Steven Leckart

PARC: Un-fumbling the Future

In 1983, my former professor and friend Howard Rheingold read an article by Alan Kay. Immediately, he wanted to experience the Alto and the future of networked minds. He started calling PARC on a weekly basis. Nothing. Then when he called back to remind HR of his existence, he was given an immediate assignment: write a last-minute speech for a Xerox executive.

With that, Howard had landed himself his "dream job" at PARC as an in-house writer. Howard's gig involved interviewing researchers and scientists about their work with interfaces, LAN, etc. Super cool in retrospect and at the time, I'm sure.

He goes into great detail in his book Tools for Thought (pictured), which explores batch processing, the 1960s, time sharing, and more at Xerox PARC. Howard's insights into the successes and failures of Xerox PARC are well worth a read.

Here's how he framed PARC's trajectory and missed opportunity in his Wired article from 1994:

Personal computers did not spring naturally from the computer industry. They were deliberately realized by a radical fringe, against all the force of the day's accepted wisdom... These zealous wizards handed Xerox an astounding lead in information technology in the early 1980s, but by the end of the decade, Xerox watched as upstarts like Apple and Microsoft grew wealthy off Xerox's discoveries. Neither Apple nor Microsoft even existed when the first Altos were designed in the early 1970s; by 1990 either company could have bought Xerox. The tragicomic Xerox saga is recorded in Douglas K. Smith and Robert C. Alexander's Fumbling the Future.

Here's the question he ended his 1994 article with:

So how will PARC guarantee that this time they won't fumble their new future? Three ways, says JSB [John Seely Brown]. "One, we are more careful about intellectual property. Two, we are working smart - looking for entrepreneurial partnerships to develop ideas quickly. And three, Xerox has radically repositioned its organization so that its corporate strategy is shaped and informed by PARC and PARC is being shaped and informed by corporate strategy."

And, of course, here's what eventually happened:

By 2002, PARC became in independent research business with the ability to license its own patented tech and discoveries to other companies, institutions, and start-ups, especially the recent wave of alternative energy upstarts. While there are still ties to Xerox, PARC's profits are entirely its own. What's more, I'm told revenue is even split up among PARC employees.

Lessons learned.

Lisa Katayama

PARC: Flexible electronics

Our first stop on our visit to PARC was Room 1229, where staff researcher Willie Wong and several team members are perfecting advanced flexible electronics technologies. By building circuits and electrical connections into bendable plastics, glass, and metal foil substrates, they're paving the way for new technologies like flexible flat-panel displays, medical image sensors, and electronic paper. Because flexible electronics are super lightweight, rugged, and can be rolled or folded into smaller pieces, they are expected to take mobility and portability to new levels.

Images courtesy of PARC

Steven Leckart

Mr.Taggy & the History of Search at PARC

There are plenty of nifty search engines that don't begin with "Goo" and end with "gle," as Wired points out. But one site they forgot to include is MrTaggy, which was created by PARC's Augmented Social Cognition Area.

Unlike other engines, this one doesn't index the content of web pages. Instead, it uses PARC's TagSearch algorithm, which aggregates and sorts the user-generated tags added to social bookmarking sites like Delicious. From there, users can give thumbs up or down for each and every result. The goal: be part-search, part-recommendation engine by tapping the wisdom of the crowd.

BBG asked the ASCA researchers to connect the dots between PARC's earlier forays into search and MrTaggy. Here's what Ed Chi, Manager of ASCA, shared with us:

First, one of the most efficient ways of browsing and navigating toward a desired information space was illustrated by the pioneering research on Scatter/Gather, a collaborative project on large-scale document space navigation between amazing researchers such as Doug Cutting (of Lucene, Hadoop fame) and Jan Pedersen (chief scientist at AltaVista, Yahoo, Microsoft for search).

The research done in early to mid 90s, showed how a textual clustering algorithm can be used to quickly divide up an information space (scatter step), ask the user to specify which subspaces they're interested in (gather step). By iterating over this process, one can very quickly narrow down to just the subset of information items they're interested in. Think of it as playing 20 questions with the computer.

Second, also around the mid-90s, an important information access theory was being developed at PARC in our research group called Information Foraging, which showed that you can mathematically model the way people seek information using the same ecological equations used to model how animals forage for food. We noticed that we can use information foraging ideas to model how people used Scatter/Gather to browse for information. It turns out that it was possible to predict how people use the information cues (which we called 'information scent') in each cluster to determine whether they were interested in the contents inside the cluster. It turns out that Scatter/Gather can be shown to be a very efficient way to communicate to the user the topic structure of a very large document collection. In other words, people learned the structure of the information space much more efficiently using Scatter/Gather interfaces.

