Computing Science Laboratory

Automatic Analysis of Mass Spectra
Mass spectrometry is a ubiquitous tool in proteomics research for identification of proteins and post-translational modifications (PTMs) such as phosphorylation. Current high-throughput methods for protein identification rely on database-lookup techniques and do not scale well for PTM identification. The goals of this project are improved software tools for de novo sequencing of peptides and identification of PTMs. In addition, the project is developing tools for identifying glycans, the focus of the rapidly evolving field of glycomics.

Community Knowledge Sharing
Work in this area draws on more than two decades of multidisciplinary PARC research on workplace communities. Combining the perspectives of social and computer sciences, researchers develop technologies that support community practices for knowledge sharing, closely collaborating with the intended users of those technologies in their design and implementation.

Content Centric Networking
Content-centric networking is an innovative approach to networking that simplifies network use, improves performance and security, and enables a seamless, ubiquitous experience. Content-centric networks enable the network to self-organize and the content itself to migrate where needed. This new approach enables network users to send and receive relevant information – anytime, anyplace, through any device, and on any network – without cumbersome, manual configuration.

Embedded Collaborative Computing
Research in this area is aimed at developing “smart sensor” networks that embed sensors and computation into the world around us. Scientists are exploring what sensing, monitoring, diagnosis, and system recovery will mean in a world where cheap computation, massively distributed MEMS-based sensing and actuation, and wireless communication are converging. They are developing scalable, generic algorithms and the necessary software infrastructure for gathering and understanding the vast amounts of data collected by distributed sensors.

Obje™ Software Architecture

The Obje™ software architecture enables digital devices and services to easily interoperate over both wired and wireless networks, in a hassle-free, ad hoc manner.

PlayOn
Online gaming is emerging as an interesting new form of social experience: many of today's games are true virtual worlds populated with hundreds of thousands of players. We are exploring how online gaming communities function in practice, based on a combination of ethnography and automated data collection. The goal of this project is to uncover the social mechanics of massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs), develop tools to help understand and manage them better, and eventually improve their design.

Security & Privacy
PARC is developing technologies that intelligently support security and privacy for ubiquitous computing environments. Work in this area ranges from usable security techniques for securely managing large networks of devices, to privacy-preserving methods for collecting and disseminating content over such networks.

Social, Mobile Audio Spaces
Our group is developing telecommunications services that extend traditional audio spaces to meet the needs of social, mobile groups. As part of this work, we are conducting fieldwork on the study of push-to-talk cellular radio service.

SocialTV
The constraints of daily life often limit the degree to which we can make television viewing a social, rather than solitary, experience. The SocialTV project is exploring how devices like PVRs and set-top boxes could be enhanced to support “distributed viewing parties” and other forms of group television viewing.

Workscapes and Organizations
Researchers are developing work practice tools and methodologies that identify the mission-critical practices wherever a company interacts with its customers (e.g., call centers and customer services). The objective is to develop specific knowledge sharing and learning strategies that support natural knowledge-sharing practices among individuals and across organizations. The multidisciplinary team is building on more than two decades of seminal work practice research from PARC.

Past projects include:

AspectJ™
AspectJ™ is a seamless aspect-oriented extension to the Java™ programming language. It enables the clean modularization of crosscutting concerns such as error checking and handling, synchronization, context-sensitive behavior, performance optimizations, monitoring and logging, debugging support, and multi-object protocols.

Enhanced Thumbnails
We have developed a technique for creating textually enhanced thumbnails of documents. These thumbnails are based on visual perception principles and combine the advantages of image thumbnails and text summaries to provide consistent performance on a variety of tasks.

Quicksilver
Over the last decades, a series of assumptions about cryptography have been deeply instilled in the security community. Unarticulated and incorrect assumptions hinder our community's progress in building and fielding secure systems and needlessly limit concepts of what can be done in service of the consumer. PARC's Quicksilver project explored the implications and applications of abundant cryptography.

Sotto Voce Electronic Guidebooks
We have investigated the application of computing technology to cultural heritage sites such as historic houses, focusing on design aspects that facilitate visitor interaction with their companions and environment.

Java is a trademark of Sun Microsystems, Inc.
AspectJ and Obje are trademarks of Palo Alto Research Center Incorporated