Ramana Rao picture Email is Rao At This Domain I'm an entrepreneur, now serving as CTO at Livefyre. Past companies include iCurrent, a personalized news aggregator, acquired by the Washington Post, and Inxight, a pioneer in text analytics and information visualizaiton, now part of SAP. Before this, I was an HCI/CS researcher at PARC and studied computer science at MIT.

Hi! This site houses postings, publications, and presos, mostly on the topic of Information Flow. The topic has been my career's pursuit across years of research at PARC, and the two startups I founded afterward. Check out my blog or my twitter stream for the latest.

Concept Articles

These articles are thoughts on nextgen user interfaces, and text analytics, and the future of search. See more including my research papers at Sensemaking.

See and Go Manifesto [Sept 1999, Interaction Magazine] Written as a reflection on the power of "wide widgets" aimed at the user interface research and development community, but given that wide widgets still haven't been fully absorbed into mainstream graphical user interfaces, it's still a bit of a rallying cry.

From Unstructured Data to Actionable Intelligence [Nov 2003, IEEE IT Professional] Describes the key beyond search technologies of categorization, extraction, and visualization. Also covers an abstract architecture for using these and the applications in leading areas of government intelligence, electronic publishing, and pharma research.

Sixty Years of Search and Beyond [May 2005, ACM Queue] A history of search starting 60 years ago as context to broadened PARC/Inxight ideas related to Intelligent Information Access. It concludes with predictions for 2020.

Classic InfoViz Demos

In the early nineties, I was working in the team that coined the term "information visualization." Though there was a lot of focus on 3-D using SGI machine in our group, I felt that the basic principles were quite applicable in 2-D techniques. Two inventions came about from this and ultimately were significant revenue generators for Inxight, the company we spun out a few years later.

Hyperbolic Browser - CHI 95 Table Lens - CHI 94
My TED 1998 talk

I was invited to do a 7 minute talk, and i managed to not get the hook as I went for 11 minutes. It really was the distillation of the story from the PARC team's vision of Beyond WIMP interfaces. The ideas have been influential for sure, but even now the vision hasn't fully come to pass. But I did get a standing-O! and I became a TEDster forever.

FOLLOW ME