Mark D. Weiser

July 23, 1952 - April 27, 1999

Dr. Mark Weiser, Chief Technology Officer at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), was best known for his contributions to the field of mobile computing. He was often referred to as the father of "ubiquitous computing". He coined that term in 1988 to describe a future in which PCs will be replaced with invisible computers embedded in everyday objects. He believed that this will lead to an era of "calm technology," in which technology, rather than panicking us, will help us focus on what is really important to us.

Other research interests included garbage collection, operating systems and user interface design. Dr. Weiser, who held several U.S. and foreign patents, wrote or co-wrote more than 75 technical publications on such subjects as the psychology of programming, program slicing, operating systems, programming environments, garbage collection and technological ethics. He taught graduate and undergraduate courses on human factors, systems, and programming. He was a popular speaker at scientific symposia and conferences, and a frequent subject of media interviews.

Dr. Weiser, who founded three companies, was the drummer with rock band Severe Tire Damage, the first band to perform live on the Internet. He was born on July 23rd, 1952 in Chicago, Illinois. He was married with two children.

The following are highlights of his career accomplishments. For more details, please see http://www.ubiq.com/weiser.

1999 recipient of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Sigmobile award, in recognition of his outstanding contributions to mobile computing

1996 - 1999 Chief Technology Officer, Xerox PARC

Dec. 1995 Program Chair for the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Fifteenth Symposium on Operating System Principles

June 1993 Severe Tire Damage became the first band to broadcast live video and audio worldwide on the Internet.

1993 ACM & IEEE, International Conference on Software Engineering "Best Paper Ten Years Later" award for "Program Slicing."

1992-1994 Associate Editor of Transactions on Software Engineering

1992-1994 elected to board of the Computer Research Association. Founder of the CRA series of annual conferences for heads of industrial computer science research laboratories.

Sept., 1991 seminal article, The Computer of the 21st Century, appeared in "Scientific American" magazine. It remains essential reading for people entering the field.

1988-1995 Manager of the Computer Science Laboratory, Xerox PARC

1988 became Principal Scientist, Xerox PARC

1987 joined Xerox PARC as Member of Research Staff

1979-1987 C.S. Dept., University of Maryland (Associate Chairman, 1986-1987)

1979 received Ph.D. from University of Michigan, Computer and Communication Sciences

1976 received M.S.from University of Michigan, Computer and Communication Sciences

1973-1976 Co-founder and President, Cerberus Inc., Ann Arbor, MI

Other activities

Principal Investigator on grants and contracts with ARPA, AFOSR, NSF, and NASA.

Professional Societies: Association for Computing Machinery, IEEE Computer Society, AAAS.

Reviewer of papers and proposals for International Conference on Software Engineering, IEEE, Transactions on Software Engineering, Journal of Systems and Software, National Science Foundation, Communications of the ACM, Software-Practice & Experience, Acta Informatica, IEEE Software, and others.

Public Software: PCR - AutoTetris - game for Sun workstations, 1992; Portable Common Runtime system providing threads, garbage collection, I/O and symbol table management for multiple languages and operating systems, 1989; SDI - game for Sun workstations, 1987.

Publications (partial list):

Dan Russell and Mark Weiser. "The Future of Integrated Design of Ubiquitous Computing in Combined Real and Virtual Worlds." Proc. CHI-98, Los Angeles, CA, pg 275-276, 1998.

Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown. "Center and Periphery: Balancing the Bias of Digital Technology," Blueprint for the Digital Economy, pp317-335, Edited by Don Tapscott, McGraw-Hill, 1998.

Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown. "Riding on a Sea of Calm", World Link, pp48-50, January/February 1998

Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown. "Designing Calm Technology" , PowerGrid Journal, v 1.01, http://powergrid.electriciti.com , July 1996. Also appeared as Chaper 6 - "The Coming Age of Calm Technogy" in the book "Beyond Calculation - The Next Fifty Years of Computing" by Peter J. Denning and Robert M. Metcalfe, Copernicus/An Imprint of Springer-Verlag.

Mark Weiser. "Open House," Review, the web magazine of the Interactive Telecommunications Program of New York University. March 1996,

Roy Want, Bill Schilit, Norman Adams, Rich Gold, David Goldberg, Karin. Petersen, John Ellis and Mark Weiser. "An Overview of the Parctab Ubiquitous Computing Experiment," IEEE Personal Communications, December 1995, Vol 2. No.6, pp28-43

Mark Weiser and Andy Garman. "Bleeding Edge Technology – From Lab Coats to Market Caps," Red Herring, August 1995

Mark Weiser. "The Technologist's Responsibilities and Social Change," Computer-Mediated Communication Magazine, V2N4. April 1, 1995

Mark Weiser, Alan Demers, Brent Welch, Scott Shenker. "Scheduling for Reduced CPU Energy", Operating System Design and Implementation (OSDI) Conference, Monterey, CA. November, 1994

Vicky Reich and Mark Weiser. "Libraries are More than Information: Situational Aspects of Electronic Libraries," CSL Technical Report 93-21, June 1994. also Serials Review, 1994, V20N3, pp. 31-38.

Mark Weiser. "The World is not a Desktop," Interactions; January 1994; pp. 7-8

Christopher A. Kantarjiev and Alan Demers and Ron Frederick and Robert T. Krivacic and Mark Weiser. "Experiences with X in a Wireless Environment," Proceedings USENIX Symposium on Mobile & Location-Independent Computing, August 1993.

Mark Weiser, "Some Computer Science Problems in Ubiquitous Computing," Communications of the ACM, July 1993. (reprinted as "Ubiquitous Computing". Nikkei Electronics; December 6, 1993)

Mark Weiser, "The Computer for the Twenty-First Century," Scientific American, September 1991

Mark Weiser. Alan Demers, and Carl Hauser, "The Portable Common Runtime Approach to Interoperability," ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, December 1989

Hans Boehm and Mark Weiser. "Garbage Collection in an Uncooperative Environment," Software: Practice and Experience, September 1988

Glenn Pearson and Mark Weiser. "Exploratory Evaluations of Two Versions of a Foot-Operated Cursor-Positioning Device in a Target Selection Task," Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 88, May 1988

Jack Callahan, Don Hopkins, Mark Weiser, and Ben Shneiderman. "Experiments with Pie Menus," Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 88, May 1988

Mark Weiser. "Program slicing," IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, vol. SE-10, no. 4, July 1984

Mark Weiser and Chris Torek. "The Maryland Window System," Proceedings of the 1984 Unix Users (Usenix) Conference, pp. 166-172, Salt Lake City, Utah, June, 1984