Banamex Security Event
1 November 2008, Mexico City, Mexico
Markus Jakobsson

Online Crime: A Snapshot and a Prediction (invited talk)
An overview of the current online crime situation and in-depth analysis of how to make predictions. More about PARC's security work...

SPIE Photonics Innovation Summit
6 November 2008, San Francisco, California
Jennifer Ernst, Scott Elrod

This summit focuses on the business theme of innovation and the role of technological innovation in three rapidly expanding markets -- solar, biophotonics, and solid-state lighting. Keynote speakers include Henry Chesbrough and John Kao. PARC will discuss perspectives on cost-efficient solar and working with multinational corporations in converting advanced research into high-value business opportunities. More about PARC client services...

NCI Translates: NCI Translational Science Meeting
8 November 2008, Washington, D.C.
Richard Bruce

Sensitive location and characterization of circulating tumor cells for improving therapy selection and monitoring treatment efficacy
For metastatic disease, biomarker profiling of distant metastases is done only when feasible because biopsy of metastases is invasive and associated with potential morbidity without proven benefit. So although biomarker expression may differ in distant metastases, treatment with targeted therapies is almost always based on biomarker targets derived from a patient¹s primary breast tumor, usually excised years before development of metastatic disease. Circulating tumor cells (CTCs) in the blood have been linked to disease outcome in patients with metastatic breast cancer...We have developed a sensitive CTC detection tool using Fiber Array Scanning Technology (FAST) that can rapidly locate CTCs on a substrate and uses abundant cytokeratins not EpCAM as targets. We have developed a protocol that enables testing for protein expression of 5 markers in addition to the ones needed for CTC identification. More about PARC's FAST cytometer technology...

2008 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW 2008)
8-12 November 2008, San Diego
Bo Begole (conference co-chair)

CSCW is the premier venue for research and innovation on the role of coordination and communication technologies in our lives. In CSCW 2008, we see growth in the diversity of topics, methods and technologies that support collaboration. Paper sessions will include original research covering emerging areas of collaboration and collaborative systems such as Wikis & Wikipedia, Naughty & Nice issues in Social Networking Systems, Gaming, Health Informatics, and Deployments at Home, while other paper sessions will cover topics with traditional representation in CSCW including Distributed Teams, Media Spaces, Online Community, Interpersonal Relations in the Group, Work Places and Work Practices.

PARC topics & speakers include:

• Gaming as a Collaborative Application (Nic Ducheneaut)
• Collaboration in virtual worlds (Nic Ducheneaut, Mike Roberts, Greg Wadley)
• Social displays (Les Nelson)
• Keyhole Snippet Sharing (Diana Smetters & Les Nelson)
• "Can You Ever Trust a Wiki? Impacting Perceived Trustworthiness in Wikipedia" (Bongwon Suh, Ed Chi, Aniket Kittur) *Best of CSCW award*
• "Towards a Model of Understanding Social Search" (Ed Chi, Brynn Evans)

Related PARC innovation areas:
enterprise and web 2.0 knowledge systems ∙ ethnography ∙ human information interaction/ HCI ∙ security ∙ ubiquitous computing

GreenTech Innovations: End-to-End Electricity
17 November 2008, New York, New York
Scott Elrod

How to Turn a Concept Into a Company (panel)
Venture investors and others are increasingly trying to create companies based around technology from national labs and universities. The national labs, meanwhile, have accelerated their efforts to commercialize their technology. But it's also a risky proposition. In these sessions, investors and researchers will share their insights in how to navigate the process.

More information:
PARC Cleantech Innovation Program ∙ PARC Client Services

American Water Works Association (AWWA) Water Quality Technology Conference and and Exhibition (WQTC) 2008
18 November 2008, Cincinnati, Ohio
Jennifer Ernst; Meng Lean; Ashutosh Kole, Jeonggi Seo, Armin Volkel

Curved Fluidic Structures to Improve Aggregation Kinetics in Municipal Water Treatment
We report on improvements to aggregation kinetics of colloidal particles in municipal water treatment by the use of curved fluidic structures, resulting in up to 50% reduction in coagulant dosage. A novel high throughput, purely fluidic, continuous flow, membrane-less, size selective method for particulate separation has been recently reported where centrifugal force created in spiral flow channels generate transverse hydrodynamic forces to separate micron-sized neutrally buoyant particles which are further focused and diverted for extraction. Together, the improved aggregation and particulate separation offer a potentially transformative approach3 to the conventional practice of water treatment. The combined effects of the spiral mixers with improved agglomeration to generate denser and uniformly sized pin floc, and spiral separators for in-line clarification presents an opportunity to eliminate flocculation and sedimentation steps, resulting in potentially significant savings in reduced land use, chemical cost, operational overhead, and faster processing time from raw to finished water. This technology improvement is also directly relevant to other water applications, including: industrial water purification, waste water reclaim, power plant cooling tower, pre-treatment for RO, and almost any instance where reduction of TSS loading reduces clogging and extends the time between cleaning for many MF and UF filtration membranes.

More information:
PARC Client Services ∙ PARC water filtration technology ∙ PARC Cleantech Innovation Program

American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting
19-23 November 2008, San Francisco, California

The Affordances of Deep-Emersion Team-Based Video Ethnography in the Workplace (Luke Plurskowski)
As the popularity for ethnographies of work have grown in recent years in academia as well as in the corporate world, the question of how best to apply ethnographic methods in a study of work has become increasingly important. This paper overviews a specific methodological approach developed by PARC over the past ten years. This approach, which combines cutting-edge technology and traditional principles of ethnographic field methods, has helped PARC succeed at many large-scale, deep-emersion studies of workplaces, some spanning two years or more. This paper cites case study examples of the methodology's application to real research engagements, to illustrate its various stages: preparation, data collection, data processing, analysis, reporting and co-design. This paper will also discuss the impact this approach has on the qualities of data that can be collected as well as on the types of reports that can be given as a result of such studies.

