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Xerox Showcases Erasable Paper, Smart Documents
Agam Shah, PC World, April 29, 2008
Excerpts from the article:
Xerox's research arm has showcased its latest innovations...
Since its establishment in 1970, the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), funded by Xerox, has created numerous technologies available on PCs today, including Ethernet, the graphical user interface (GUI) and the computer mouse. The laboratory, with other Xerox research facilities, is now trying to help its parent company and other start-ups by focusing on printing and other innovations to access, use and secure electronic documents.
Scientists demonstrated paper that can be reused after printed text automatically deletes itself from the paper's surface within 24 hours. Instead of trashing or recycling after one use, a single piece of paper can be used a second time, and reused up to 100 times, said Eric Shrader, area manager at PARC.
Predictions that paper would disappear in the 1970s in favour of electronic documents was false, Shrader said. As the number of electronic documents produced increases, about two to five pages are printed in the office for daily use, like email messages and web pages, which are discarded or recycled after being read. Reusable paper reduces that waste and is environmentally safe, and reuse also helps reduce overall printing and paper costs, Shrader said...
...PARC is also developing algorithms to better secure data on a document through its intelligent redaction technology, which automates the process of blacking out certain parts of a document considered confidential. For example, when there is a legal subpoena of medical records, information like diseases need to be blacked out, said Jessica Staddon, manager of security and privacy research at PARC. Based on rules established to protect the data, the technology weeds out information to blank out, like drug use and mental health conditions.
In medical records, for example, the technology can automatically detect words to redact based on the name of a drug or medical organisations. The current data redaction rates show about 75 percent accuracy, Staddon said.
Data redaction processes are currently inefficient as they require domain experts and hours of manual labour, Staddon said. The intelligent redaction technology computerises the process and provides the expertise based on artificial intelligence software tools and algorithms developed by PARC.
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