I am a research scientist, inventor, and innovator.
@ PARC (formerly Xerox Parc. Now SRI)
My research has followed my passions for creativity and impact. It has ranged from design of computer languages, knowledge representation, expert systems, collaboration technology, sensemaking systems, digital rights management, user interfaces, personalized news systems, smarter cities and collaborative analysis, and most recently explainable artificial intelligence and bootstrapping of multi-model collaborative systems.
I enjoy working with teams and creative people with purpose. The photo on the right from around 2015 is from the “design lab” that we created to better support creative working meetings. The use of a “stand up table” and multiple large displays was intended to support the high energy conversations that we needed and enjoyed. These were BYOC (Bring Your Own Computer) meetings — and the room was set up so that anyone could easily shoot their display to the wall where everyone could see it.
(This idea of a shared computational whiteboard goes back to our early Colab project and a paper “Towards Portable Meetings” I wrote back in the day with John Seely Brown. Of course, since 2020 and remote meetings, many people are familiar with shared screens and remote meetings. I believe that there still enormous unexplored white space in improving how we collaborate with machines that intermediate our interactions and with AIs as partners.)
With colleagues, I developed technology for several PARC spin-outs, most notably ContentGuard/Pendrell. I contributed in lesser degrees to Liveworks, UpperCase, and Inxight. This work has led to building systems, writing papers, and creating a large growing portfolio of patents. My research and patents have led to hundreds of millions dollars in business for Xerox.
I have taken multiple tours of duty at PARC in research management — managing the Information Sciences and Technology Lab for four years. I led research areas at PARC five times in areas starting with knowledge and collaboration technology, computer security, sensemaking technology, technology for agile organizations, and most recently human machine collaboration.
Invention and Innovation
For innovation projects, I like design thinking, lean start-up methods, and agile approaches in innovation. The figure on the right is partly from Nordstrom Innovation Labs. It shows the flow of activities and philosophy that we have used on projects.
I like to use a 3-legged stool as a metaphor for understanding the major project success factors of user desirability, business viability, and technical feasibility. Miss any of these and a project will fail.
I have a gift for identifying the core of a problem to discern bottlenecks and opportunities for invention and innovation.