I hope it is quite clear that the relevance feedback mechanisms are very much inspired by Scatter/Gather. The related tags communicate the topic structure of what's available in the collection. Through this process, we designed MrTaggy, hoping that it would be just as efficient as Scatter/Gather in communicating the topic structure of the space.

Third, our group had developed Information Scent algorithms and concepts to build real search and recommendation systems. These algorithms build upon earlier work on a human memory model called Spreading Activation.

TagSearch algorithm uses similar concepts here. It constructs a kind of Bayesian modeling of the topic space using the tag co-occurrence patterns.

TagSearch's algorithm owes its heart and soul in concepts in Spreading Activation, which helps us find documents that are related to certain tags, and vice versa.

So what it's like to actually use MrTaggy?

I started a search with the suggested tags "funny" and "video." Less than 30 seconds later, I discovered this Bruno-related gem from FunnyorDie that had, until now, somehow escaped my attention.

Good find, MrTaggy!

Lisa Katayama

Life at PARC: Organic food, Unix parties, coyotes, and geeks

What's everyday life like at Silicon Valley's most famous research center? To find out, I talked to YF Juan, a director of business develpment at PARC, and communications manager Linda Jacobson.

Much like the research that goes on behind the laboratory doors, PARC's culture and atmosphere were designed with painstaking precision. The 14-acre facility was custom-designed by Gyo Obata, a founding partner at the world-renowned architecture firm HOK. At founder George Pake's request, each employee was to have his or her own office with a view of either the courtyard or of the rolling Palo Alto hills. Of equal importance to privacy were the common areas. The entire building is divided into pods, and each pod has offices, labs, and common spaces with themed decors designed to inspire different types of thinking&mdash the social science pod boasts a colorful, Scandinavian feel, whereas the computing science common area has a more traditional look with shelves lined with books on networking and computing. Outside the building walls, bush-lined walkways lead from sunny patios to trails of undeveloped lands inhabited by hares, chipmunks, lizards, coyotes, horses, and migratory birds. "The idea was to design an environment that would encourage collaboration as well as solitude for creative problem solving," says Jacobsen.

Life at PARC, it seems, is a unique blend of nature and technology, public and private, social and geek, artsy and science-y that melds into a one-of-a-kind creative environment conducive to extreme innovation. Keep reading to learn about the different types of geeks, spontaneous parties, and global cuisine that keep PARC employees happy.

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Steven Leckart

Sputnik: Videos of Interconnected Ideas, Thinkers

Info architect Jonathan Harris explains his latest work, which launched today:

The central premise of the Sputnik project is that everything is connected to everything else, and that topics and ideas that may seem fringe and even heretical to the mainstream world are in fact being investigated by leading thinkers working in fields as diverse as quantum physics, mathematics, neuroscience, biology, economics, architecture, digital art, video games, computer science and music...

Conducted over more than ten years and previously unavailable to the public, the interviews within the site chronicle some of the most provocative human ideas to have emerged in the last few decades. The site itself aims to highlight the interconnections between seemingly disparate thinkers and ideas, using a simple navigational system with no dead ends, where every thought leads to another thought, akin to swimming the stream of consciousness.

200 videos are already on the site, with more to come. File under: major time suck.

Lisa Katayama

Photo and original diagram of the world's first ethernet cable

Behind an ordinary door in a nondescript room hosting several printers and copiers at PARC is the world's first Ethernet cable. In 1973, Bob Metcalfe sent an internal memo to his colleagues at Xerox proposing a local system of interacting workstations, files, and printers. The devices would all be linked by one coaxial cable, he said, and would run within a local area network. He called the system an Ether Network, or Ethernet. By 1976, there were over 100 devices linked into Metcalfe's local network, and it was even used to test out the world's first laser printer, which was being developed concurrently in another research facility within Xerox. Metcalfe and his assistant David Boggs published their findings in the Association for Computing Machinery later that year. The rest is history.

Below is a composite sketch of several diagrams Metcalfe drew and included in his original memo.

Steven Leckart

PARC: What's w/the Shagadelic Carpet & Beanbag Chairs?

