The Palo Alto Research Center and Knowledge Discovery Technologies

1
The Palo Alto Research Center and Knowledge
Discovery Technologies

• Martin Leitch November 10th, 2005

2
Preview of Points

• The history of the Palo Alto Research Center
• What is Knowledge Discovery?
• Current Knowledge Discovery technologies
• Future Knowledge Discovery

3
History

• PARC's mandate was no less than to create the
  architecture of information for the future."
• We do everything from atoms to culture here.
• John Seely Brown, former director of Xerox PARC
• It's the birthplace of distributed and personal
  computing.
• ComputerWorld, MAY 18, 1998

4
Innovations
5
Innovations

• Ethernet
• The Mouse
• Smalltalk
• Client/Server Architecture

• The precursor to Postscript
• VLSI
• WYSIWYG
• The GUI

6
Current PARC Research Areas

• Micro-Scale Devices
• Smart Matter Integrated Systems
• Mobile Wireless
• Image Processing
• Community
• Document Content
• Sensemaking

7
What is Knowledge Discovery?

• Knowledge Discovery technologies help to automate
  organizing, utilizing and evolving large
  knowledge repositories.
• The WIMP Paradigm
• "90 of the human brain is devoted to processing
  sensory information and 10 to cognitive or
  thinking tasks. In computers, that ratio is
  reversed.
• John Seely Brown, former director of Xerox Parc

8
Knowledge Discovery Technology

• Star Tree (Hyperbolic Tree)
• Table Lens
• Timewall
• Content Terrain Map
• Categorizing

9
Patchwork Girl
10
Star Tree (Hyperbolic Tree)
11
Table Lens
12
TimeWall
13
Content Terrain Maps
14
Categorizer

• Categorizer - Factiva (A Reuters/Dow Jones
  company) receive and distribute over 180,000 news
  feeds per day 65 being handled by Categorizer.
  The work of over 600 people is now automated with
  comparable accuracy and that accuracy increases
  over time as the volume grows.

15
Future Knowledge Discovery
16
Links

• http//www.parc.com
• http//www.inxight.com
• http//www.lexisnexis.com/startree/startree.asp
• http//ucjeps.berkeley.edu/map2.html