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John Seely Brown is currently a visiting scholar at
the Annenberg Center at USC and prior to that he was the Chief Scientist
of Xerox Corporation and the director of its Palo Alto Research Center
(PARC)—a position he held for nearly two decades. While head of
PARC, He expanded the role of corporate research to include such topics
as organizational learning, complex adaptive systems, ethnographic studies
of the workscape and both MEMS & NANO technologies. He was a cofounder
of the Institute for Research on Learning (IRL). John, or as he is often
called—JSB— is a member of the National Academy of Education
and a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence
and of AAAS and a Trustee of Brown University and the MacArthur Foundation.
He serves on numerous public boards of directors (Amazon, Corning, Polycom,
Varian Medical Systems) and on various private boards. He has published
over 100 papers in scientific journals and was awarded the Harvard Business
Review's 1991 McKinsey Award for his article, "Research that Reinvents
the Corporation" and again in 2002 for his article “Your
Next IT Strategy. With Paul Duguid he co-authored the acclaimed book
The Social Life of Information (HBS Press, 2000) that has been translated
into 9 languages with a second addition in April 2002. Also, with John
Hagel, Dr. Brown has just finished a book The Only Sustainable Edge
which is about how to do more with less. It also provides a novel framework
for understanding what is really happening in off-shoring in India and
China and how each are inventing powerful news ways to innovate. Part
scientist, part artist and part strategist, JSB’s views are unique
and distinguished by a broad view of the human contexts in which technologies
operate and a healthy skepticism about whether or not change always
represents genuine progress. Dr. Brown holds a Ph.D. in Computer and
Communication Sciences from the University of Michigan.