About Intel Research PaPR

OUR PROGRAMS explore fundamental paradigms and phenomena of everyday life to help Intel think critically about how people, practices, and institutions matter to technological innovation and to conceive of provocative experiences in the future.

We use social science methods, qualitative and quantitative, to generate insights, models and demonstrations that help reframe 'what matters' to internal and external partners. We are developing capabilities in design in order to provide Intel with a unique perspective on what's possible today, tomorrow and in the coming years.

In 2007-08, PaPR researchers and designers have worked on topics that include time and immersiveness, global experiments in currency and finance, kids and media literacy, the middleclass. We have led innovation activities for Intel's business units. The contents of this brochure present some of the highlights.

PaPR & Intel Research
Our home in Intel Research places us within a community of research labs tasked with conducting highly innovative and disruptive programs for Intel. Our internal partners at Intel include the Intel Research community, Intel's CTG labs and Intel's business units. We have close ties with the academic community forged through program collaborations, publications, conferences and seminars. PaPR's programs fulfill the Intel Research vision of Essential Computing: simplifying and enriching all aspects of work and daily life. We focus especially on the areas of Personal Awareness and Richly Communicative which explore questions of personal agency and empowerment, sociality, and communication. We expect PaPR programs to provide important contributions to Physicality and Concealing Complexity in the future.

A Brief History
In 1997, Intel hired several social scientists to form People and Practices Research. These researchers engaged the techniques of social science and design in order develop deep understanding of how people live and work and to draw out implications of the research for corporate strategy and technology development. Today, there are over 40 social scientists and designers at Intel.

About Intel Research

Intel Research is an exploratory research organization within Intel whose mission is to drive high-impact, off-roadmap research that is vital to the company. It is led by Andrew Chien, Vice President, Corporate Technology Group and Director, Intel Research. Intel Research consists of a network of labs with deep collaborative ties to university researchers and Intel product groups, plus associated higher education programs that engage with focus schools and sponsor research in the academic community. Three university labs in PaPR, Berkeley and Pittsburgh are located nearby their primary external collaboration partners, the University of Washington, UC Berkeley and CMU, respectively. The People and Practices Research Lab, located in Hillsboro, and the Santa Clara Lab, with integrated biosystems and other research expertise, also operate under a collaborative research model. In addition, Universal Parallel Computing Research Centers (UPCRC) at UC Berkeley and Illinois (UIUC) are joint research efforts between the universities, Intel and Microsoft.

Research in this network of labs is directed toward a broad vision of the future. Over the years, computing has steadily evolved, moving from the machine room out into people's workplaces and into their daily lives. As this transformation continues, we will see computing evolve from being a number of separate devices we each use occasionally to dozens of devices that are an essential part of daily life. This vision of Essential Computing is broken down into research themes that focus on making technology more viable, more useful, more personal, and more essential in our daily lives. Through these research directions, we seek to simplify and enrich all aspects of our daily lives through applications and systems technologies that empower each of us as individuals and connect us to each other.