Jim Thornton
Jim Thornton I am a researcher in the Ubiquitous Computing Area of the Computer
Science Lab at PARC
(formerly Xerox PARC)
Palo Alto Research Center
3333 Coyote Hill Road, Palo Alto, CA 94304
Tel: +1-650-812-4407 Fax: +1-650-812-4471
jthornton@parc.com
last update $Date: 2007/04/23 22:35:05 $
I am interested in automating the administration and defense of large collections of machines, especially issues of configuration management and system administration. I am also interested in technological support for social interaction in a variety of settings.
Our work in Social, Mobile Audio Spaces builds on our experience with audio in the museum setting but addresses a much larger opportunity created by the combined trends of increasing wireless bandwidth and increasing demand for contact within social groups.
San Jose Mercury News Article (2/2/05)
The constraints of daily life often limit the degree to which we can make television viewing a social, rather than solitary, experience. The SocialTV project is exploring how devices like PVRs and set-top boxes could be enhanced to support “distributed viewing parties” and other forms of group television viewing.
BusinessWeek Online Article (3/22/05)
Select Previous Projects
The Sotto Voce Electronic Guidebooks work provided an opportunity to explore the application of mobile computing technology in the museum context with a diverse user population. What is most distinctive about our approach is its focus on supporting and encouraging social interaction within a party of visitors while simultaneously providing information content for a learning experience.
The Harland project investigated a flexible attribute storage model for application data, somewhere between conventional structured and semi-structured data models. Harland started as an extension of the Placeless Documents project but quickly followed an independent path informed by experiences of application development in the lab.
I was a founding member of the Placeless Documents project which explored a radical restructuring of the way that documents in electronic form are organized and managed. In Placeless, we aimed to eliminate organizations that tie particular documents to single "places" like a certain physical machine, an application program, or even one spot in a filing structure. Instead, we proposed a structure revolving around independent document properties and indirection between access and storage to allow flexible organization and control in terms meaningful to people.
DocuPrint NPS is the product name of a family of production printing systems sold by Xerox based on software developed at PARC. I was part of the team that developed the core architecture and delivered the first implementations to customers. I contributed to many different parts of the system including the job store, network connectivity, and field configuration management. Although I have not been working on the project for a long time, I still get to consult occasionally.
L. Oehlberg, N. Ducheneaut, J. D. Thornton, R. J. Moore, E. Nickell.
Social TV: Designing for Distributed, Sociable Television Viewing.
Proc. EuroITV 2006,
Athens, Greece, May 2006.
J. D. Thornton, V. Quéma.
Evaluating Patch Safety: Configuration Sharing for Problem Avoidance.
PARC Technical Report TR-05-2, Feb. 2005.
[PDF]
P.M. Aoki, M. Romaine, M.H. Szymanski, J.D. Thornton, D. Wilson, and A.
Woodruff.
The Mad Hatter's Cocktail Party: A Social Mobile Audio Space Supporting
Multiple Conversations.
Proc. ACM SIGCHI Conf. on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI
'03), Fort Lauderdale, FL, Apr. 2003, 425-432.
[PDF]
R. E. Grinter, P. M. Aoki, A. Hurst, M. H. Szymanski, J. D. Thornton and A.
Woodruff.
Revisiting the Visit: Understanding How Technology Can Shape the Museum
Visit.
Proc. ACM Conf. on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, New Orleans,
LA, Nov. 2002, 146-155.
[PDF]
P. M. Aoki, R. E. Grinter, A. Hurst, M. H. Szymanski, J. D. Thornton and A.
Woodruff.
Sotto Voce: Exploring the Interplay of Conversation and Mobile
Audio Spaces.
Proc. ACM SIGCHI Conf. on Human Factors in Computing Systems,
Minneapolis, MN, Apr. 2002, 431-438.
[PDF]
A. Woodruff, P. M. Aoki, R. E. Grinter, A. Hurst, M. H. Szymanski, and J. D.
Thornton.
Eavesdropping on Electronic Guidebooks: Observing Learning Resources in
Shared Listening Environments.
Proc. 6th Int'l Conf. on Museums and the Web, Boston, MA, Apr. 2002,
21-30.
[PDF]
P. Dourish, W. K. Edwards, J. Howell, A. LaMarca, J. Lamping, K. Petersen, M.
Salisbury, D. Terry and J. Thornton
A Programming Model for Active Documents
Proc. ACM Symp. User Interface Software and Technology UIST2000, San
Diego, November 2000.
A. LaMarca, W. K. Edwards, P. Dourish, J. Lamping, I. Smith and J. Thornton.
Taking the Work out of Workflow: Mechanisms for Document-Centered
Collaboration
Proceedings of the Sixth European Conference on Computer-Supported
Cooperative Work (ECSCW'99), Copenhagen, Denmark, September 12-16, 1999.
[PDF]
E. de Lara, K. Petersen, D. B. Terry, A. LaMarca, J. Thornton, M. Salisbury,
P. Dourish, K. Edwards and J. Lamping.
Caching Documents with Active Properties
HOTOS-VII Hot Topics in Operating Systems
[PDF]
J. Thornton
Practical Description of Configurations for Distributed Systems Management
Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Configurable Distributed
Systems, IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Distributed
Processing, May 6-8, 1996, Annapolis, Maryland, pp. 36-43
J. Thornton
Practical Description of Configurations for Distributed Systems Management
MSc. Thesis, University of British Columbia, 1994.
[PDF]
J. Thornton
Prescriptions: A Language for Describing Software Configurations
UBC CS TR-94-18