John Maxwell

John Maxwell is a Principal Engineer at PARC.  His expertise is in developing intelligent tools to help users with domain-specific tasks.  He has done work in computational physics developing a compiler that automatically compiles differential equations into a solver for computational fluid dynamics (CompMods).  He has also worked in computational mechanical engineering developing tools for searching the space of mechanical designs (Fun Design). John developed a conversational agent framework that was used to help people perform hands-free tasks.  The framework included animations that were overlaid on the task using augmented reality to show the user how to perform the task.  John also worked on a tool to help nurses manage their workload (Digital Nurse Assistant). John spent many years doing computational linguistics as part of the NLTT group.  He was the technical lead for the Xerox Linguistic Environment (XLE), which is a grammar writer’s workbench. It was one of the key enabling technologies used by Powerset for semantic search over Wikipedia. Powerset was acquired by Microsoft and became part of Bing. He also made significant contributions to the natural language technology that was licensed to Microlytics and to Inxight. John joined PARC as an intern in 1978 as part of the Smalltalk group. He has a bachelor's and master's degree in computer science from MIT. He wrote the first WYSIWYG music notation editor (Mockingbird) for his Master’s thesis. He also helped develop the Cedar experimental programming environment.