Ethnography in the Corporation Workshop sponsored by the National Association for the Practice of Anthropology (Brigitte Jordan)
This interactive workshop is intended for anyone who wants to prepare for a career in business or who wants to learn more about doing anthropology in corporations. Through case examples, we will explore the differences between corporate and academic investigations and examine how organizational researchers adapt anthropological methods to business settings.

More about PARC ethnography...

International Workshop on Storage Security and Survivability
31 October 2008, Fairfax County, Virginia
Philippe Golle

Testable Commitments
A key challenge in litigation is verifying that all relevant case content has been produced. Adding to the challenge is the fact that litigating parties are both bound to produce relevant documents and bound to protect private information (e.g. medical information). This leaves open the possibility of withholding content inappropriately, and verifying that this has not occurred is a time-consuming process involving the presiding judge. We introduce testable commitments: a cryptographic technique for verifying that only the right information has been withheld with only minimal involvement from a trusted third party. We present a construction of testable commitments and discuss its implementation. Related PARC research...

CMU Human-Computer Interaction Institute Seminar Series
29 October 2008, Pittsburgh, Pennysylvania
Peter Pirolli

From Solo to Social Information Foraging Theory
Information Foraging Theory is a theory of human-information interaction that aims to explain and predict how people will best shape themselves to their information environments, and how information environments can best be shaped to people. The approach involves a kind of reverse engineering in which the analyst asks (a) what is the nature of the task and information environments, (b) why is a given system a good solution to the problem, and (c) how is that "ideal" solution realized (approximated) by mechanism. Typically, the key steps in developing a model of information foraging involve: (a) a rational analysis of the task and information environment (often drawing on optimal foraging theory from biology) and (b) a computational production system model of the cognitive structure of task. I will review work on individual information seeking, as well as out more recent studies of the social production, sharing, and use of information in areas such as wikis, social tagging, social network sites, and social search. Related PARC research...

Technology Sourcing for Faster Innovation and Business Growth: Integrating External Ideas with Internal Development
28-30 October, Boston
Jennifer Ernst

Industry leaders will discuss how they have implemented technology scouting and open innovation programs -- including expanding their innovation networks, discovering opportunities, leveraging IP (internal, external, joint), enhancing productivity and competitiveness, shifting organizational culture, and assessing risks and rewards. PARC client services...

ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS 2008)
27-31 October, Alexandria, Virginia
Philippe Golle

Machine Learning Attacks Against the Asirra CAPTCHA
The Asirra CAPTCHA relies on the problem of distinguishing images of cats and dogs (a task that humans are very good at). The security of Asirra is based on the presumed difficulty of classifying these images automatically. In this talk, we describe a classifier which is 82.7% accurate in telling apart the images of cats and dogs used in Asirra... We also investigate the impact of our attacks on the partial credit and token bucket algorithms proposed... One contribution of our work is to inform the choice of safeguard parameters in Asirra deployments. Related PARC research...

Emerging Technologies Summit 2008
27-28 October, San Diego, California
Scott Elrod, Nitin Parekh, Meng Lean

PARC-moderated panel sessions/ hosted presentations:

• Session 1: Technology Development and Clean Tech Investments -- focusing on early stage investments, from a range of perspectives including that of companies with new demand-side technologies, and of angel, VC and corporate venture funds; individual talks and panel will address the current investment climate, as well as the outlook over the next several years
• Session 7: Technology Incubation and Clean Tech Investments -- focusing on understanding how technologies make their way into the marketplace with perspectives from industrial research centers, the national labs and Universities; the panel will also address the incubation role that is being provided by various organizations around the world

PARC talk: Rapid, Low energy, Compact, Scalable Water Treatment

This presentation describes a highly scalable fluidic technology that presents a transformative approach to the practice of conventional water treatment. Features include: a high throughput, purely fluidic, continuous flow, membrane-less, size selective method for particulate extraction; and accelerated agglomeration kinetics from mixing and transporting chemical coagulant and raw water in confined channels... The integrated approach using both spiral mixers and spiral separators eliminate flocculation and sedimentation steps, resulting in significant savings in capital cost (reduced land area, equipment, and infrastructures), and operations and maintenance cost (reduced chemical use, low energy, and faster processing time from raw to finished water). This technology is also directly relevant to many other applications including: industrial water purification, waste water reclaim, power plant cooling tower, pre-treatment for RO, and almost any instance where reduction of TSS loading prevents clogging and extends the time between cleaning for many MF and UF membranes.

More information:
PARC sessions ∙ PARC water filtration technology ∙ PARC Cleantech Innovation Program

Stanford Engineering Seminar
27 October
Eugene Chow

Stress-Engineered MEMS
More about this PARC research...