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Lisa Katayama

PARC's responsive mirror = every girl's shopping fantasy come true

I'm sitting on a stool in a plain white room at the Palo Alto Research Center, checking out my new earrings via a small desktop mirror. They're a big dangly pair, each with a white porcelain rose and a black stone hanging underneath. On top of the mirror is a webcam attached to the computer on its right &mdash it's recording my every move and sensing the angles of my head and the closeness of my face as I check myself out. After a couple of minutes of striking poses, I click on the mouse to pause the camera and take the earrings off. I put my old pair back on &mdash a petite gold and silver lotus root that I bought in Japan several months ago &mdash and press play. Two screens pop up, one of me now and one of me just a few minutes ago with the previous pair. It's like I'm seeing double &mdash every time I move my head in real time, the me from a few minutes ago moves her head the exact same way. The flower earrings, I notice, look a lot better from the side, but I like the way the lotus roots dangle when I'm looking straight ahead.

By streaming video taken by the camera through their spatially oriented machine learning software, PARC researchers have figured out how to give people like me a real-time interactive comparison shopping experience. The responsive mirror system, which comes in both a desktop and full-length version, displays previously worn outfits on a second "mirror" &mdash the playback of a movie taken by a webcam on the ceiling that locates you spatially within the frame and then finds the same angled shot from the previous clip. The technology hasn't hit retailers yet, but PARC researchers are hoping to implement it in dressing rooms soon.

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Lisa Katayama

Gallery of caution signs at Parc

You know you're in a serious research facility when you're walking along the corridors and every other door you pass has a different caution or danger sign on it. Here are a few selects that I was able to snap pics of during our visit to PARC in May.

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Steven Leckart

Wait, Where is Alan Kay's Office?

I figured it was a simple question: Can you show me Alan Kay's office?

I was wrong.

After the jump, find out why and whether I ever found his office...

photo by Marcin Wichary

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Steven Leckart

BBG on... PARC

One early morning a couple months back, we ventured from San Francisco down Highway 101 to 3333 Coyote Hill Rd., where a terracing three-story concrete building sits amidst rolling hills and horse farms.

The Palo Alto Research Center was established in 1970 as a division of Xerox (in 2002, PARC became an independent company). Through the years, PARC has churned out more than 6002100 patents and patents-pending in a variety of disciplines &mdash from computing and engineering to electronics and biomed. At one time, PARC's patent portfolio was worth an estimated $1 billion.*

The Alto was dreamt up in 1972 and unveiled in 1973. PARC researchers were responsible for unleashing the first GUI in 1975. Researchers at PARC created the first worm in 1978 (it was intended for good: seek out idle servers to distribute processing load).

Famously, in 1979 a wide-eyed 24-year-old named Steve Jobs visited PARC and had his mind totally blown. About the GUI, he later recalled:

"I thought it was the best thing I'd ever seen in my life... within, you know. ten minutes it was obvious to me that all computers would work like this some day."

To honor the place that's more or less responsible for envisioning, creating and instigating the modern computing era, BBG will be posting a series of stories today about PARC: historical tidbits, current research, photos, video, insights and more.

*see Open Innovation

Joel Johnson

Video Exclusive: Schematic's multi-meter, multi-touch, multi-user Touchwall

Trevor Kaufman of design haus Schematic passed along this shiny, produced video showing off their new "Touchwall" project that's the sequel to a previous multitouch panel they built. As it happens, we're the first to get a look at it.

Multitouch is in a weird spot. It's in our phones. It's in big projects like the Touchwall. But it's not in our home machines yet (for the most part, excepting Tablet PC users and a few HP and Asus customers). So kinks are still there for the working out, and that's a lot of what Schematic has been working on.

For instance, how do you type in a username and password on a big public wall? For Touchwall, you don't—you swipe an RFID badge on the screen.

What about letting multiple users access the system at once? Schematic solved that problem by letting that be possible.

Because Schematic is a design and special projects group, they aren't shy to crow about their fancy acheivents. (Kaufman said we should think of the Touchwall "not as a standalone device, but as a new technology paradigm", which implies a unique technical challenge: What does the Touchwall do when you get sick all over it?) But these are really interesting problems they're solving, and if these sort of interfaces really are the public access terminals of our future airports and Cinnabons, I look forward to greasing them up.

Joel Johnson

Nokia's Teslaesque wireless power research

Nokia's trying to figure out how to scavenge ambient radio waves and convert them into power for phones.

The trick here is to ensure that these circuits use less power than is being received, said Rouvala. So far they have been able to harvest up to 5 milliwatts. Their short-term goal is to get in excess of 20 milliwatts, enough power to keep a phone in standby mode indefinitely without having to recharge it. But this would not be enough to actually use the phone to make or receive a call, he says. So ultimately the hope is to be able to get as much as 50 milliwatts which would be sufficient to slowly recharge the battery.

