PARC CEO: Past, present, and future

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>> We're at the Palo Alto Research Center, also known as PARC, and with me today is Mark Bernstein, and we're going to talk about the past, present, and future of PARC.

MUSIC Let's talk about the past. You have a wonderful wall here, and I see you have a iPad-looking-ish thing. Can you go into some of your favorites here and inaudible.

>> Mark Bernstein: Sure. What you're looking at here is really a representation of the output of Mark Weiser's ubiquitous computing vision. And that was the belief that, in the early nineties, when most of this was built, is that computation was going to find many different form factors and play different roles in our lives. And what you see here are just a few of those artifacts. Some that are very small, pad-size here, as you pointed out, and also very large, interactive networked displays, which were all intended to enhance how people interact with information.

>> Okay. And now today, in the early 2000s, Xerox was thinking about selling PARC and then decided to keep it. What's the strategy today and, sort of, what's your model?

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Bernstein: We still see ourselves as the portal to Xerox's future, so a lot of the work we do is for them. But we also have an independent side where we're able to construct our own research agenda, and that's where our clean-tech initiative and some of our life sciences work comes from.

>> So looking out in the future, what are your three biggest areas of focus, and, you know, what are the things ten years from now we're going to go inaudible?

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Bernstein: We have a, we have a couple of what we call "big bets." Content-centric networking is one of those that we believe will help transform the internet from what it is today into a much more able vehicle for being able to both store and deliver content to users of the internet in a much more efficient fashion. So that's something that will sort of transform over the next ten years. We also have a project in clean tech we call hydrodynamic separation, and that's focused on being able to separate particles and fluid streams. So the application's there for clean water and for some chemical manufacturing processes. and then overall, I think everyone recognizes that the future is going to be fraught with a lot more information than we have right now. I know it seems like a lot now, but we haven't seen anything yet. So the notion of being able to have contextual information delivery is another area of research we're really focused on here.

>> Alright. Thanks a lot for your time, Mark.

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Bernstein: My pleasure.

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==== Transcribed by Automatic Sync Technologies ====