Visual Analytics Science and Technology
19-24 October 2008, Columbus, Ohio
Eric Bier, Dorrit Billman, Kyle Dent, Stuart Card

Entity-Based Collaboration Tools for Intelligence Analysis (best paper award winner)
Software tools that make it easier for analysts to collaborate as a natural part of their work will lead to better analysis that is informed by more perspectives. We are interested to know if software tools can be designed that support collaboration even as they allow analysts to find documents and organize information (including evidence, schemas, and hypotheses). We have modified the Entity Workspace system to test such designs and have evaluated the resulting design in both a laboratory study and a study where it is situated with an analysis team. In both cases, effects on collaboration appear to be positive. Key aspects of the design include an evidence notebook optimized for organizing entities (rather than text characters), information structures that can be collapsed and expanded, visualization of evidence that emphasizes events and documents (rather than emphasizing the entity graph), and a notification system that finds entities of mutual interest to multiple analysts. More about this PARC research...

Singapore Hydrohub Seminar (hosted by the Public Utilities Board)
15 October 2008, Singapore
Meng H. Lean & Nitin Parekh

Water purification without membranes: A novel technology from PARC
We describe the novel hydrodynamic separation of neutrally buoyant suspensions in curved channel structures. We also describe the application of this transformative technology to water treatment using the concept of in-line coagulation, floc formation, and immediate separation. Advantages of the approach include: high throughput, continuous flow, selectable particle-size cut-off separation, rapid processing, small footprint, and low energy (power and pressure). The capability to separate suspensions from a fast flowing stream is generic to many applications; including: municipal water treatment, pre-treatment for RO, waste water reclaim, ballast water treatment, industrial water purification, agricultural water, food and beverage, bio fuels (algae harvesting), produced waters, power plant cooling tower, and so forth. Identification of parallel applications for this platform technology, developing business valuation, mapping of the application landscape, and creation of a strategy to prioritize which application to go after presents a challenging business development effort. More about the water filtration technology...

Ethnographic Practice in Industry Conference (EPIC)
15-18 October 2008, Copenhagen, Denmark
Brigitte "Gitte" Jordan

Mobile Work and Mobile Lives: A Roundtable Discussion of Emerging Concepts and Themes toward a Research Agenda
The mobile or remote work trends that have generated transformations in the global economy have also created major shifts in conventional workscapes and lifescapes. Technologies have increasingly divorced task from place and have made possible the de-territorialization of work and created the virtual workplace and the virtual organization with social and cultural consequences. Technological advances have allowed production facilities to expand into new territories, so that it is not just knowledge work that has become elusive, but the work that produces the items we use day-to-day has also become mobile, unbounded, and independent of particular localities. The format of the Mobile Work and Mobile Lives workshop will be loosely structured to facilitate open conversation and debate about mobile work and mobile lives, so that themes and issues will emerge to spark research ideas that can be developed in academic, corporate, or other organizational settings. The co-organizers' previous investigations suggest that the topic of mobile work and lives has not been widely researched by ethnographers (with some notable exceptions), and often gets dismissed as obvious. The goal of this roundtable is to discuss, debate, and reflect upon the far-reaching and often invisible effects these trends have on workers' lives, lifestyles, and life options and to envision future trends that can guide the work of ethnographic practice and research. More about PARC ethnography...

Fusionopolis
17 October 2008, Singapore
Stuart Card

Grand opening of Fusionopolis
Intended to be one of the world's leading research and development centers and lead Singapore's transformation into a knowledge-based economy, Fusionopolis is the new complex where Singapore is bringing together 1600 scientist and engineers in the physical sciences, computer technology, and engineering as part of its investment in research and development to power future innovation and industries. Along with guest of honor Prime Minister Le Hsien Loong, PARC Senior Research Fellow Stuart Card has been invited to the official opening and reception. More about Stuart Card...

Technology Park Berlin Adlershof
9 October 2008, Berlin, Germany
Markus Fromherz

Introduction to PARC
More about PARC & client services...

International Workshop on Nitride Semiconductors (IWN 2008)
6-10 October 2008, Montreux, Switzerland
John E. Northrup (invited speaker)

Indium incorporation c-plane and m-plane InGaN surfaces
We present first-principles calculations for m-plane and c-plane In0.25Ga0.75N surfaces, focusing on how the growth conditions affect indium incorporation.

International Conference on Prognostics and Health Management
6-9 October 2008, Denver, Colorado
Serdar Uckun (general chair)

Standardizing Research Methods for Prognostics
Prognostics and health management (PHM) is a maturing system engineering discipline. As with most maturing disciplines, PHM does not yet have a universally accepted research methodology. As a result, most component life estimation efforts are based on ad-hoc experimental methods that lack statistical rigor. We provide a critical review of current research methods in PHM and contrast these methods with standard research approaches in a more established discipline (medicine). We summarize the developmental steps required for PHM to reach full maturity and to generate actionable results with true business impact. Related PARC research...

WIRED NextFest
27 September-October 12 2008, Chicago, Illinois
Xerox

Workgroup Protocols for Networked Teams
Now in its fifth year, WIRED NextFest is one of the premier showcases of global innovations transforming our world. Xerox is one of three presenting sponsors. Exhibits will showcase bold sustainable design, next generation healthcare, interactive art and games, humanoid robotics, and more -- including PARC's water filtration technology. More about the water filtration technology...

Summer Institute at Wallenberg Hall
26 September 2008, Palo Alto, California
Bo Begole

Workgroup Protocols for Networked Teams
PARC will present research results on "Predictive Work Rhythms".

Ubicomp 2008
22-24 September 2008, Seoul, Korea
Kurt Partridge

On Using Existing Time-Use Study Data for Ubiquitous Computing Applications
Governments and commercial institutions have conducted detailed time-use studies for several decades. In these studies, participants give a detailed record of their activities, locations, and other data over a day, week, or longer period. These studies are particularly valuable for the ubicomp community because of the large number of participants (often the tens of thousands), and because of their public availability. In this paper, we show how to use the data from these studies to provide validated and cheap (although noisy) classifiers, baseline metrics, and other benefits for activity inference applications. More about PARC's ubiquitous computing work...

