A delegation from Xerox visited MIT on April 25 to celebrate the accomplishments of this year’s Xerox-MIT fellowship recipients. Each fellow gave a brief overview of their current research, and Jim Larson, vice president and center manager of the Xerox Research Center Webster (New York), gave an overview of the Xerox Innovation Group’s research direction. In addition to their traditional document management business, Xerox expanded into business process outsourcing (BPO) and IT outsourcing with their acquisition of Affiliated Computer Services (ACS) in 2009. ACS’s expertise is in managing paper-based work processes and providing specialized BPO and IT services for industries that range from telecommunications, retail and financial services to healthcare, education and transportation.

Xerox-MIT fellows work with their faculty advisors at MIT and with a practicing engineer at Xerox. Along with their regular courses of study at MIT, they may also spend a summer working at one of Xerox’s research centers worldwide with their second mentor. Entering its fifth year, the Xerox-MIT partnership combines the best of engineering education with the best of engineering practice — a combination that lies at the very heart of the School of Engineering’s educational priorities.

The School of Engineering’s new dean, Ian Waitz, hosted this year’s event along with Larson. Also in attendance were Sophie Vandebroek, Xerox chief technology officer and president of the Xerox Innovation Group, as well as several members of the research staff from the Webster research facility.

The call for nominations for the next cohort of Xerox-MIT fellows has already been issued; nominations are due Friday, May 13.

Areas of interest for the 2011-12 fellowship cycle include:
  • Complex system dynamics
  • Data mining, visualization, and analytics
  • Cloud and distributed computing
  • Knowledge work automation
  • Web and social computing
  • Nanotechnology systems
  • Green processes and technologies
  • Imaging, video, and smart documents


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