Dr. Walter Johnson
is Vice President and Director of the Intelligent Systems Laboratory research organization at PARC, a Xerox company. Focusing on analytics and modeling across a broad range of domains, the organization's researchers create social software to enhance collaboration and social cognition; model cyberphysical systems to plan, optimize, diagnose, and control complex processes in domains from manufacturing to energy management; and engage in agent-based modeling and simulation of complex work environments to improve processes in which humans and information systems are highly interdependent.
A former scientist in PARC's groundbreaking Human-Computer Interaction group, Johnson specialized in intelligent interfaces for mobile and ubiquitous computing applications. His work on a paper user-interface for document processing systems led to a special enterprise-level division being created to capitalize on this competency. Johnson also worked on a tablet computer startup at Silicon Graphics, and on portable document readers at PARC spinout Uppercase, Inc., which was acquired by Microsoft in 2000. He served as VP of Strategic Operations at incubator company 12 Entrepreneuring and, most recently, as SVP of Operations at real-time web-based news platform Skygrid.
Johnson obtained his Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from the University of Pittsburgh, and B.A. and B.S. degrees at the University of Arizona. Johnson has 14 patents.