Eighteenth International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS'08)
14-18 September 2008, Sydney, Australia

19th International Workshop on Principles of Diagnosis (DX'08) [pdf]
22-24 September 2008, Blue Mountains, Australia

PARC topics include:

• A Unified Information Criterion for Evaluating Probe and Test Selection
• A Framework for Continuously Estimating Persistent and Intermittent Failure Probabilities
• Using Model-Based Diagnosis for Bayesian Inference
• Pervasive Diagnosis: Integration of Active Diagnosis into Production Plans
• An Improved Approach for Generating Max-Fault Min-Cardinality Diagnoses

More about PARC's work in Intelligent Control & Autonomous Systems...

Eighth IAPR International Workshop on Document Analysis Systems (DAS 2008)
16-19 September 2008, Nara, Japan
Prateek Sarkar

On the Reading of Tables of Contents
This paper presents a framework for understanding tables of contents of books, journals, and magazines. We propose a universal logical structure representation in terms of a hierarchy of entries, each of which may contain a descriptor and a locator. We enumerate graphical and perceptual cues that provide cues to parsing of tables of contents in terms of this formalism. We make initial suggestions about the form of evaluation metrics for comparing groundtruthed tables of contents with the output of recognition algorithms... Finally we discuss implications of our observations on the design of recognition algorithms. More about PARC's intelligent image recognition work...

IEEE International Symposium on Personal, Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications (PIMRC 2008)
15-18 September 2008, Cannes, France
Marc Mosko

Context-Aware Packet Switching in Ad Hoc Networks
We present the design and performance of a new approach to packet switching for MANETs, which we call Context Aware Protocol Engines (CAPE). With CAPE, nodes disseminate information in the network by means of context-aware packet switching that enables the statistical multiplexing of bandwidth, processing and storage resources using integrated signaling covering channel access, routing and other functions, to share and store the context within which information is disseminated. Data packet headers consist of simple pointers to their context, and elections and opportunistic reservations integrated with routing are used to attain high throughput and low channel-access delay. More about PARC's networking work...

Venture Capital Private Equity Roundtable meeting
12 September 2008, Palo Alto, California
Mark Bernstein

New Business Value from Research Innovation at PARC
PARC's research innovation enables several forms of business value creation within the lines of its business model. Payment for client services, funding from government agencies, and licensing royalties for its patents and know-how are all prominent sources of revenue. This talk will focus on the different models for creating new businesses from PARC's internal projects, in collaboration with entrepreneurs who incubate their ventures with PARC technology, and with some who reside inside PARC and grow their businesses with the help of the research community. More about PARC's Client Services...

14th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery & Data Mining
24-27 August 2008, Las Vegas, Nevada
Richard Chow, Philippe Gollé, Jessica Staddon

Detecting Privacy Leaks using Corpus-Based Association Rules & Sponsored ad-based similarity: an approach to mining collective advertiser intelligence
Detecting inferences in documents is critical for privacy applications in order to ensure the desired release or acceptance of information. In this paper, we propose a refined and practical model of inference detection using a base corpus. Our model is inspired by association rule mining: inferences are based on word co-occurrences...Our model also includes the important case of private corpuses, to model inference detection in settings such as an enterprise where there is a large private document repository... More about PARC's security & privacy work...

SPIE Optics + Photonics
10-14 August 2008, San Diego, California

PARC topics include:

• "All printed thin film transistors for flexible electronics" (Invited Paper)
• “Characterization of flexible image sensors"

More about PARC's work in large area electronics...

2008 Academy of Management Annual Meeting
8-13 August 2008, Anaheim, California
Yutaka Yamauchi

Understanding and Changing Requirements Development Practices in Enterprise System Development
We report a field study of interactions between users and designers who were specifying requirements for an enterprise system. Conversations were tape-recorded and analyzed over time as participants worked together to develop requirements. The detailed analysis revealed a four-stage learning model that characterizes requirements development as a pathway from syntactic, to semantic, and to pragmatic nature of requirements. The findings led us and designers to co-develop a new requirements development methodology. The methodology was deployed through training sessions within the IT organization. More about PARC's ethnography work...

103rd Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association
1-4 August 2008, Boston, Massachussetts
Jack Whalen

PARC talks include:

• Ethnomethodology: Working Documents (with Nahoko Kameo, Marilyn Whalen)
• What 'unique adequacy criteria' might mean in actual practice.
  (Invited presentation to a special session of the
  Ethnomethodology/Conversation Analysis Section)
• Tales From the Field: Ethnomethodological and Conversation Analytic
  Research
• Strategic and Applied Research in a Corporate Laboratory
• Sociology in the High-Technology WorkplaceSociology in the High-technology Workplace

More about PARC's ethnography work...

IEEE LEOS 2008 Summer Topicals
21-23 July 2008, Acapulco, Mexico
Peter Kiesel, Markus Beck, Michael Bassler, Noble Johnson

Micro-fluidic-based optical detection platform for characterizing fluorescing objects with integrated wavelength detection
We describe a compact, low-cost analyte detection platform that combines a fluidic channel, large area fluorescence excitation and on chip wavelength detection. The unit is optimized to record native fluorescence spectra from moving analytes. More about PARC's optical detector systems work...

