New Paradigms For Using Computers
Thursday, July 27, 1995
ABSTRACTS OF TALKS
Speaker: Ramana Rao
Visualization Revealed: Concepts One After Another Richly Arrayed
Abstract: While Information Visualization (IV) has become all the rage in research during the 90's, the impact from this work has been more illusive. In the last eight years, our research has explored the application of the interactive graphics and animation technology (2-d and 3-d) to visualizing and making sense of large information sets. For example, we have devised a number of Focus + Context Techniques, which blend detailed views of interactive operators for, say, exploring patterns and isolating outliers. An overview of our general approach and a tour of visualizations, a series of ideas that will lead into underlies the surface of the research. These ideas collectively suggest to me that visualization is a central ingredient for building the kind of rich information workspaces that has been sought for decades, since Memex in systems like Augment, Star, NoteCards, and the Macintosh.
Biography: Ramana Rao has worked at Xerox PARC since 1986. He has published in a number of research areas including information access, information visualization, paper user interfaces, document imaging, object-oriented programming, reflection and window systems. He participated in the design of Common Lisp. In the last few years, Ramana has been actively involved in moving Xerox visualization work into products, toolkits, and partnership arrangements. Prior to joining PARC, Ramana worked at a startup company that developed presentation graphics applications for the IBM PC and a consulting company that designed and built a fault-tolerant file server for a major minicomputer company. Ramana received his BS and MS degrees in Computer Science from MIT and has a reservation to do a Ph.D. in literature after he ships a system that he can use to make sense of all the world's literature.
Speaker : Nolan Bushnell
Entertainment In The Next Millenium
Abstract: Connected and new graphics chip together will give both computer power and links which lead to game playing that previously has been impossible. The game forms can allow multi-player games in which competitors with 1,000, 10,000, or 50,000 people on a team, can compute in new games and competitors, prizes, celebrities, and even professional cybersports are bound to fall. Will actual sports become obsolete? Will sports "wannabe's" now actually be able to be participants?
Biography: Nolan Bushnell, one of Silicon Valley's early computer pioneers, started the singularly biggest consumer electronics "boom" of the 1970's--video games. He founded Atari Corporation in 1972, and in 1976 sold it to Warner Communications. This industry grew to over $8 billion a year in sales, nearly double that of the entire movie industry.
In 1977, Bushnell opened the first Chuck E. Cheese restaurant, which combined fast food, electronic games, amusement facilities and musical entertainment by computer-animated robot characters. The chain was sold in 1983. It currently has system sales of over $300 million.
In 1981, Bushnell founded Catalyst Technologies. Described as an incubator to mass produce small businesses, Catalyst Technologies was an umbrella corporation that provided seed capital, business plan development and management guidance for Silicon Valley entrepreneurs.
Bushnell is currently Chairman and CEO of E2000, a company which creates and sells computer games and operates large techno state-of-the-art entertainment centers. He also serves on the boards of several closely held companies.
Speaker: Douglas Engelbart
"Augment and the Bootstrap Institute"
Abstract: NLS/Augment is arguably the genesis of hypertext, linked media online webs. This project continues to be at the core of the Bootstrap Institute. This talk will concentrate on how our technology, which Engelbart founded, leverages collaborative work and workplaces and allows distributive teams to work together better. Our system supports need-identification, opportunities-recognition, designing and deploying solutions and incorporating lessons learned in future work. Probably the most important benefit of the bootstrap technology is the improvement cycle of the organization it becomes part of.
Biography: Douglas C. Engelbart has spent 30 years predicting, designing and implementing the future of organizational computing. He has a BS in Electrical Engineering from Oregon State University and Ph.D. in EE from UC Berkeley. He has worked for NACA Ames Laboratory (now NASA) and spent 20 years with the Stanford Research Institute, where he developed NLS, which integrated many computing firsts including the mouse, display editing, windows, hypermedia, groupware and other concepts. He went to work for Tymshare after it bought commercial rights to NLS. When Tymshare was acquired by McDonnell Douglas, he worked for that company on issues of integrated information system architectures. In 1989, he established the Bootstrap Project at Stanford for advanced research on collaborative knowledge development in the practical application of his work. He has 20 patents, including one for the invention of the mouse. He has been honored by PC Magazine with a Lifetime Achievement Award, by the ACM with a Software System Award and the IEEE with a Computer Pioneer Award, among many others.
