PARC Scientist Stu Card Wins Franklin Institute Bower Award for Achievement in Science

Palo Alto, CA, March 27, 2007 – Stuart K. Card, a senior research fellow at PARC (Palo Alto Research Center, Inc., a Xerox Corporation subsidiary), has been awarded the Franklin Institute’s 2007 Bower Award and Prize for Achievement in Science, one of science’s highest tributes.

Honoring the greatest men and women in science, engineering, and technology, the Franklin Institute Awards identify individuals whose innovation has benefited humanity, advanced science, launched new fields of inquiry, and deepened our understanding of the universe.

Dr. Card’s award is for his fundamental contributions to the fields of human-computer interaction and information visualization. “Card pioneered the field of making access to computer electronics so streamlined that a human never stumbles over it or even notices it. Card’s improvements in human-computer interaction have been as key to the electronic revolution as parallel advances in electrical engineering,” according to the Franklin Institute.

From his earliest research on computer input devices to his current work on developing ways to characterize human-information interaction, Dr. Card is credited with fundamentally influencing the creation of computers that best suit the capacity of the human mind and body.

“Stu Card has led the evolution in human-computer interaction beyond the utility of effective interfaces with computational devices,” PARC president and director Mark Bernstein said. “The emergence of ‘human-information interaction’ as a science, which couples cognitive modeling and human perception, is a tribute to Stu and his colleagues.”

In addition to the Bower Award, he was elected in February as a member of the National Academy of Engineering, one of the highest honors accorded to professional engineers.

Card joined PARC in 1974, when it was a Xerox laboratory chartered with the goal of creating “an architecture for information.” Since then, he has become renowned for his contributions to the creation of “Rooms” (a multi-screen workspace manager), the information visualizer, table lens, segmenting of pull-down menus into sections, and the human-performance analysis of the mouse, which directly influenced its commercial introduction.

Today, Card’s work focuses on how people can use visual, machine, and social means to make sense of large amounts of information.

The prolific inventor holds 36 U.S. patents, and has published more than 80 publications, 63 of them in refereed journals or conference proceedings. He and his research team have innovated technologies that led to the development of more than a dozen commercial products and influenced the founding of three software companies: Inxight Software, Outride, and ContentGuard. Card has written three books, including the groundbreaking Psychology of Human-Computer Interaction (1983), which helped to establish the field and has been cited in more than one thousand publications, and the seminal Readings in Information Visualization: Using Vision to Think (1999), which popularized the phrase “information visualization.” He has served as an ACM Associate Editor, on numerous editorial boards, and university, professional, and governmental advisory committees.

In 2000, Card was awarded the first Lifetime Achievement Award for Computer-Human Interaction from the Association for Computing Machinery, and simultaneously named an ACM Fellow. In 2001, he was elected the first Fellow of the Computer-Human Interaction Academy, and in 2005, the World Technology Network elected him a Fellow.

Card and his fellow 2007 Franklin Institute Award Laureates will be honored at a black-tie gala at the Benjamin Franklin National Memorial and the Franklin Institute Science Museum in Philadelphia on April 26. He will be personally honored at the “Card Colloquium” at the University of Pennsylvania on April 25, where he will speak about Human Information Interaction: The Theory and Design of Cognitive Prostheses.

Originally from Romeo, Michigan, Card and his family live in Los Altos Hills, California.

About PARC

PARC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Xerox Corporation (NYSE: XRX), collaborates with sponsors and clients to discover breakthrough business and technology concepts that solve real needs, and transform how enterprises deliver value to customers. PARC’s physical, computer, biological, and social scientists take an agile, cross-disciplinary approach to innovation, with the vision, expertise, and instinct to convert groundbreaking scientific findings into industrial-strength prototypes. Founded in 1970 as part of Xerox Research, then incorporated in 2002 as an independent research business, PARC is celebrated for such innovations as laser printing, distributed computing and Ethernet, the graphical user interface (GUI), object-oriented programming, and ubiquitous computing.

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