2005

How the Web changes your reading habits                                  6/05 Christian Science Monitor
When Ed Chi wants to read, he turns to two of the six computer screens that surround his desk. One is devoted exclusively to e-mail; the other, to the rest of his reading material. The reading experience online "should be better than on paper," Chi says. He's part of a group at PARC developing what it calls ScentHighlights, which uses artificial intelligence to go beyond highlighting your search words in a text. It also highlights whole sections of text it determines you should pay special attention to, as well as other words or phrases that it predicts you'll be interested in. "Techniques like ScentHighlights are offering the kind of reading that's above and beyond what paper can offer," Chi says.

Memory mimic aids reading                                  5/05 Technology Research News
Researchers from the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) have devised ScentHighlights, software that leverages the way the brain models words to help speed the process of reading or skimming through digitized text. The software highlights portions of text in a way that makes it cognitively easier for the user to find what she is looking for. ScentHighlights expands on a set of topics of interest supplied by a user to create a list of keywords tailored to the user's interests.

AI'S Next Brain Wave                                  4/05 Information Week
Information Week reports that artificial intelligence, a field that "had lost its sex appeal by the start of the last decade," is behind a new generation of research. This article features work from four research labs: "IBM, Intel, Microsoft, and Xerox subsidiary Palo Alto Research Center. Instead of leading to another round of outsize expectations, this generation of research likely could lay the groundwork for a new breed of computer systems that learn from their users and the world around them." Computer scientists at the Palo Alto Research Center also are trying to bring user interfaces to life by replacing raw information with material that selects itself based on what the computer thinks the user wants to know. ScentHighlights, published in January and based on a PARC theory called information scent, is part of an emerging class of user interfaces that react to what gets a user's attention. Includes interviews with Stuart Card and Ed Chi.

2004

The New Sensemakers                         12/04 Innovation Pipeline/Red Herring
The Next Thing Beyond Search Is Sensemaking. To understand relevant parts of our world, everyone does sensemaking. Not all sensemaking is equal. Here are some examples of sensemaking ranging from the mundane to the challenging ...

Deceivingly Strong Information Scent Costs Sales             8/04 Jakob Neilsen's Alertbox
"Users will often overlook the actual location of information or products if another website area seems like the perfect place to look. Cross-references and clear labels alleviate this problem."

Martial arts lands wireless blow                          6/04 BBC News
"Scientists at the Palo Alto Research Center in California have developed a system to measure the force of blows in the Korean sport of Tae Kwon Do. It works by using wireless sensors in the gear worn by competitors. "The fact it can work with the scoring system to improve a judge's performance is what we consider to be the novel aspect," said Dr Ed Chi."

Sensors Track Martial Arts Blows                          6/04 Technology Research News
Researchers from the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), Stanford University, and Impact Measurement have brought computers into a martial arts sparring ring with a system that senses the force of a hit.

Indexes Bolster eBook Search                          5/04 Technology Research News
"Book indexes and tables of contents are useful, but of necessity general. Researchers from Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) have given ebooks a more comprehensive index and table of contents tool that combines keyword searching and concept searching."

Search tool aids browsing                          3/04 Technology Research News
"Many research teams are working on the problem of how to make finding information on the Web faster and easier. Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University have devised a scheme that gives existing search engines some extra help."

Sidebar: Virtual Desktops Get Bigger                           1/04 ComputerWorld
The Palo Alto Research Center is working on a new user interface that it says will make the virtual desktop as useful as the physical desktop. It will reflect the way people actually work, rather than making people adapt their workstyles to a computer's quirks.

2003

The Mouse That Roared                                               9/03 CNET
To a degree, the mouse technology has survived because it hamonizes almost perfectly with human hand-eye coordination. If you drew two targets on a screen and bounced between them with different devices, you would perform the task faster and with more accuracy with a mouse than with a track-pointer, a joystick or a touch pad - even if the mechanisms all ran at the same speed.

