Palo Alto Research Center Research Articles

Machinery for managers: secretaries, psychologists, and ‘human–computer interaction’, 1973–1983

AbstractThis article characterizes early research in the field of ‘human–computer interaction’ (HCI) by analysing the first decade of ‘user psychology’ research at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). PARC's Applied Information-Processing Psychology Project (AIP) provided an initial theoretical foundation for HCI in the early 1980s. Like researchers in artificial intelligence (AI), researchers at AIP drew from information-processing psychology. However, AIP researchers argued that their focus on human behaviour distinguished their research from AI and other fields allied with computer science. Previous scholarship has shown that United States computer engineers became concerned with ‘users’ as they sought to commercialize military-funded developments in interactive computing. This paper argues that the decision made by upper management in computerizing workplaces to shift some text production work from clerical workers to middle managers during the 1970s and 1980s led AIP to perceive ambiguities around gender and technical skill. This shaped the initial theoretical foundations that the research group offered to HCI – especially the group's conception of the ‘user’. Computer designers went from presenting word-processing programs as clerical machines for women workers to presenting them as tools for masculine thinking. AIP's research diverged from industrial engineering and AI in response to this transformation.

Obituary: Martin Kay

Obituary: Martin Kay

Conversation with Francesco Antinucci about cognitive science and aesthetic perception

Francesco Antinucci has been Research Director of the Cognitive Sciences and Technologies Institute of the Italian National Research Council (CNR). He has developed part of his researches in the United States, at the Department of Psychology of the University of California at Berkley, at the School of Information Studies of the same university, and at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) by Xerox. He has worked with new technologies from their earliest stages, developing several multimedia and virtual reality applications.

Publishing a Computer Graphics Book With Prototype Desktop Publishing Tools

The first major computer graphics text, Principles of Interactive Computer Graphics,1 was inspired by a course, a research project, and a set of notes, all by Ivan Sutherland. In 1971, William Newman invited me to join forces to supplement his partial book draft with notes I had been writing. The book, which appeared in 1973, was received well, exceeding the sales projections of its publisher, McGraw-Hill. Between 1973 and 1977, William and I were research staff at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) working on tools for an “office of the future,” focusing especially on interactive graphics and raster printing. We realized that raster displays and printers would soon dominate and would require mastering new techniques and adapting old ones. The second edition of our book, a complete rewrite, introduced some of the new technologies. This note is a story of the writing of the two editions of the book and it is also a story about how the editions were published in the era before commercial desktop publishing systems. In both the cases, we exploited and adapted computer tools of the time to do much of the publishing ourselves. For the second edition, we chose to use the illustration and printing tools we had developed at PARC to produce camera-ready copy. Especially significant was the use of the Press file format, an early page description language, to combine onto each page the various separate components prepared by different composition tools.

The Xerox Alto Publishing Platform

Starting in 1973, researchers at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) built the first networked workstation platform (Alto and Ethernet) and a suite of applications and services to explore office automation. Separate interactive tools allowed people to create and edit different sorts of document content, which were then merged onto pages using Press files, a page description file format.

The Pransky interview: Dr Steve Cousins, CEO, Savioke, Entrepreneur and Innovator

Purpose – The following paper is a “Q & A interview” conducted by Joanne Pransky of Industrial Robot Journal as a method to impart the combined technological, business and personal experience of a prominent, robotic industry engineer-turned successful business leader, regarding the commercialization and challenges of bringing technological inventions to market while overseeing a company. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach – The interviewee is Dr Steve Cousins, a seasoned executive, entrepreneur and innovator with a strong track record for managing research and development organizations and realizing a significant return on investment. Dr Cousins has dedicated the past near-decade of his life to the mission of building and deploying personal and service robotic technology to assist people. In this interview, Dr Cousins discusses some of the technical and business insights that have led to his most recent robotic advancements as Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Savioke, a company that is creating autonomous robot helpers for the services industry. Findings – Dr Cousins received his BS and MS degrees in computer science from Washington University, and holds a PhD in computer science from Stanford University. Dr Cousins managed the Advanced Systems Development Laboratory at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) and then went on to lead the IBM Almaden Research Center, one of the top human–computer interaction research groups in the world, as the Senior Manager of the User-Focused Systems Research Group. While at IBM, Dr Cousins earned a micro-MBA. Originality/value – Dr Cousins is spearheading a new business model for robotics, Robots as a Service (RaaS), with Savioke’s flagship mobile robot, Relay. Based on the information technology industry service trend of improving customer experiences, Savioke is successfully applying RaaS to the hospitality industry with about 10 Relays at half a dozen US major hotels. Before founding Savioke, Dr Cousins was the President and CEO of Willow Garage, where he oversaw the creation of the robot operating system (ROS), the PR2 robot and the open-source TurtleBot. In the last three years of his tenure at Willow Garage, Dr Cousins spun off eight successful companies: Suitable Technologies (maker of the Beam remote presence system); Industrial Perception, Inc. (acquired by Google in 2013); Redwood Robotics (acquired by Google in 2013); HiDOF (ROS and robotics consulting); Unbounded Robotics; The Open Source Robotics Foundation; The OpenCV Foundation; and The Open Perception Foundation. Dr Cousins is an active participant in the Robots for Humanity project.