Air Force Office of Scientific Research Cognitive Modeling-Software Engineering Workshop
21-22 July 2008, Arlington, Virginia
Jack Whalen

Certainly, software engineers require abstractions of objects in the world and the processes that animate them when designing and developing computer systems. Indeed, a design is an abstraction, a formal representation or model that serves as a kind of plan for the builders. But does this mean that when the objects of interest are human beings and their behavior – the social order nicely described by SEI as the ‘ecosystem’ for any and all computing – that researchers who study humans, social scientists in particular, ought to then have similar kinds of abstractions and formal models as their own goal, as a basic requirement of their science? Most social and behavioral scientists would answer in the affirmative, arguing without an analytically stipulated conceptual scheme or model from which to proceed (and to which to return), any orderliness in the vast plentitude of human beings’ lived experience cannot be found (seen), let alone explained. The social science tradition that informs my work, ethnomethodology, provides a different answer, however, one based on a rather different perspective on the organization of human behavior. This alternate perspective also directs our attention to humans’ own understandings of their actions: How do they make sense of their world, display this understanding to others, and produce the mutually shared social order in which they live – and in which the computer systems we design and build for them must operate? In addressing these questions, I very briefly describe the ethnomethodological approach, discuss the problem of representation and abstraction in the analysis of behavior, and argue about why this matters for system design. More about PARC ethnography...

Twenty-Third Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-08)
13-17 July 2008, Chicago, Illinois

PARC talks include:

• “Combining Breadth-First and Depth-First Strategies in Searching for Treewidth"
• "Pervasive Diagnosis: The Integration of Diagnostic Goals into Production Plans"
• "Heuristic Search for Target-Value Path Problem"

Related PARC innovation areas:
intelligent control & autonomous systems ∙ embedded reasoning

Interdisciplinary Workshop on Security and Human Behaviour
30 June-July 1 2008, Boston, Massachussetts
Markus Jakobsson

Love and Authentication
One of the most commonly neglected security vulnerabilities associated with typical online service providers lies in the password reset process. By being based on a small number of questions whose answers often can be derived using data-mining techniques, or even guessed, many sites are open to attack. To exacerbate the problem, many sites pose the very same questions to users wishing to reset their forgotten passwords, creating a common "meta password'' between sites: the password reset questions. At the same time, as the number of accounts per user increases, so does the risk for the user to forget her password. Unfortunately, the cost of a customer-service mediated password reset is far beyond possible for most service providers. In this talk, an alternative technique will be presented. It is fast and efficient, is compatible with input-constrained devices (such as handheld devices), and has low error rates. More about PARC's security work...

Singapore International Water Convention
25 June 2008, Singapore
Meng Lean

High Throughput Membrane-less Water Purification
This paper describes a highly scalable fluidic technology that presents a transformative approach to the practice of conventional water treatment. Features include: a high throughput, purely fluidic, continuous flow, membrane-less, size selective method for particulate extraction; and accelerated agglomeration kinetics from mixing and transporting chemicals and raw water in confined channels... More about PARC's water technology work...

22nd International Workshop on Qualitative Reasoning
22 June 2008, Boulder, Colorado
Lukas Kuhn & Johan de Kleer

An integrated approach to qualitative model-based diagnosis
This work extends model-based diagnosis to systems which convert, move, and process material. Examples of such systems are printers, refineries and food processing plants. Such plants present two challenges to model-based diagnosis: (1) the plant may process 100s-1000s of items per minute so retaining full details of behavior of all past objects is impractical, and (2) complex multi-way interactions can occur among components operating on the same object. We address the first challenge by synopsizing past behavior in a data structure of fixed size. We address the second challenge by introducing the notion of interaction fault which represents the situation where a set of components operating on the same object damage the object even though each component alone produces no noticeable damage. Introducing interaction faults is much simpler than introducing fine-grained models of component object interactions. We demonstrate the approach on a highly redundant printer. More about PARC's intelligent control & autonomous systems work...

ACL Workshop on Software Engineering, Testing, and Quality Assurance
for Natural Language Processing
20 June 2008, Columbus, Ohio
Tracy Holloway King (joint work with Dick Crouch at Powerset )

Type-checking in Formally Non-typed Systemsguage Understanding: Question answering and textual 'entailment'
Type checking defines and constrains system output and intermediate representations. We report on the advantages of introducing multiple levels of type checking in deep parsing systems, even with untyped formalisms. More about PARC's natural language work...

Tech Connect Summit
4 June 2008, Boston, Massachussetts
Meng Lean

Low-Cost Membrane-less Water Purification
Conventional municipal water treatment is a multi-stage process, requiring large amounts of land and/or expensive filtration processes. PARC has developed a compact, low-cost purification system that reduces maintenance down-time, increases throughput, decreases power consumption, and shrinks real estate requirements. Alternate applications exist for the core IP. Membrane filtration (MF) is the state of the art for removing particles from water, but it suffers from clogging and frequent down-time to back flush. Cyclone separators require sedimentation which results in long processing times and cannot address particles smaller than 70mm depending on transit time. Our technology will separate particles down to the 1-5um size range, does not need membranes, can address neutrally buoyant particles, and can operate continuously. Water utilities, membrane suppliers, and water solution providers will be potential clients. Advantages include: minimal clogging as our approach is self-cleaning; low cost of manufacturing and direct integration with existing pumping and plumbing infrastructure; lighter TSS loading on membranes elsewhere in the system; replacement for intermediate filtration steps; small footprint with elimination of flocculation and sedimentation – particularly valuable for growing capacity of existing facilities in urban areas; reduced coagulant dosage and elimination of most flocculant cost; and faster processing or reduced time between raw and finished water leading to reduced holding capacity. More about PARC's water technology work...

