Fully formed object-oriented programming in the Smalltalk programming language and integrated development environment.
PARC is also where Steve Jobs and early Apple engineers took inspiration for aspects of the Macintosh computer.
Today, Xerox PARC remains an active operation with a host of commercial clients, focused in areas that include printed electronics, data and analytics, cleantech, and contextual intelligence.
As part of the cxotalk.com series of talks with innovators, I spoke with the Xerox PARC's CEO, Stephen Hoover.
During the conversation, we talked about innovation, managing brilliant researchers, and the critical importance of user experience. One of the fascinating parts of our discussion was a window Steve provided into PARC's work on the Internet of Things.
You can watch the entire video embedded above and read a complete transcript on the episode page at cxotalk.com. Here are portions of Stephen Hoover's comments, edited for length and clarity.
Why does innovation succeed or fail?
What is human-centered big data?
Our role is to understand people's jobs and how technology can help them get those jobs done while making it easy for them to adapt.
For example, Xerox has a significant business in customer care, with 2.5 million customer interactions daily. Across all of those interactions, we can learn which are the more likely problems needing to be solved and the answers.
This idea of human-centered, big data has a human on both sides of the equation. There is the end customer; we need to understand their state of mind and what they're doing. Then, the call center agent: helping them take that call and use it as a learning opportunity. We watch what the customer care agent does to solve the problem, using that data and machine learning to make our diagnostic algorithms better for the next time.
As computers become more and more capable, we're going to have human-computer teams solving problems, interacting together to come up with a better answer. There is a lot of science, a lot of technology, in that.
[For example,] it used to be that humans were best at chess in the world, and then artificial intelligence technologies came along, and computers beat the best humans.
But, who are the best computer chess players today? Human-computer teams. You take a person, and a computer and they work together. Computers are really good at deep, fast search to evaluate all the alternatives, but they are not best at high-level strategy.
You may be thinking three or four strategies; the computer investigates and provides the likely outcomes. The human then picks the next strategy, and they play back and forth in the cycle. That's the best chess player today.
We're going to see work happen more and more in that way. We have a significant investment in this whole area of machine learning and empathetic computing, understanding what people's intent and behaviors are and how to help them.
What are opportunities for the Internet of Things?