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...
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...
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...
“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)
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...
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...
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...
We report on work on and with the English ParGram grammar (error mining, construction of semantic representations by means of term-rewriting rules, improved probabilistic disambiguation). More about PARC and ParGram...
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...
Computing Linguistically-based Textual Inferences
This talk provides an overview and a demo of PARC's Bridge system. The particular task that we focus on is entailment and contradiction detection (ECD), 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...
Control of Large-Scale Reconfigurable Systems
The rise in embedded computing, sensing and actuation is leading to the development of larger scale distributed systems in a variety of domains. These systems can have many appealing qualities, such as modularity - which confers benefits during both design time and run time - and reconfigurability - the ability to change the system structure for customization purposes, for repairs or in response to environmental conditions or component failure. To reap these benefits, however, the software designed for such complex systems must address a number of challenges in dynamically coordinating and controlling the distributed components. This presentation covers some of the challenges, solutions and lessons learned during the design and implementation of a prototype highly modular, reconfigurable printing system at PARC. More about PARC's intelligent control & autonomous systems work...
Class identification of pathogens based on native fluorescence spectroscopy on-a-chip
Native fluorescence spectroscopy is a promising approach for pathogen detection since it is sensitive and requires neither specific binding nor tagging of the analyte. Specificity can be met by a combination of multi-color excitation, collection of detailed spectral information and optimized evaluation techniques. Our approach achieves these requirements with a compact solution that includes on-chip native fluorescence spectroscopy. More...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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.
"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...
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...
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...
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...
An Intelligent Fitting Room Using Multi-Camera Perception
We describe the architecture of the vision system for the Responsive Mirror, a novel system for retail fitting rooms that enables online social fashion comparisons in physical stores based on multi-camera perception. This vision system provides implicitly controlled real-time interaction for “self” and “social” clothing comparisons by automatically tracking user’s motion as she tries on clothes. We describe the key components of the motion-tracking and clothes-recognition systems and evaluate their effectiveness against images collected during a previous user study and a dataset of images representing content from a social fashion network. More about PARC's ubiquitous computing work...
Mobile Recommendations for Leisure Activities
We demonstrate a context-aware mobile system for recommending information about leisure activities (Shopping, Eating, Doing, Seeing, and Reading), codenamed Magitti, which infers the user’s leisure activity from context and patterns of behavior. Magitti filters a database of city-guide-style leisure information to find the most relevant items based on the user’s profile, history, context, and predicted activity. Users can also customize the profile or dynamically adjust the current preferences if they wish to improve the recommendations further. More about PARC's context-aware and ubiquitous computing work...
All Additive Printing of Flexible Backplanes for Large Area Displays Methods used to deposit and integrate solution-processed materials to fabricate thin-film transistor (TFT) backplanes by ink-jet printing are presented. The materials studied allow the development of an all-additive process in which materials are deposited only where their functionality is required. We demonstrate successful integration of a complete additive process with the fabrication of simple prototype TFT backplanes on glass and on flexible plastic substrates, and we discuss the factors that make the process possible. More about PARC's large-area electronics research...
Planar Compound Microlenses for Particle Detection in Biomimetic Flicker Spectroscopy Water is a vital part of human life and a resource to be protected for national defense and security. The National Research Council has recommended that public water supplies be tested for dangerous contaminants, and that sensor systems be created to continuously monitor the water supply to maintain public safety and confidence. We propose a new biomimetic sensor technology for continuous monitoring of water systems for agent particulates using micro-optical-electro-mechanical (MOEMS) techniques. More about PARC's particle manipulation work...
Toward Seamless Interaction in Information Environments The early vision of Ubiquitous Computing is no longer a dream but an all too ubiquitous problem. Yesterday's vision of widespread computation, information, media, and communication has today become a reality where managing and controlling these many types of information services, devices, and applications is becoming impossible. Today's technological reality also creates opportunities for new kinds of applications and services that integrate information across the "virtual" and "real" aspects of one’s life. 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: 1) lightweight "at-hand" interaction techniques and systems that react to implicit user actions; 2) infrastructures and platforms that reduce technical boundaries; and 3) user behavior modeling to anticipate user goals and adapt systems to user needs. More about PARC's ubiquitous computing work...
KMWorld & Intranets
6-8 November 2007, San Jose, California
Ed Chi & Lawrence Lee
Web 2.0 in the Enterprise While the benefits of Web 2.0 social software for greater collaboration, innovation, and knowledge sharing are often discussed, the coordination and interaction costs that occur in social systems are often overlooked. Based on extensive studies of social systems such as del.icio.us and Wikipedia, we have identified a number of factors that need to be managed to realize the full benefits of these systems within the enterprise. More about PARC's augmented social cognition work...