Clean Technology 2008
2 June 2008, Boston, Massachussetts
Meng Lean

Membrane-less Filtration for Conventional Potable Utility Applications
This talk describes an innovative highly scalable fluidic technology that presents a transformative approach to the practice of conventional water treatment. Features include: a high throughput, purely fluidic, continuous flow, membrane-less, size selective method for separation of neutrally buoyant suspensions; and accelerated agglomeration kinetics from enhanced mixing and high fluidic shear resulting in reduced coagulant chemical dosage by 30-50%. Together, the combined effects allow for... More about PARC's water technology work...

SDForum Security SIG
22 May 2008, Palo Alto, California
Markus Jakobsson

Crimeware: What lies ahead?
Malware these days is pushed by organized crime, aided by phishing-like deceit tactics, and spread via advertisements, social networks and shrink-wrapped electronics. It captures keystrokes of individuals, spies on corporations and politicians, and threatens our national security by means of server takeovers, information leakage, and a potential deterioration of trust in the infrastructure. We no longer call it malware - we call it crimeware. Crimeware can only survive if attacks can be monetized, and is suppressed by the risk of traceability and legal action. The traditional form of monetization relies on stealing credentials... In this talk, we present and explain yet another, not yet publicized, attack type that would let absolutely untraceable attackers to cash out huge amounts, at the cost of tremendous damages to victim corporations. Discussion of this new kind of attack will allow us to look into the future and consider what new countermeasures are needed. More about PARC's security & privacy work...

International Congress of the International Society for Analytical Cytometry (XXIV)
17-21, May 2008, Budapest, Hungary
Peter Kiesel, Michael Bassler, Markus Beck, Noble Johnson, & Oliver Schmidt

On-the-flow characterization of cells based on native fluorescence spectroscopy

A novel concept for on-chip flow cytometry with improved signal-to-noice-ratio and “alignment-free” optics

More about PARC's optical detector systems work...

NEC Technology Forum 2008
15 May, Tokyo, Japan
Bo Begole

Reaching for Seamless Interaction in Information Environments
The overarching goal of PARC's research in ubiquitous computing today is to achieve an environment of "seamless interaction" -- where people control information environments as a seamless whole as opposed to managing collections of networked components. We take a three-front strategy toward this objective: Ubiquity, Natural Interaction, and Proactivity. Hardware trends continue to drive the ubiquity of computation as miniaturization and the digitalization of media creates technologies that are increasingly portable as well as embedded in buildings, appliances, furniture, clothing and more. New technologies create ways for people to use more natural interaction styles that match the embodied ways we interact with the physical world. Sensor systems have made it possible for systems to become proactive in filtering, sorting, and presenting information, even sometimes taking action that is appropriate to the situation. This presentation describes several projects in these research thrusts and reflect on some of the lessons learned for user-centered methods for the design of pervasive, behavior-adapting applications. More about PARC's ubiquitous computing work...

Advances in Biodefense Technology
7-8 May 2008, Barcelona, Spain
Peter Kiesel, Markus Beck, Michael Bassler, Noble Johnson, & Oliver Schmidt

On-the-flow pathogen characterization based on native fluorescence detection
Native fluorescence spectroscopy is promising for pathogen detection since it is sensitive and requires neither specific binding nor tagging. Our compact detection platform combines fluidic channels with chip-size spectrometers and records fluorescence from analytes as they traverse the channel. More about PARC's optical detector systems work...

Workshop on Adaptive and Reconfigurable Embedded Systems (APRES 2008)
21 April 2008, St. Louis, Missouri
Maurice Chu

Enabling Extensibility of Sensing Systems through Automatic Composition over Physical Location
Networked sensing systems are increasingly adopted in many applications, but today's systems are generally single purpose and hard to extend. This paper addresses the problem of enabling developers to develop extensible networked sensing systems. We propose a design methodology, which centers on a novel automatic composition service where the sensor processing software modules are parameterized by a physical location region. The automatic composer automatically configures the processing and communication occurring in a networked sensing system based on up-to-date sensing needs and sensor device availability. Our approach also enables adaptability and robustness against sensor failures. Related PARC work...

26th Annual Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI2008)
5-10 April 2008, Florence, Italy
print program available [.pdf]

PARC presentation topics include:

• “Lifting the Veil: Improving accountability and social transparency in Wikipedia with WikiDashboard”
• “Augmented Information Assimilation: Social and algorithmic web aids for the information long tail”
• “Keyhole Tagging: Selective sharing in close collaboration”
• “Escape: A target selection technique using visually-cued gestures”
• “Crowdsourcing user studies with Mechanical Turk”
• “Activity-Based Serendipitous Recommendations with the Magitti Mobile Leisure Guide”
• “Responsive Mirror: Fitting information for fitting rooms” -- at workshop on Surrounded by Persuasive Ambient Intelligence
• "Social Information Foraging and Sensemaking"; "We digital sensemakers"; "Tracing the microstructure of sensemaking" -- at Sensemaking workshop
• "Cognitive engineering and the psychology of human-computer interaction" -- at Invited Season: Celebrating the 25th anniversary of The Psychology of Human Computer Interaction (by Stuart K. Card, Thomas P. Moran, Allen Newell)

Related PARC innovation areas:
enterprise and web 2.0 knowledge systems ∙ ethnography ∙ human information interaction/ HCI ∙ ubiquitous computing