Previously ⌦ LEDs lit by wireless power

Joel Johnson

What sort of things are possible if Project Natal works as promised?

Jason Cross:

The possibilities there are huge. They could certainly do object recognition - a game could not only model and mimic you, but could know when you pick up a cup or soda can. At a most basic level, in social networking environments you could have an avatar truly do what you're doing including munching on chips exactly as you do or taking a sip of beer or whatever. At a more advanced level, you could build object recognition into games - literally take a sip of water or whatever you have around (or mime it with an empty cup) to drink a health potion. With that kind of notion as a starting point, imagine what they could do with recognizing other objects. Imagine the real-world and marketing implications of recognizing specific products. Get a bigger energy boost from drinking a Mountain Dew!

Joel Johnson

Snoozy the Sloth, a stuffed toy that really breathes

Justin Blinder gave birth to "Snoozy the Sloth", a stuffed toy that has a real diaphragm inside that allows it to breath, going so far as to exhale breath from its latex-glove lungs onto the neck of whomever is nuzzling it.

Justin made Snoozy for a class at Parsons; I bet it won't be long before he is mass produced. For now, though, I like that Snoozy is a one-off, held together with makeshift parts, like a premature robot just clinging to life.

Joel Johnson

The fMRI of Love

A.J. Jacobs slips into an fMRI machine to test what his brain looks like when he's thinking of his wife—and what it looks like when he's thinking of Angelina Jolie. It's a jumping off point to discuss the chemistry of love, one of the most interesting (and mysteriously painful) matters of modern neuroscience:

The three systems are intertwined. For instance, sex boosts attachment. When you have an orgasm, your brain pumps out oxytocin, heightening feelings of closeness. Which is why one-night stands often last past one night. And why exhausted married couples should force themselves to hump once in a while. In fact, semen itself contains oxytocin. You literally have a love syringe between your legs.

Steven Leckart

Two years of air quality photos in Beijing

Working with the Asia Society and a photographer in Beijing, my former colleague Michael Zhao has designed an interactive site with an amazing collection of snapshots taken through the same apartment window in Beijing. The images date from March 2009 (as I write) all the way back to March 2007.

You can click through them all, and sort by best/worst air pollution index (API) and air quality grade for each day on the Asia Society project site. Or you can watch everything in reverse timelapse and zoom out to see tiny images of every day on Michael's site.

On my last birthday (Dec. 7), Beijing's air scored a C and the index was a 112, meaning "Generally healthy individuals may also notice some discomfort." The photo above is a 115. The worst day recorded/photographed: December 28, 2007, with a score a 500!

Of course, there's some pretty neat tech wizardry that goes into measuring airborne chemicals. After the jump, check out a quantum cascade laser open path sensor...

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Steven Leckart

Goggles schmoggles

[via Make]

[via CreativePro]

[via Smartdogs]

[via Make]

[ditto Make]

Joel Johnson

The spaced out covers of Advanced Materials

If the covers of Advanced Materials, a peer-reviewed science journal published every month by Wiley, were offered as a series of posters, I would not be made of strong enough stuff to resist.

Steven Leckart

Review: A few days w/the Mind Lamp [verdict: trippy!]

As I write, I'm staring at an LED vase that's pink, wait, red. No, violet. Def pale blue. Errr...yellow. Constructed from blown glass, the Mind Lamp is more than an attractive, color-changing accessory. It's a challenge. Known informally as "consciousness-related" tech, the lamp comes stocked with what's known as a quantum measurement device, or REG. Find out what that is, and my attempts to influence the color of the lamp with nothing but... my mind.

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Joel Johnson

Visualization: Jer Thorp's "Just Landed"

Jer Thorp slurped up mentions of "Just landed in" or "Just arrived in" from Twitter, mapped the coordinates, and made an animated map in Processing that shows people popping around the world. The test render above shows the data pulled over the course of 4 hours. If that's actually all the returned queries from the entirety of Twitter, I'm surprised there aren't more. [via Waxy]

Joel Johnson

Visualization: Position of all NBA shots, '07-'08

Jason R. Bailey built this Processing visualization that tracks the position of all the shots from the NBA's 2007-2008 season. [via Visualize It]

Joel Johnson

Cloaking devices are here, provided you are already invisible

National Geographic on new cloaking research:

Both materials still have a long way to go before they're ready for stealth military operations. To start with, both cloaks work only in infrared light for now. The next step is to try to develop a version that works in visible wavelengths.

