John Seely Brown's research while affiliated with Palo Alto Research Center and other places
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Publications (48)
Over the past decade, knowledge and learning have emerged as the keys to economic success and as a focus for thinking about organizational effectiveness and innovation. An overwhelming majority of large organizations now engage in a wide range of knowledge and learning activities and nearly all have programs and personnel explicitly dedicated to th...
The ubiquity of information makes it easy to overlook the local character of innovative knowledge. Nowhere is this local character more overlooked yet paradoxically more evident than in Silicon Valley. The Valley persists as a densely interconnected innovative region, though its inhabitants loudly proclaim that the information technology they devel...
For years pundits have predicted that information technology will obliterate the need for everything from travel to supermarkets to business organizations to social life itself. They have heralded the coming of the virtual office, digital butlers, electronic libraries, and virtual universities. Beaten down by info-glut and exasperated by computer s...
While the recent focus on knowledge has undoubtedly benefited organizational studies, the literature still presents a sharply contrasting and even contradictory view of knowledge, which at times is described as "sticky" and at other times "leaky." This paper is written on the premise that there is more than a problem with metaphors at issue here, a...
How do schools help to create the kind of person a child becomes? Changing Classes tells the story of a small, poor, ethnically-mixed school district in Michigan's rust-belt, a community in turmoil over the announced closing of a nearby auto assembly plant. As teachers and administrators found ways to make schooling more relevant to working-class c...
Much current work on organizational knowledge, intellectual capital, knowledge-creating organizations, knowledge work, and the like rests on a single, traditional understanding of the nature of knowledge. We call this understanding the "epistemology of possession," since it treats knowledge as something people possess. Yet, this epistemology cannot...
The teaching and learning of mathematics in K-12 classrooms is changing. New curricula and methods engage learners in working on real problems. An essential feature of this work involves teacher and students in 'talking mathematics'. How can students learn to do this kind of talking? What can they learn from doing it? First published in 1998, this...
Work practices usually differ fundamentally from the way that organizations describe their operations in manuals, training programs, etc. This paper focuses on the way that certain work practices are supported at Xerox, and the conclusions of this effort are related to complementary investigations on learning and innovation. Here we propose that th...
OVERVIEW: As the business environment becomes more turbulent and unstable, new opportunities are emerging for radical innovations that can shape markets. Yet the budgets for research that can produce this kind of innovation are under serious attack. Researchers need to demonstrate that their work contributes to enhancing a corporation's ability to...
Bits flowing through the wires of a computer network are ordinarily invisible. But a radically new tool shows those bits through motion, sound, and even touch. It communicates both light and heavy network traffic. Its output is so beautifully integrated with human information processing that one does not even need to be looking at it or near it to...
A lot has been written about the Internet and where it is leading. We will say only a little. The Internet is deeply influencing the business and practice of technology. Millions of new people and their information have become interconnected. Late at night, around 6am while falling asleep after twenty hours at the keyboard, the sensitive technologi...
These essays by leading theorists and researchers in sociocultural, cognitive, developmental and educational psychology honour the memory of Sylvia Scribner, whose work is recognized by each of the authors as seminal to their own thinking. The themes include the relationship between history and culture, the importance of context to thinking, the pl...
Sociocultural Studies of Mind addresses the primary question: how is mental functioning related to the cultural, historical, and institutional settings in which it exists? Although the contributors speak from different perspectives, there is a clear set of unifying themes that run through the volume: 1. One of the basic ways that sociocultural sett...
The following keynote presenters shared their views on organizational change through a dialogue format. We have preserved this format in the summary of their presentation in order to show the interplay of their ideas.
Understanding Practice brings together the many different perspectives that have been applied to examining social context. From Ole Dreier's work on the therapeutic relationship, to Hugh Mehan's work on learning by disabled students, to Charles and Janet Keller's work on blacksmithing, the chapters form a diverse and fascinating look at situated le...
