Mark Stefik

Mark Stefik is currently managing the Knowledge, Language, and Interactions area at PARC. He is also a lead on two client projects which are examples of what he calls "social nervous systems": 

• Urban Parking Services, a multidisciplinary project that includes ethnographers and hardware and software engineers across PARC working with several U.S. and European cities to understand and address parking issues around congestion, public safety, and public policy. The work includes field studies, analytics, modeling, and developing hardware and software prototypes of new-generation parking systems and services.
• Digital Nurse Assistant, a multidisciplinary project that includes ethnographers, software engineers, and workflow modelers. The team has developed an experiential demo with a major healthcare provider and is now working on pilot deployments in several U.S. hospitals. 

Overall, Mark's research is about how people create and share information. His earlier work focused on personalized news, sensemaking systems, hardware and software for collaboration in electronic meetings, object-oriented programming systems, and expert systems. Mark has contributed technology to several PARC spinouts; his seminal digital property rights for publishing work led to the creation of
ContentGuard, which was acquired by Microsoft, Time Warner, and Thompson in 2005. Mark also managed and led one of PARC's major research organizations in developing sensemaking technology for intelligence analysts.

Dr. Stefik's Ph.D. work at Stanford University was on experiment planning in molecular genetics. He is a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and his perspectives on serial invention are documented in the book
Breakthrough: Stories and Strategies of Radical Innovation.