| CHI 98 Conference Program | April 18-23, 1998, Los Angeles, CA USA |
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Alan Kay
The Walt Disney Company
History, and especially recent history, is littered with new useful ideas that have been rejected over and over again. Then, after desperate attempts to make them look like old existing ideas, they are grudgingly accepted. As Kuhn dryly noted, even in science it seems to take 25 years for a new idea framework to be accepted, because that is how long it takes for the old scientists to die off! Outside of science, it seems to take still longer.
In this talk, we will explore the nature of creativity-particularly in the computer and user interface areas-and then try to discover why what is creative to one group seems so destructive to another.
Dr. Kay, Disney Fellow and Vice President of Research and Development, is best known for the idea of personal computing, the conception of the intimate laptop computer and the inventions of the now ubiquitous overlapping-window interface and modern object-oriented programming. His deep interest in children and education was the catalyst for these ideas and continues to be a source of inspiration to him. As one of the founders of the Xerox PARC, Kay led one of the groups that in concert developed these ideas into modern workstations (and the forerunners of the Macintosh), Smalltalk, the overlapping-window interface, desktop publishing, the Ethernet, laser printing and network "client-servers." MP< Dr. Kay was a member of the University of Utah ARPA research team that developed 3-D graphics, where he earned a doctorate (with distinction) for the development of the first graphical object-oriented personal computer. He holds undergraduate degrees in mathematics and molecular biology from the University of Colorado. Kay also participated in the original design of the ARPANet, which later became the Internet. Kay has received numerous honors, including the ACM Software Systems Award and the J-D Warnier Prix D'Informatique. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering and the Royal Society of Arts.
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