Recent ethnographic studies of workplace practices indicate that the ways people actually work usually differ fundamentally from the way organizations describe that work in manuals, training programs, organizational charts, and job descriptions. Nevertheless, organizations tend to rely on the latter in their attempts to understand and improve work...
The purpose of this symposium is three-fold: First, by presenting a selection of our work as examples, we seek to define a model of intelligent interaction and illustrate points in the interface process where artificial intelligence can play a role.
Second, by comparing the approaches represented in our efforts, we intend to explore a fundamental p...
This paper is a response to Iwasaki and Simon [14] which criticizes de Kleer and Brown [8]. We argue that many of their criticisms, particularly concerning causality, modeling and stability, originate from the difference of concerns between engineering and economics. Our notion of causality arises from considering the interconnections of components...
The purpose of this symposium is three-fold: First, by presenting a selection of our work as examples, we seek to define a model of intelligent interaction and illustrate points in the interface process where artificial intelligence can play a role.
Second, by comparing the approaches represented in our efforts, we intend to explore a fundamental p...
This article explores new paradigms for the use of computers in learning. Two concepts crucial to the development of qualitatively new kinds of computer-based learning environments are identified: the importance of focusing on the underlying process rather than just the product of a creative effort; and the importance of the computer's ability to r...
Research on human factors in computer systems has emphasized supporting individuals. This panel will discuss new issues that emerge when computer systems support groups of people and whole organizations. Malone (see following paper) will suggest a broadening of the definition of user interfaces to include “organizational interfaces” and will indica...
Research on human factors in computer systems has emphasized supporting individuals. This panel will discuss new issues that emerge when computer systems support groups of people and whole organizations. Malone (see following paper) will suggest a broadening of the definition of user interfaces to include “organizational interfaces” and will indica...
A qualitative physics predicts and explains the behavior of mechanisms in qualitative terms. The goals for the qualitative physics are (1) to be far simpler than the classical physics and yet retain all the important distinctions (e.g., state, oscillation, gain, momentum) without invoking the mathematics of continuously varying quantities and diffe...
The am program was constructed by Lenat in 1975 as an early experiment in getting machines to learn by discovery. In the preceding article in this issue of the AI Journal, Ritchie and Hanna focus on that work as they raise several fundamental questions about the methodology of artificial intelligence research. Part of this paper is a response to th...
A qualitative physics predicts and explains the behavior of mechanisms in qualitative terms. The goals for the qualitative physics are (1) to be far simpler than the classical physics and yet retain all the important distinctions (e.g., state, oscillation, gain, momentum) without invoking the mathematics of continuously varying quantities and diffe...
ABSTRACT The AM program,was constructed by Lenat in 1975 as an early experiment in getting machines,to learn by discovery. In the preceding article in this issue of the AI Journal, Ritchie and Hanna focus on that work,as they raise several fundamental,ques6ons about,the methodology,of artificial intelligence research. Part of this paper is a respon...
This paper explores a particular kind of qualitative reasoning, called "envisioning," that is capable of producing causal explanations for device behavior. It has been implemented in a computer program, ENVISION, which can analyze a wide variety of thermal, fluid, electrical, translational and rotational devices. Rather than present the technical d...
One of the intriguing properties of many expert trouble-shooters is their ability to diagnose systems that they have never seen before. These experts construct their own qualitative causal models of how a system functions given a description of its structure and what it is supposed to do. What is the basis of this skill? Towards answering this ques...
Change is a ubiquitous characteristic of the physical world. But what is it? What causes it? Howcan it be described? Thousands of years of investigation have produced a rich and diverse physics which provides many answers. Important concepts and distinctions underlying change in physical systems are state, cause, law, equilibrium, oscillation, mome...
Citations
... 3. The task for subjects was to describe these relations by means of simple graphs (e.g. Brown and de Kleer 1981). 4. One reviewer asked why we did not use the Big Five personality dimensions in total. ...