Condensed Matter & Biological Physics Seminar Series at Purdue University
4 April 2008, West Lafayette, Indiana
Peter Kiesel

Compact, microfluidic-based detection platform for on-the-flow analyte characterization
PARC has developed various key technologies which are essential for on-chip optical detection system. This talk will give a brief overview of these technologies and will then focus on our work in on-the-flow pathogen detection based on native fluorescence spectroscopy. This is a very promising approach that does not require specific binding or tagging of the analyte. However, the variety of cells is large compared to the number of basic molecular building blocks. Therefore, the fluorescence spectra of different species are often very similar, and sophisticated detection methods are required to reveal differences. The specificity of this approach can be further improved by implementing high spectral resolution and using multiple excitation wavelengths. We have developed a compact platform that combines... More about PARC's optical detector systems work...

Federal Trade Commission working meeting [invitation only]
1 April 2008, Washington, D.C.
Markus Jakobsson

FTC roundtable discussion on phishing education
We have been invited by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission to share insights about phishing, the online identity theft technique that uses deceptive spam to trick consumers into divulging sensitive information. The FTC’s goal is to identify ways to raise public awareness of phishing to help consumers protect themselves, giving them a "playbook" for recognizing and reacting to this malicious practice. More about PARC's security & privacy work...

12th Annual International Conference on Research in Computational Molecular Biology (RECOMB2008)
30 March-2 April 2008, Singapore
Marshall Bern

Spectrum Fusion: Using Multiple Mass Spectra for De Novo Peptide Sequencing
We report on a new algorithm for combining the information from several mass spectra of the same peptide. The algorithm automatically learns peptide fragmentation patterns, so that it can handle spectra from any instrument and fragmentation technique. We demonstrate the utility of the algorithm, and the power of multiple spectra, by showing that combining pairs of spectra (one CID and one ETD) greatly improves de novo sequencing success rates. More about PARC's bioinformatics work in this area...

Computer Science Department at U.C. San Diego
21 March 2008, San Diego, California
Marshall Bern

Customized software for peptide identification by tandem mass spectrometry
There are a number of different programs for identifying peptides by tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS), including Mascot, SEQUEST, X!Tandem, Spectrum Mill, Phenyx, and Paragon. A couple years ago, I made the beginner's mistake of writing another such program, ByOnic. But now that I've got the program and can quickly customize it for new types of data, I am finding that this enables some interesting collaborations. I will talk about three such projects: data-independent MS/MS, alcohol-induced carbonylation, and oxidative surface mapping using laser-induced oxidation. More about PARC's bioinformatics work in this area...

U.S. Intelligence Agency workshop held at MITRE Corporation
(hosted by the Integrated Center for Research and Development, in association with the National Media Exploitation Center)
15 March 2008, McLean, Virginia
Eric Saund

Status and a Technology Roadmap for Document Recognition
Intelligence agencies collect vast quantities of data from diverse sources including video, still images, audio recordings, and documents. To extract useful content to "connect the dots," they need to employ computer vision, speech recognition, and document recognition technology. This talk takes stock of the document image analysis portion of the challenge. In this talk, we: (1) survey the state of the art, exploring what works, and what doesn't; (2) consider the drivers and leading edge of both the commercial document recognition industry and current academic research; (3) touch on major trends and a dozen hot topics; (4) consider how and where progress gets made, and how to move it from the laboratory to applications; and (5) discuss major fundamental challenges to the field, and recommend process steps that would maximally leverage R&D investment. More about PARC's intelligent image analysis work...

Center for Language Technology
6 March 2008, Goteberg, Sweden
Annie Zaenen

Towards Language Understanding: Question answering and textual 'entailment'
After a brief introduction about the role of questing answering and textual inferencing in language understanding, we discuss the PASCAL RTE challenge. We describe an experiment that was intended to evaluate how close the RTE challenge comes to representing the judgments of the 'man in the street'. We then decompose the textual inferencing task in real entailments and in more pragmatic notions and illustrate how the PARC XLE system handles both kinds of inferences. More about PARC's natural language work...

Chalmers University of Technology
5 March 2008, Johanneberg, Sweden
Lauri Karttunen

Computing linguistically-based textual inferences
A long-standing goal of computational linguistics is to build a system for answering natural language questions. A successful QA system has to recognize semantic relations between sentences. If the user would like to know the answer a question such as Did Shackleton reach the South Pole?, the system should recognize that the sentence Shackleton failed to reach the South Pole contains the answer. None of the current search engines is capable of delivering a simple NO answer in such cases. The system described in this talk does make the correct inference. It is the Bridge system (a bridge from language to logic) developed at PARC. More about PARC's natural language work...

Symposium on Identity and Trust on the Internet (IDtrust Symposiums)
4-6 March 2008, Gaithersburg, Maryland
Jessica Staddon, Philippe Golle, Paul Rasmussen...

A Content-Driven Access Control System
Protecting identity in the Internet age requires the ability to go beyond the identification of explicitly identifying information like social security numbers, to also find the broadlyheld attributes that, when taken together, are identifying. We present a system that can work in conjunction with natural language processing algorithms or user-generated tags, to protect identifying attributes in text. The system uses a new attribute-based encryption protocol to control access to such identifying attributes and thus protects identity. The system supports the definition of user access rights based on role or identity. We extend the existing model of attributebased encryption to support threshold access rights and provide a heuristic instantiation of revocation. More about PARC's security & privacy work...

