MIME-Version: 1.0 Server: CERN/3.0pre6 Date: Wednesday, 20-Nov-96 19:31:55 GMT Content-Type: text/html Content-Length: 3673 Last-Modified: Thursday, 14-Mar-96 20:02:11 GMT About Jim Davis at the Design Research Institute Picture of me

Jim Davis

Xerox Corporation
PhD, MIT Media Lab 1989
davis@dri.cornell.edu

My goal in general is to build software systems that improve communication among people. I believe that communication mediums of the future will have an increasing understanding of the structure and content of the messages they transmit. They will manipulate, reformat, and even generate that content. I am interested in hypertext systems, network information access, and collaboration.

I work on the CSTR project, an ARPA sponsored effort to make computer science technical reports more easily accessible. As part of that work, I designed a distributed technical report server which is now running at many universities.

I am interested in Corporate (or Group) Memory, meaning electronic systems for capturing and accessing the knowledge used and produced by (the workers of) an institution, in order to increase the quality of or reduce the time required to do future work. Corporate memory includes not just the intellectual products of the institution (e.g. an engineer's designs, a lawyer's contracts, an author's screenplays) but also knowledge about the process that produced the product: knowledge of dead-ends explored, tools used, and justifications supporting the final decisions.

I have also begun a project (with Dan Huttenlocher) in developing corporate memory through shared annotation of structured documents. This project investigates how people can share information by reading and writing annotations in electronic documents shared by the group. An initial prototype implementation is being used by Cornell class CS212. Here, the shared documents are problem sets and course notes, and a nnotations might be requests for clarifications by students, technical questions, or corrections made by staff. The question is whether this will be a useful means for students to obtain answers, whether students will find each other's questions a useful source for learning, whether students will often be able to answer each other's questions (correctly), and whether the course staff will find this a useful means for feedback in improving the course. So far, the evidence is that they do.

I'm also interested in natural language generation and the design of computational proxies ("agents") which can safely and reliably carry out remote computations on foreign machines without risk to either you or the owner of the remote machine.

See also

Papers
Online copies of some of my publicatiions.
Web resource for the DRI.
A list of Web resources that seem especially useful for the DRI
my web resources
Resources I've collected that seem useful (or fun) to me
professional history
This is a narrative, not a resume.
Contact improvisation
Is it a sport or an art?
Resume
No, I'm not in the job market. But thanks for asking. I like it just fine at Xerox