Speaker: David M. Kelley
Setting Up A Culture of Innovation: Lessons From The Front Line
Abstract: David Kelley, President of IDEO Product Development, drawing on his experience with over 2,000 product development programs and his 15 years of teaching product design methodology as a professor at Stanford University, discusses insights on fast paced approaches for product success. Based on his experiences from a wide range of industries, Mr. Kelley describes the essence of successful programs IDEO has completed in collaboration with its clients. He suggests ways to strengthen new product programs by "being big and acting small", "living for the future" and "encouraging sucess by allowing failure".
Biography: David Kelley is the founder and president of IDEO Product Development, one of America's largest independent product design and development firms. IDEO's client list includes Apple Computer, Baxter HealthCare, Dell, General Motors, Hewlett Packard, NEC, Samsung, Sony, and Steelcase. IDEO has developed more than 2000 products for its client companies. In addition to his work at IDEO, David Kelley is a professor at Stanford University in the Product Design Program. Kelley was also the founder of Onset, a venture capital firm dedicated to transforming product concepts into a number of successful companies.
Speaker: James Gosling
Bringing Behavior to the Internet
Abstract: HotJava is yet another web browser. A traditional web browser understands many protocols and data formats. The code to support these is tied together in one big lump. In contrast, HotJava understands no protocols or data formats. It understands how to dynamically link code from elsewhere on the net into its address space in a manner that is safe from "viruses", has good performance, and is architecture-neutral. HotJava uses the names of things, like protocols, to derive names for classes that it links in dynamically. One extension to web browsing that we've added is the ability to attach code fragments to web pages, enabling interactive content. Pages can contain games, simulations, live data, and complex forms. This talk will cover what HotJava is and how it works.
Biography: James Gosling received a BSc in Computer Science from the University of Calgary, Canada, in 1977. He received a PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1983. The title of his thesis was, "The Manipulation of Algebraic Constraints". He is currently a "Distinguished Engineer" at Sun Microsystems. He has built satellite data acquisition systems, a multiprocessor version of Unix, several compilers, mail systems and window managers. He has also built a WYSIWYG text editor, a constraint-based drawing editor and a text editor called `Emacs' for Unix systems. At Sun his early activity has been as lead engineer of the NeWS window system. More recently he has been the lead engineer for the Java/HotJava system.
Speaker: Marc Davis
Representing Video For The 50,000,000 Channel Future
Abstract: It is hard to imagine our own civilization before the advent of widespread literacy in the 17th and 18th centuries. In the next century our descendants might find it hard to understand that while everyone watched movies, videos, and TV, so few made them. Technologies for representing, retrieving, and repurposing video content, like Media Streams, will enable radical changes in video production, distribution, and reuse. It may be hard to conceptualize a world in which you engage in a daily practice of making movies from parts of existing ones to communicate and play with. Media Streams is a system for representing video content that enables humans and machines to work together to annotate, browse, retrieve, and repurpose digital video. It uses a stream-based iconic visual language that represents semantic and syntactic properties of video content in order to enable the retrieval/composition of video sequences from an archive of annotated footage. Media Streams' representation and retrieval technologies employ cinematic concepts of space, time, character, and action. Its representational framework uses a hierarchially structured semantic vocabulary of composable primitives which overcome the limitations of keyword-based systems. Media Streams' iconic visual language addresses the limitations of text based technologies for reading and writing representations of video content for a global media archive. Media Streams' representational structures and retrieval algorithms enable user queries to compose new, rather than just find existing, sequences. In the near future, content representation technologies will enable video to finally become a computational medium such that every computer can be a TV station.
Biography: Marc Davis is currently a member of the Research Staff at Interval Research Corporation and a lecturer at Stanford University in Palo Alto, CA. With a diverse background in literary theory, media technology, and aritificial intelligence, he researched and developed repurposing digital video. Marc has also studied in Germany at a German Academic Exchange Service. He has worked at Mitsubishi and Interval. Marc Davis has published papers and given talks on video representation, multimedia, virtual reality, interface agents, user interface design.