Build-a-Battery.

The article reports research and development company Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) has developed a cost-saving manufacturing battery-printing process that simplifies the process used to manufacture batteries by allowing lithium-ion cathodes and polymer separators to be simultaneously extruded using a two-headed printing nozzle.

Regressive Augmentation: Investigating Ubicomp’s Romantic Promises

Regressive Augmentation: Investigating Ubicomp’s Romantic Promises

Task analysis, calculation and approximation: The work of Stuart K. Card, 2007 Bower Laureate in Computer & Cognitive Science for Human-Centered Computing

In the early 1980s there was a large base of well-regarded cognitive theory—explaining human cognition. Additionally, personal technology was increasingly a factor in the workplace, but it was notoriously hard to use, leading to frustration rather than increased satisfaction and productivity [1–3]. In 1974 Stuart Card accompanied Allen Newell from Carnegie Mellon University to Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) to work on the problem of human–computer interaction. Newell returned to CMU, but Card remained to become the founding manager of the User Interface Research group. Card’s first major work The Psychology of Human–Computer Interaction, was published in 1983. It was undertaken to address the problems of usability by closing the gap between theory and technology. It did this by providing a methodology for bringing theory to bear on application. The work served as a foundation for research and development in human–computer interaction for the following 15 years.

Hard Java

Sun Microsystems has been a fantastic repository of talent for years, somewhat reminiscent of Apple Computer and the Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center). Sun developed the SPARC line of CPUs for their Solaris Operating System (a flavor of Unix). This group devised the only-ever hardware- and software-independent computer boot-up system (OpenBoot / Open Firmware / IEEE 1275). They also brought forth Java, a programming language which today seems ubiquitous and indispensable.

Missing the wave? Scattershot funding has its costs

Funding initiatives often drive large-scale research agendas in both academia and industry. In many instances, these initiatives arise from projects led by a few individuals who articulate a compelling vision of the future. In our fields, the late 1980s and early '90s provided several such visions and demonstrations. Mark Weiser at Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) coined the term ubiquitous computing in 1988 and is often credited with the vision that we still hold today. Focused initiatives often gather a community of researchers and industry people who normally might not communicate as readily. This community helps set the research agenda for the field and set the standards by which results can be accessed. It defines benchmarks and produces common resources such as hardware and software infrastructure and reference databases that can help transition the technology to industrial partners. Scattershot funding can lead to research being applied to many different areas without the research's own internal discipline.

A Conversation with Alan Kay

When you want to gain a historical perspective on personal computing and programming languages, why not turn to one of the industry’s preeminent pioneers? That would be Alan Kay, winner of last year’s Turing Award for leading the team that invented Smalltalk, as well as for his fundamental contributions to personal computing. Kay was one of the founders of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), where he led one of several groups that together developed modern workstations (and the forerunners of the Macintosh), Smalltalk, the overlapping window interface, desktop publishing, the Ethernet, laser printing, and network client-servers.

Auspicious computing?

Anthropologists working in the technology industry are nothing new. Lucy Suchman and Julian Orr blazed that trail at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in the late 1970s; they helped shed light on a range of organizational and work practices, documenting the ways in which people responded to the influx of new technologies such as early photocopying machines and computer-aided design (CAD) programs. Indeed, the late Marc Weiser credits Suchman, Orr, and their PARC colleagues with helping him think through the ubiquitous computing notion and compelling him to animate it with real people and their daily lives. Currently, anthropologists and other social scientists still work at Xerox, Kodak, Microsoft, Whirlpool, Philips, and Intel. Not only do we continue to use anthropological methods and theories to make sense of everyday activities and cultural practices for a diverse industry audience, but we also find ways to challenge the implicit assumptions that underwrite our very notions of what technology could or should do. This paper examines one such set of assumptions that everyone seems to share about computing.

Ready to set sail [Xerox PARC, commerce

Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) is legendary in information technology circles for two things: the profound impact it has had on computing and the apparent failure of Xerox to capitalise on that. Now Xerox is setting PARC free on the choppy seas of commerce, to flourish or founder on its ability to invent the future and commercialise it. This article discusses how this can be done according to Mark Bernstein, the director of PARC.