... As Thi Hoang Yen (2014: 98) mentioned, the history and developments of this concept are widely reported in literature reviews, such as those made by Kennedy (1977), 22 Abratt (1989), Brown (1998), Hatch et al. (2003 and recently by Furman (2010). ...
... Due to their system of performance evaluation, researchers are keen to disclose information as soon as possible in order to gain priority in terms of patents and publications. Conversely, firms may wish to keep the innovation secret and to watch the patterns of the market and competitors in order to control their own resources in terms of appropriability and gain a competitive advantage (Brown, 2000;Teece, 1986). Since researchers and firms have to 'sell their product' to a different audience, this leads the two actors to explore problems and objects of research differently. ...
... The work reported in this paper is mostly situated in the field of Qualitative Physics (see, e.g., [6]- [8]). The main goals of Qualitative Physics are to "produce causal accounts of physical mechanisms that are easy to understand" and at the same time are "far simpler than the classical physics and yet retain all the important distinctions without invoking the mathematics of continuously varying quantities and differential equations" as stated in de Kleer's cornerstone paper [8]. ...
Reference: Qualitative Physics in Angry Birds
... The interest in automated discovery of hypothesises between mathematical concepts dates back to 1976. Lenat [121][122][123] developed two programs called 'AM' and 'EURISKO' to discover new mathematical concepts with a few simple heuristics which then build upon each other in a recursive manner. Later, in 1984, Valiant [124] formalised the concept of learning machines, i.e. machines capable of learning entire classes of non-trivial concepts in a polynomial number of steps, and showed that this was possible to achieve. ...
![[object Object]](https://i1.rgstatic.net/ii/profile.image/272728615813137-1442034977632_Q64/Douglas-Lenat.jpg)
... Da Der bekannteste Vertreter der klassischen konsistenzbasierten Diagnosealgorithmen ist die General Diagnostic Engine (GDE) [5] [16] [38], deren Implementierung der Diagnose von logischen Schaltungen dient und über die Jahre modifiziert wurde [39]. Weitere Anwendungen zur Diagnose von logischen Schaltungen umfassen unter anderem [40] und [41]. Grundsätzlich lässt sich um Fehlerzustände, die das fehlerhafte Verhalten von Komponenten beschreiben erweitern. ...
... For this reason, it was seen as a central imperative and priority in the project to engage key stakeholders who it was envisaged would have key roles in the generation of the scientific findings of the project as well as putting into practice its findings in the form of tools for development. Such stakeholders have unique insights into their national, sectoral and local level contexts such that the findings can be translated into what researchers have called "local knowledge" (Brown & Duguid, 2002;Geertz, 1985). There are no easy recipes for implementing research findings at workplaces. ...
![[object Object]](https://i1.rgstatic.net/ii/profile.image/438568687542273-1481574331349_Q64/Paul-Duguid.jpg)
... Computer aided teachinglearning is one of the most effective additional tool when annexed with usual science and language courses (Fisher, 1983). It is indecisive either computer functions of information presentation or the teaching method used or both roped together are the influencing factors on student learning (Brown, 1985;Kulik, 1991). ...
... It is here that the individual begins to have a complex character, because it can be verified that learning is from its birth a group, collective, social activity, because it is mediated by the exchange with other human beings (Nonaka et al., 1996), it is the process through which man assimilates, in interaction with his own characteristics, skills, actions and experiences, in the interaction with the knowledge acquired from the skills, emotions, feelings and values immersed in cultural, social and economic contexts (Brown & Duguid, 2001;Fromm, 1980 (Pozo, 1989). ...
... PICT#6 (informed choice) supports occupants' autonomy by opposing technology paternalism. Noticeably, the principle whereby Aml is controllable by ordinary people is in tension with the ubiquitous computing paradigm of a calm technology permanently available at the periphery of users' attention (Weiser and Brown, 1996). PICT#8 and sustainability foster distributive justice in the context of consumer capitalism where Aml is deployed, such as with respect to the scarcity of energetic resources in a city, for example. ...
