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 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.