Reflections on Impact and Summary (Click here)
Scaling Up: Spreading knowledge around
Fields: Sensemaking, Digital Rights Management, Artificial Intelligence (AI). Invented the core technology for digital rights management and co-founded the subfield of sensemaking. Contributions to a workshop at a National Collaboratory workshop helped to prepare the way for the NSF national collaboratory projects and the digital libraries program. A system for personalized news combined human/social and machine intelligence for a trainable and curated knowledge medium without knowledge engineers.
- Selected Papers
- The cost structure of sensemaking. InterCHI, 1993. (437 cites)
- Letting loose the light. (in Internet Dreams), 1996 (354 cites)
- Shifting the possible: How trusted systems and digital property rights challenge us to rethink digital publishing. Berkeley Law Technology Journal, 1997 (266 cites)
- The next knowledge medium. AI Magazine.1986. (196 cites)
- The news that matters to you. AI Magazine. 2011. (1 cite)
- Selected Patents
- System for controlling the distribution and use of digital works. U.S. Patent 5,629,980 (932 cites)
- System for controlling … having a usage rights grammar. U.S. Patent 5,715,403 (800 cites)
- System for controlling … composite digital works. U.S. Patent 5,638,443 (638 cites)
- Commercial Impact
- Spun out the ContentGuard company yielding several hundred million dollars to Xerox. This was foundational technology for securely distributing all digital media — music, movies, books, etc.
- Projects that developed products for Xerox transportation services (now products of Conduent).
Human-Computer Collaboration
Fields: Human-computer interaction, computer-intermediated communication, AI, analytic, and context-awareness for teams.
Workshop
- AAAI-17 Workshop on Human-Machine Collaborative Learning.
- The news that matters to you. AI Magazine. 2011.
- Patents
- Multiple patents on hardware and software for collaborative systems.
- Commercial Impact
- CitySight product for departments of transportation in cities with several hundreds of users in city departments. Now a product of Conduent serving several U.S. cities.
Collaboration: Creating knowledge in teams
Fields: Computer Support for Cooperative Work (CSCW), Computer and Human Interaction (CHI) This work introduced multi-user interfaces for team work. The lIveboard was the initial device in Mark Weiser’s ubiquitous computing vision.
Selected Papers
- Beyond the Chalkboard Computer Support for collaboration and problem solving in meetings. CACM, 1987. (1195 cites)
- WYSIWIS Revised: early experiences with multi-user interfaces. ACM TOOIS. 1987. (750 cites)
- City Lights: Contextual views in minimal space.CHI 2003. (74 cites)
- Selected Patents
- Small Scale work space representations indicating activities by other users. U.S. Patent 4,974,173 (206 cites)
- Ultrasound input device. US Patent 4,814,552 (107 cites)
- Commercial Impact
- Liveworks company. Chesbrough paper.
- Minor contributions to Uppercase and Inxight.
Reasoning: Automating knowledge work (earliest)
Fields: Artificial Intelligence (AI). The textbook on knowledge systems brought rigor to the field. For my doctoral dissertation I developed a hierarchical constraint approach to manage the combinatorics of planning across loosely-coupled subproblems.
- Selected Papers
- Planning with constraints: MOLGEN part 1. AIJ, 1981. (823 cites)
- Introduction to Knowledge Systems, Morgan Kaufmann, 1995. (515 cites)
- Planning and Meta-Planning: MOLGEN part 2. AI, 1982. (369 cites)
- The organization of expert systems. AIJ, 1982 (346 cites)
- Commercial Impact
- Indirect impact in education for the knowledge systems industry.
Representation: Designing symbol structures
Fields: Programming Languages, Artificial Intelligence (AI). This work includes thought leadership in language design contributing to the unification of knowledge representation and object-oriented programming. There is also philosophical work on engineering of knowledge representations.
- Selected Papers
- Object-oriented programming: themes and variations, AI Magazine 1985. (952 cites)
- The Loops Manual. Xerox Corporation. (487 cites)
- CommonLoops: Merging lisp and object-oriented programming. ACM SIGPlan. 1986 (372 cites)
- Knowledge programming in Loops. AI Magazine. 1983 (160 cites)
- Towards the principled engineering of knowledge. AI Magazine. 1988 (58 cites)
- Commercial Impact
- Co-developed object-oriented extension for InterLisp supporting Xerox’s lisp machine business.
- The Units Package developed at Stanford was the original technical basis for the KEE product of Intellicorp.