Web Browsers: The Road Ahead                                  9/03 Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox
"A recent study at the Palo Alto Research Center found that adding this latter feature almost doubles users' performance: locating products on the Xerox website too 3.5 minutes with plain browsing, 3.0 minutes with regular search, and 1.6 minutes when links were highlighted with search relevance in an experimental ScentTrails interface."

PARC                                                                               7/03 PC Magazine
According to usability experts, the top user issue for Web sites is difficult navigation. PARC's UIR group has been developing automated usability tools for several years. The tools work on the theory that the way people navigate information on the web is similar to the way animals forage for food.

Magnify Your Search Results                                        3/03 Search Engine Watch
This article talks about the advantages of using Popout Prism to do internet searches and searches for information in long documents or a large collection of documents. Popout Prism "magnifies critical information on web pages, making it 'pop out' and appear to float above the background."

CONSUMABLES : We want information;                       1/03 Arkansas Democrat Gazette
we need knowledge
"By the early 1990s, Peter Pirolli and Stuart Card of Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, operating on the assumption that the human quest for information was analogous to foraging for food, began to apply what they called" foraging theory" to information hunting and gathering."

2002

Book Review:                                            12/02 Webreference.com
Human Factors and Web Development, 2nd Ed.
"This week we review a new HCI book on web development titled appropriately enough "Human Factors and Web Development, 2nd ed." A collection of 16 chapters from leading experts in the field this book provides a fascinating glimpse into current and future HCI research into man-machine interaction on the web."

Building a Better Automotive Web Site                                        11/02 Forrester Report
"One in five visitors to an OEM Web site becomes less likely to test-drive. But fixing site flaws will only stop the bleeding. To increase test-drive intention, OEMs must motivate users by delivering the right kinds of content."

Understanding user interaction,                                   11/02 Comdex
key to improving Web retrieval
"While the Internet industry has been making progress in applying basic information retrieval to the Web, the future of Web searching must incorporate an understanding of how users interact with search tools. At the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), a Xerox subsidiary, researchers are investigating the next generation of search technology and have created a model, called InfoScent, to describe how users seek information on the Web. InfoScent has enabled PARC researchers to model user traffic patterns on the Web.

Usability and Web site success             11/02 Computerworld, Conference Report
"I traveled to Cambridge, Mass., recently for four days of intensive sessions with leading experts in the field of user interface design gathered for the User Interface 7 East Conference (UI7)."

Digital Bloodhounds:                                                                        6/02 ComputerWorld
Web Users Follow the 'Information Scent'  
"Palo Alto Research Center Inc. (Parc), formerly Xerox Parc, is conducting research that it claims can help Web designers and content providers avoid much of the expensive and time-consuming trial-and-error process that marks many e-commerce projects. Using equations borrowed from biological models, Parc is studying "information scent". "

Dr. Stuart Card named Senior Research Fellow             6/02 PARC News Release
PARC is pleased to announce the promotion of Dr. Stuart Card to Senior Research Fellow, the highest scientific postion conveyed by PARC. Stu joined PARC in 1974 and is currently the area manager of User Interface Research at PARC. This honor recognizes a career that is nothing short of astonishing.

PARC cited as one of leading labs in                        3/02 Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox
defining Human-Computer Interaction
According to Jakob Nielsen, "A core group of elite corporate research labs (and a few universities) defined the field of human-computer interaction....Even though good HCI research occurs at hundreds of worldwide locations, a few research labs have defined the field and nurtured the most important work."Among his list of top labs, PARC is the only lab to make the list in every time period cited. And, Nielsen projects, PARC will likely to continue to be one of the most influential HCI labs in the coming years.

2001

Hot on the Scent of Information             6/01 Wired News
"They say we're nothing but mammals. Info-seeking mammals. According to research being conducted at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, humans look for information on the Web with the same food-gathering techniques employed by animals. Namely, by following its scent. "

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