could overhear conversations and pick up derivative connections. Then it got to be a little overwhelming so I went and winnowed those down… and again. The people you follow dictate the information you get. And there were three factors. One is how informative or interesting they were to my interests. The second one was how frequently they updated. If they updated 50 times a day I couldn’t keep up with that. And the third reason is strategically, who I want to build a relationship with”.

Designing for moving news

Here are some of the design implications/requirements, taken from the findings above,  for systems aimed at propagating enterprise news:

1. Integrate into the email habitat to maximize chances of adoption.
2. Facilitate putting news receivers in control. While email has its advantages, it is in some sense a sender-controlled system.
3. Enable targeting to continue but increase the chance of serendipitous but relevant connections in a way that keeps the social paths for news short and efficient.
4. Enhance the ability to target news to others without further overloading email.
5. Allow the emergence of shared interest spaces.

Over the past few years I’ve felt that something really powerful was happening in the interstices between what was going on in the digital world and what was going on in the sciences – especially the social/behavioral and computer sciences.

The Web was becoming increasingly social with millions of people participating in huge online communities and movements: everything from World of Warcraft to Wikipedia to presidential campaigns. Not only that, but research scientists themselves seemed to be getting more “social”: computer scientists were collaborating with social scientists and psychologists to understand massive networks of human-to-human interactions, and psychologists were getting together with economists to study the “social mind” as opposed to the “isolated rational mind.” Suddenly, there’s a whole set of new phenomena that we’ve just never seen or understood before.

Much of this has to do with the fact that really massive amounts of finely grained data about human online behavior provide an un-mined goldmine for scientists, and they now have the data-mining and network science tools to start digging.

Harnessing this psychological and social machinery

Social mechanics and dynamics are involved in everything from spreading happiness and obesity to generating new innovations. New kinds of network-based technologies can be used to harness this psychological and social machinery in radically new and more effective ways (e.g., the Iowa Electronic Markets; reCaptcha).

Who would have thought that simple architectures for participation (e.g., Wikipedia, SourceForge, InnoCentive) could rival the scale of results previously achieved only by massive private or public works projects? Unfortunately, we’ve got some really big problems: global warming, the economy, terrorism, war, polarization, incivility, a loss of “community” – to name just a few. Maybe the insights and technologies around those new social-computational architectures can be harnessed in ways that address some of these big problems? Perhaps new citizen science communities to accelerate evidence-based medicine to promote health and save money, or innovation networks to discover new climate solutions?

Most social technology efforts fail

While we can get excited about the possibilities, we also have to be realistic. For every utopian outcome one can imagine, there are real-world undercurrents that need to be considered – just think of the diverse stakeholders and agendas of those in medicine or climate change. Furthermore, only a minuscule percentage of the population actively contributes to even the most successful systems. Most social technology efforts fail: for every Wikipedia, there are thousands of dead or dying wikis.

The truth of the matter is that we really understand very little about how or why new social-computational systems work.

Towards a science of technology-mediated social participation

I believe we need to develop a deeper science and education about technology-mediated social participation. It needs to promote:

1. new theories that are rich and encompassing enough to provide practical guidance on how to design an online community;
2. new examples of socio-technical architectures that harness more people in complex, engaging, and productive ways; and
3. new methods and infrastructures to promote the study of online interaction, while protecting people and stakeholders.

There’s a whole thorny set of issues and opportunities within each of these topics.

This week’s Workshop on Technology-Mediated Social Participation at PARC will bring together approximately 30 researchers from industry, academia, and government. A second workshop will be hosted on the East Coast in February by the University of Maryland. The goal of these workshops is 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. If there is one thing that I have learned from the new studies and models it is that better ideas and solutions come to those who are connected to others with diverse ideas and viewpoints. We see further when we stand on the shoulders of others.

• Spotlights: Printed electronics opportunity & challenge; on keeping U.S. innovation competitive [share your comments]
• On the Road: Printed electronics, flexible electronics
• People: PARC scientist awarded AIP Prize for Industrial Applications of Physics
• Featured: PARC Forum on Stretchable Electronics [watch online]
• PARC In the News: Volunteers log off Wikipedia; PARC overflowing with new ideas; what your phone might do for you two years from now; more…

Spotlights: Printed electronics opportunity & challenge; on keeping U.S. innovation competitive

A $300 billion industry is in the making. Raghu Das, CEO of analyst firm IDTechEx (and the first guest contributor to PARC’s blog), argues that the “printed electronics” industry will eventually become far larger than the semiconductor industry today. By offering such advantages as new form factors, lower cost, and large area electronics, printed electronics have already made available devices such as batteries, photovoltaics, transistors, new display technologies, sensors, printed conductors, and more. But these are enabling technologies — not products. How can we create new markets and novel designs for products that users need? More…

PARC today is no longer “Xerox PARC” but a commercial entity with multiple Fortune 500 and other clients. We’re building our contemporary innovation model by positioning ourselves at the heart of industrial R&D, government contracts, and world-class university research. (For us, the last one is translated as bringing together the top minds from diverse fields: our talent is our primary asset.) To support the next waves of innovation, we need to examine how the rest of the U.S. and world will replicate Silicon Valley – with its access to top talent, multicultural citizens, venture infrastructure and corporate partners, universities, and inexhaustible energy. But here’s the thing: two-thirds of our commercial income comes from abroad. Asia, in particular, is aggressively probing for new engines of innovation. Share your comments…