Community Knowledge Sharing in Practice: The Eureka Story

An organization’s most valuable knowledge—its essential intellectual capital—is not limited to the information in ofŽcial document repositories and databases, such as scientiŽc formulae, ‘‘hard’’ research data, computer codes, codiŽed procedures, Žnancial Žgures, customer records, and the like. It also includes the largely undocumented ideas, insights, and know-how of its members (see, for example, Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995; Stewart, 1997; Davenport and Prusak, 1997; Senge et al., 1999). This informal (often tacit) knowledge is deeply rooted in individuals’ experiences and the culture of their work communities. It commonly originates as practical solutions— through everyday inventions and discoveries—to the problems they must solve and thus serves as the critical resource for ordinary work practice (see, especially, Brown and Duguid, 1991, 2000). Much of this knowledge often remains embedded in practice. Small circles of colleagues and work groups commonly share crucial steps in a new practice and fresh solutions to recalcitrant problems through conversations and stories, with members Ž lling in the background and gaps from their own experience. These groups and communities use the local vernacular to express these instructions and stories. Organizations face the challenge of somehow converting this valuable but mainly local knowledge into forms that other members of the organization can understand and, perhaps most important, act on. Here we present a detailed account of one organization’s effort to encourage inventiveness, capture new ideas, and use technology to then share the best of this knowledge beyond a local work group. Our account is based on our experiences during seven years with the design, development, deployment, and evaluation of the Eureka system at Xerox Corporation. Xerox uses Eureka to support the customer service engineers (CSEs) who repair the copiers and printers installed at customer sites. In four iterations, the system went from an experiment that researchers at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) designed to measure the value of codiŽed Želd experience to a system deployed to 20,000 CSEs worldwide. By focusing on communities and how they share knowledge in ordinary practice, we developed a set of questions and a methodology that we hope will enable others to build similar community knowledge-sharing systems. However, deploying any knowledge system involves pushing changes within a corporate culture; understanding the Eureka experience and the problems facing all knowledge systems to be deployed in the real world requires equal focus on these challenges. Our narrative covers the history of this project, carefully detailing the fundamental interrelationships between the social and the technical.We include a framework for building these kinds of community systems (see the sidebar) and our reections on the barriers to organizational change that their proponents confront.

Modular robots

Modular reconfigurable robots-experimental systems made by interconnecting multiple, simple, similar units-can perform shape shifting. A robot made up of a chain of simple hinge joints could shape itself into a loop and move by rolling like a self-propelled tank tread; then break open the loop to form a serpentine configuration and slither under or over obstacles; and then rearrange its modules to morph into a multilegged spider, able to stride over rocks and bumpy terrain. This robot, dubbed PolyBot, is being built and experimented with at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), in California. This paper describes the main features of PolyBot and how it works. Programming of PolyBot is also discussed

E-mail as habitat

article Share on E-mail as habitat: an exploration of embedded personal information management Authors: Nicolas Ducheneaut Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC)View Profile , Victoria Bellotti Computer Science Laboratory at Xerox PARC Computer Science Laboratory at Xerox PARCView Profile Authors Info & Claims InteractionsVolume 8Issue 5Sept./Oct. 2001 pp 30–38https://doi.org/10.1145/382899.383305Online:01 September 2001Publication History 254citation4,737DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations254Total Downloads4,737Last 12 Months184Last 6 weeks19 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteGet Access

The Social Life of Information (review)

This is essentially a series of pleasantly ruminative essays grouped around the topic of the complex nature of information interchange in corporate life. They are intended as a corrective to a world that the authors imply is too "data driven" (meaning computer data) and that needs to understand better the multi-faceted organizational role played by such forms as paper communications, face-to-face contacts, and informal networking among communities of interest. Co-author John Seely Brown was, until recently, Director of Xerox Corporation's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), and Duguid is a research specialist in Social and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, also with ties to Xerox PARC. This connection is evident when they remind us of the virtues of paper copy, but there are also some interesting pages of honest criticism of Xerox's policies and operations with regard to its internal information use.

Under the Mike-R-Scope: What Happened at Xerox PARC?

Fumbling the Future: How Xerox In vented, then Ignored, the First Personal Computer by Douglas K. Smith and Robert C. Alexander appeared almost a decade ago and has been republished with a 1999 copyright. In addition, 1999 saw the publi cation of a new book on the same subject, Michael Hiltzik's Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age. In this column, I review and compare these books, and also describe the role of the management scientists at Palo Alto Re search Center (PARC), a topic neither book mentions. In both books, the authors Smith and Alexander and Hiltzik describe how Xerox set up a new research laboratory in Palo Alto, away from its copier business in Rochester, to do research on the architec ture of information. Both books contain

Are we prepared for the nanotechnology revolution?

“Molecular nanotechnology will have a tremendous impact on all aspects of life in the twenty-first century,” declared Ralph C. Merkle, a research scientist at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in California. Merkle, one of the field’s pioneers, was named the 1998 corecipient (along with Stephen Walch of the Thermosciences Institute at the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California) of the Foresight Institute’s 1998 Feynman Prize in Nanotechnology for Theoretical Work. According to Merkle, among the benefits of mastering molecular nanotechnology—a proposed process for building large structures by the precise manipulation of individual atoms and molecules—will be not only major reductions in manufacturing costs, but also reduction in twenty-first-century society’s dependence on fossil fuels, reduction in environmental pollution of all kinds, and increased food production for the world. With molecular nanotechnology, the manufacturing process could come close to its theoretical maximum efficiency and minimum waste. Thinking of the scrap and shavings produced by cutting metal or wood, Merkle observed: “There is nothing fundamental about spewing out random undesired atoms to the environment as part of the manufacturing process.”