The cloaks are also capable of hiding only microscopic objects.

Joel Johnson

Video: Brain -> Twitter Interface

From the UW Madison press release:

The interface consists, essentially, of a keyboard displayed on a computer screen. "The way this works is that all the letters come up, and each one of them flashes individually," says Williams. "And what your brain does is, if you're looking at the 'R' on the screen and all the other letters are flashing, nothing happens. But when the 'R' flashes, your brain says, 'Hey, wait a minute. Something's different about what I was just paying attention to.' And you see a momentary change in brain activity."

Wilson, who used the interface to post the Twitter update, likens it to texting on a cell phone. "You have to press a button four times to get the character you want," he says of texting. "So this is kind of a slow process at first."

However, as with texting, users improve as they practice using the interface. "I've seen people do up to eight characters per minute," says Wilson.

I believe this is the tweet in question.

Joel Johnson

Terrifying robot image of the day: Boston Dynamics' SquishBot

Boston Dynamics [via]:

SquishBot is a program to develop a new class of soft, shape-changing robot. The goal is to design systems that can transform themselves from hard to soft and from soft to hard, upon command. Another goal is to create systems that change their critical dimensions by large amounts, as much as 10x. Such robots will be like soft animals that can squeeze themselves through small openings and into tight places.

Joel Johnson

Warmer, warmer: e-paper with sub-second refresh

Unlike other color e-paper examples, Bridgestone's prototype color e-paper can refresh its screen in just 0.8 seconds, making it fast enough to use with touchpen input.

Joel Johnson

The Sensoring Manifesto

Grant Meacham has written The Sensoring Manifesto, a pithy proclamation about the fact that gadgets are just an intermediate state for something that will eventually exist inside of us:

By acquiring information as sensory input instead of a disruptive gadget, the natural senses are strengthened. The capacity of the brain can be increased, new senses added, and old senses enhanced. It has already been found that additional streams of information can be parallel processed by the brain, the user only aware of the information, not the delivery system. Not only is this possible, but it is happening right now. We are silently entering the age of sensoring, where our interaction and perception of the world will be defined by hacked and augmented senses. We are at the start of this transition, and we can choose how we will let it effect and shape our lives, but only if we are aware. Recently, technology has been advancing faster than culture, resulting in the adoption of objects without consideration of social ramifications. If the implications of sensoring are not addressed and discussed now, we will be unprepared for the future. The progression of technology is not going to slow down, and we will be expected to monitor increasing amounts and sources of information. Sensoring, augmenting and synthesizing new senses to process this data, will be the most effective way of staying connected without becoming detached from your environment.

Joel Johnson

"woooot" index

Woot, inspired by Rob's hard investigative look into the economy of lols, has done the deep googling necessary to track the elusive wooooot (and w00000000t).

Joel Johnson

OXCART: The Real Secret of Area 51

Since the government has finally declassified the program, the people who worked at Area 51 can now talk about A-12 OXCART, a Wicked Secret program to build an test a Mach 3 spyplane at Nevada's Groom Lake. (You may know it as the SR-71 Blackbird.) The L.A. Times talks to survivors of the program:

So, what of those urban legends--the UFOs studied in secret, the underground tunnels connecting clandestine facilities? For decades, the men at Area 51 thought they'd take their secrets to the grave. At the height of the Cold War, they cultivated anonymity while pursuing some of the country's most covert projects. Conspiracy theories were left to popular imagination. But in talking with Collins, Lovick, Slater, Barnes and Martin, it is clear that much of the folklore was spun from threads of fact.

As for the myths of reverse engineering of flying saucers, Barnes offers some insight: "We did reverse engineer a lot of foreign technology, including the Soviet MiG fighter jet out at the Area"--even though the MiG wasn't shaped like a flying saucer. As for the underground-tunnel talk, that, too, was born of truth. Barnes worked on a nuclear-rocket program called Project NERVA, inside underground chambers at Jackass Flats, in Area 51's backyard. "Three test-cell facilities were connected by railroad, but everything else was underground," he says.

Photo: James Dale

Joel Johnson

Honda builts brain-to-robot interface for Asimo

TOKYO, Japan, March 31, 2009 - Honda Research Institute Japan Co., Ltd. (HRI-JP), a subsidiary of Honda R&D Co., Ltd., Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International (ATR) and Shimadzu Corporation have collaboratively developed the world’s first*1 Brain Machine Interface (BMI) technology that uses electroencephalography (EEG) and near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) along with newly developed information extraction technology to enable control of a robot by human thought alone.