On the Road: Printed electronics, flexible electronics

Covering printed electronics applications, technologies, and opportunities, the 6th annual Printed Electronics USA conference and trade show (this week December 1-4 in San Jose, California) is the world’s largest event on the topic. PARC will be presenting on materials characterization and optimization; application development from designing circuits to fabricating proof of concept; and full system prototyping that integrates printed electronics, conventional thin film components, and/or standard silicon circuitry. Visit Booth 12 from December 2-3 and/or attend our presentation on “Jet-Printing: From Drops to Electronic Devices” on December 3. To schedule an appointment or request a discount registration code, please contact peusa09@parc.com. More…

The 9th annual Flexible Electronics and Displays Conference and Exhibition (February 1-4 in Phoenix, Arizona) brings together key players in industry, startups, R&D organizations, and academic institutions – “the ideal milieu” for moving flexible electronics to the next level. PARC CEO Mark Bernstein will kick off the business and technical conference on February 2 with a keynote on flexible electronics as a strategic technology and PARC’s innovation model today. More…

People: PARC scientist awarded The Prize for Industrial Applications of Physics

The American Institute of Physics awarded the 2010 Prize for Industrial Applications of Physics “for developing proven technologies” to PARC’s Robert Street, “inventor of digital x-ray detector”. His pioneering work at PARC in the early 1990s led to the development of flat-panel digital x-ray detectors, a commercially available technology that replaced traditional film x-ray machines for many medical applications. Bob’s current research explores novel low-cost and large-area electronics for applications ranging from new flat panel displays to radiation sensors. Projects he has been involved with in recent years include ink-jet printing of organic electronic devices, constructing flexible electronic displays, developing technology for truck-size scanners for homeland security, and researching new solar cell structures. More…

Featured: PARC Forum on Stretchable Electronics

Electronic systems that involve transistors and other components on thin plastic or rubber substrates offer mechanical properties (e.g., bendability) and other features (e.g., lightweight) that cannot be achieved with conventional technologies. Examples of new device possibilities include electronic eyeball cameras and personal health monitors, where the electronics must conform to curved surfaces and stretch during use. Presented by John A. Rogers of the University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign, this PARC Forum talk describes the use of nanomaterials in integrated circuits that offer the electronic performance of state-of-the-art wafer-based devices but with the mechanical properties of a rubber band. The talk explains the remarkably simple materials science and physics of these approaches, as well as aspects of their use in various electronic systems. Watch online…

PARC In the News:

Volunteers Log Off as Wikipedia Ages – Wall Street Journal
PARC overflowing with new ideas – BBC News
What Your Phone Might Do for You Two Years From Now – New York Times
Algae Company #60 Takes Design Cues From… – Greentech Media
Printed electronics needs new design rules – Printed Electronics World
Stanford-led research helps overcome barrier for organic electronics – Stanford News
Palo Alto gets green recognition – Stanford Daily

The opportunity

Why printed electronics? They can:

• be made over large areas — think billboard-sized displays;
• offer new form factors — think flexible, rollable, invisible electronics;
• cost less than conventional electronics — thanks to lower cost materials and manufacturing; and
• offer improved performance over conventional electronics in some areas.

Over the last decade, chemical and ink companies (which ultimately may have the most to gain in this new industry) have been developing inks for semiconductors, conductors, dielectrics, light emitting materials, and other components to be even longer lasting, more reliable, and suitable for cheap substrates such as polyester film and paper, which require lower processing temperatures. Printing companies and equipment providers have responded by developed suitable processes and printing technologies for these materials.

Now there are many exciting possibilities thanks to an array of available devices: batteries, photovoltaics, transistors, new display technologies, sensors, printed conductors, and more.

The challenge

However, batteries, transistors, and sensors are enabling technologies — not products. Of 500 IDTechEx-tracked organizations (50% universities & research institutes, 50% corporations) developing printed or organic transistors, the combined commercial revenue of products using these transistors is…zero. (Although that’s changing this year).

While it’s tempting for those in printed electronics to try to displace conventional electronics, printed electronics usually offers only a marginal improvement in performance or cost. And while printed electronics will eventually displace some conventional electronics, it will take time and money to gain scale.

The need for new markets and creative design

The key may be to create new markets rather than try and replace something already there. For example, printed battery testers have been the early successes of printed electronics: about 1 billion of these simple electrical devices are printed yearly for e-readers and cosmetic skin patches that enable faster absorption of ointment. All have created new markets.

Perhaps the nature of printed transistors is not to follow Moore’s law initially, but to work out how a dozen or fewer transistors can be applied in different ways, volumes, and prices not possible before. Where printed transistors do mimic the silicon chip is the need for modularity. The industry needs basic circuit functions such as electronics that detect presence,  provide timing functionality, change an indicator, provide a changing message, and so on — all of these can be applied on their own or combined for applications in diverse industries.

But few understand how these different materials can be co-deposited on the same substrate. There are few companies building products that address specific end-user needs better met through printed electronics. However, the technology has caught the attention of consumer goods, healthcare, media, consumer electronics, advertising, and many other companies that may not have traditionally been thought of as electronic/electrical users. It’s now time to address the opportunity.

Find out more

• Attend the IDTechEx Printed Electronics USA conference and tradeshow at the San Jose Convention Center in California from December 2-3 2009. The printed electronics industry’s largest gathering, presenters come from companies totalling more than $400 billion of revenue. Issues from applications to technology will be discussed, and Procter & Gamble, the world’s largest consumer packaged goods company, will be delivering the opening keynote.
• Read Printed Electronics World, the IDTechEx free journal on this topic, online.