Tokyo Tech 21st Century COE Program: The Science of Institutional Management of Technology Annual International Symposium [in Japanese]
29 February 2008, Tokyo, Japan
John C. Knights

Regional Institutions and Their Impact on the Innovation Environment in Silicon Valley
The history of innovation in Silicon Valley and the greater San Francisco Bay Area is frequently explained through the history of the people and companies who made the major technological advances and their personal and organizational triumphs and failures. What is often ignored or relegated to the background is the role that regional institutions played in nurturing the environment and culture in which these people and companies operated and how that role has evolved over time... PARC Vice President of Business Development John Knights examines the evolving roles of these institutions in light of the concurrent globalization of the high technology industry. More about PARC innovation milestones...

Tokyo Institute of Technology and Social Brain Forum [in Japanese]
27 February 2008, Tokyo, Japan
Victoria Bellotti

The Magitti* Activity-Aware Leisure Guide: Opportunity Discovery, Innovation and New Technology Platform Development at PARC
We describe an example of PARC's innovation services for corporate clients. The project was undertaken for Dai Nippon Printing Co. Ltd. (DNP), to assist them in developing a new opportunity beyond their traditional printing business. The Magitti solution*, developed at PARC in close collaboration with DNP personnel, was designed to be synergistic with DNP's existing strengths in the publishing industry whilst incorporating the latest in context- and activity-aware computing techniques to recommend published content. We explain our market and opportunity discovery fieldwork and innovation exercises, as well as the system components and user experience and an early field evaluation. We also discuss ways in which new techniques and technologies were successfully transferred to DNP. More about PARC client services and opportunity discovery through ethography...

*Magitti is an electronic mobile leisure guide that presents options for things to do, filtered by how well they match current interests. Users don't have to tell Magitti what they are doing; it uses an inference engine to figure this out for itself. Interests are inferred from time, location, past behavior, and predicted activity type. Taste profiles and preferences can be dynamically adjusted to further improve recommendations. Over time, Magitti learns from behavior to make its recommendations more personally targeted.

Dow Jones VentureOne Summit 2008
26 February 2008, Redwood City, California
Mark Bernstein

"What’s Next?" panel moderated by Wall Street Journal columnist Lee Gomes
In recent years, VCs have thrust themselves into the worlds of China, India, Web 2.0, and cleantech looking for the next great deal. But what is next on the horizon? Is it perhaps Eastern Europe, Web 3.0, or space? Looking into their crystal balls to give their thoughts: PARC Director and President Mark Bernstein; Prith Banerjee, SVP Research & Director HP Labs; Geoffrey Moore, Venture Partner, Mohr Davidow Ventures; and Vincent Pluvinage, General Manager, Strategic Alliance and Private Equity Partnerships, Intellectual Ventures. More about PARC client services...

Human Computer Interaction Consortium [members only]
30 January-3 February 2008, Frasier, Colorado
Peter Pirolli, Ed Chi

Beyond Information Foraging to Ecologies of Sense Making
The LATEST (Learning Actively about Topics in Emerging Science and Technology) project combines psychological research with technology research in human-information interaction. LATEST involves a three-prong approach to understanding how expertise can be transferred to active learners. First, we are developing a model of expert information foragers. Second, based on this model, we are developing specific tools and interaction techniques to support more expert-like performance in active learners. A large part of the technical research will focus on Web-based social computing. Third, we developing a framework for the evaluation of social sensemaking tools to evaluate these technologies. More about PARC's web-based social computing work...

Rutgers University Center for Cognitive Science Colloquium
29 January 2008, New Brunswick, New Jersey
Lauri Karttunen/ PARC Natural Language group

Computing linguistically-based textual inferences
In this talk we give an overview and a demo of PARC's Bridge system. The particular task that we focus on is entailment and contradiction detection, a more refined variant of the PASCAL RTE (Recognizing Textual Entailment) challenge. Given a passage of text and a query, does the query sentence follow from the text in the passage, is it contradicted by it, or neither? More about PARC's natural language work...

CoDev 2008: Open Innovation – Key Levers for Business Growth & ROI
21-23 January 2008, Scottsdale, Arizona
Jennifer Ernst

Growth beyond the core: fusing inside and outside knowledge to reach new markets presentation available [.pdf]
As Open Innovation has been matured, the concept itself has expanded. Today, the most progressive companies have recognized the advantage of looking outside not only for technology, but also for complementary expertise to help them create or enter new markets. PARC, known for its role in creating much of modern computing, has been deep in the trenches of expertise-based relationships in the last six years. This talk will discuss the nuts-and-bolts of PARC's recent work with both multinational corporations and new ventures. The cases will include a summary of the important lessons for making expertise-based engagements successful, particularly in developing new market opportunities. It will also touch on PARC's own transition from corporate research lab to cross-industry business catalyst. More about PARC client services...

Construction of Meaning, Stanford Semantics and Pragmatics Workshop
18 January 2008, Palo Alto, California
Cleo Condoravdi & Lauri Karttunen/ PARC Natural Language group

Computing linguistically-based textual inferences
In this talk we give an overview and a demo of PARC's Bridge system. The particular task that we focus on is entailment and contradiction detection, a more refined variant of the PASCAL RTE (Recognizing Textual Entailment) challenge. Given a passage of text and a query, does the query sentence follow from the text in the passage, is it contradicted by it, or neither? More about PARC's natural language work...

Workshop on Recommendation and Collaboration, International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces
13-16 January 2008, Canary Islands, Spain
Maurice Chu