In early February, I left PARC to start working at Google as a research scientist. To start out, I will report directly to Peter Norvig. This is obviously an exciting change for me, as I had dreamed of making a difference in people's lives with technology for many years, and Google is a great platform for making this happen.
I worked at PARC for 13 years, starting as an intern in 1997, and officially hired in 1999 and working up to Sr. Research Scientist in 2005, and becoming Area Manager of the Augmented Social Cognition group in 2007, and Principal Scientist sometime after that.
I first went to PARC following my dream to work at the famed research center, and to work with Stuart Card, who brought me on as a visualization and visual analytics researcher. Little did he know that I would become much more interested in web analytics, and I used visual analytics as a jumping board for getting involved with researchers such as Jim Pitkow and Peter Pirolli. I also must thank Peter Pirolli for inspiring me to be the researcher that I became during the years at PARC; he had been a partner-in-crime in getting social computing recognized as a important research direction for HCI at PARC.
Having visualized my professional network recently, one can see that it is filled with PARC researchers and alumni. I guess it is true that once you've been at PARC, you remain a PARC person for the rest of your life*!
Going forward, I will blog about research results here instead of the old ASC Team blog. Thanks for listening!
--Ed
*It's worth noting that Eric Schmidt (soon ex-CEO for Google) is a PARC alumni.
