Unreasonable Research
After answering questions for a Xerox press release, the carousel started for talking to reporters. Actually a good thing, since it means that the press release found a good number recipients and covered an interesting technical topic.One question, however, that always bothers me. It always comes, as certain as bad weather on weekends: "How/why did you invent this technology?"
The standard answer is something like: "we stumbled on it"; or "we had an Eureka moment". Needless to say that I hate this description since it makes us idiots stumbling along and occasionally stumbling over something valuable. In reality, we are something different altogether, we are "unreasonable".
In my opinion, research has to be unreasonable, or to put it in the words of George Bernard Shaw: "Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people". Unreasonable in this context means to deviate from the path, because most of the interesting items are not lying on a path that many people intend to travel. Just imagine a mountain top as your destination, and as long as you climb the path nicely, everything is fine, but nothing new will come about.
How often have you been on a mountain trail and somewhere on the way you saw something beautiful, interesting in a direction that you did not intend to travel? What are you going to do? Be reasonable and keep climbing? Or are you going to explore? And the creative researchers among us are good, very good in exploring and quickly assessing the new item - and unreasonable enough to deviate from the path and head in the new direction. Consciously.
Let me take the current UV press release as an anchor.
Now scientists at Xerox Corporation have developed a new technology that makes it easier to add security to any document from a personal check to a birth certificate using the same printers found in most print shops.The innovative security printing method uses a special combination of toners - the "dry ink" used in xerographic printers - to create the secure imprint. Prints from a four-color printer selectively expose the fluorescent properties found within white paper, making it possible to embed personalized printing, hidden security marks or codes that are only visible when exposed to ultraviolet light.
How did we really invent it? Well, consider "best color quality possible" as our mountain top. Raja Bala had circumvented a problem which I considered easy to solve (I was wrong, of course!). But I found the beginning of a path that led into a new direction. Sadly however, I was not able to follow it, so I documented the trail head, and - importantly - also described what I expected to be an interesting topic for data encoding: Paper Fluorescence. But even with the help of some other people I was just not able to make any progress on that path.
So far so bad, but being unreasonable, it stayed in our heads. Years later (yes, years!!! , this exchange happened in 2001!!!) Raja came to me and told me that, “yes”, there was a trailhead, but “no”, my description was wrong (Raja was wrong, of course!). But Raja had successfully avoided the first obstacle on the path. Suddenly the next steps became clearer and we filed our first IDs in 2005. Since then, with the help of others inside Xerox Innovation Group and FreeFlow VIPP, we have been able to actually create a working system, moving the fluorescent encoding into product in 2006 (VIPP Freeflow Security Suite).
What was the most fun in this work? That in 2007 we discovered another interesting trail forking of the fluorescent trail, one that we are working on now and that - in my view - is even more valuable.
Let's all be a bit more unreasonable.
Reiner Eschbach
Research Fellow
Xerox Innovation Group
Comments
The mountain trek is a good analogy. One characteristic I have observed about some of our inventions has been to take a phenomenon that has been traditionally considered a hurdle in solving one problem, look at it from a different point of view, and realize that it is actually an elegant solution to a different problem! Sometimes you stare at a problem long and hard, and in that process, can even find ways to make the problem worse!! The reasonable person might then quit and decide to take up a different problem (or career)! But the unreasonable person says “hmm, maybe I can turn this into something useful”.
Both the fluorescence security feature (recently released), and GlossMark technology (previously released) are great examples of this. In the fluorescence case, the original problem we tackled was that fluorescence in the paper changes its characteristics (brightness, whiteness, etc.) depending on the amount of UV light hitting the paper. This makes it hard to predict and manage the printed color. Now if you put the paper under UV light, you made the problem much worse – the paper starts to glow!! Then the epiphany struck, and realized we could turn it from a color management headache into a security enabler. (As Reiner says, we are still looking to solve the original problem!)
Same with Glossmarks. Researcher Shen-ge Wang and his colleagues were tackling the problem of trying to reduce the (much detested) differential gloss in prints via digital imaging techniques. They promptly found that they could make the problem worse and add differential gloss where there was none before. Hmm, that’s a neat effect! Voila, GlossMarks! There are many such examples of the fruits of unreasonableness.
PS I try to quote G. B. Shaw to my wife when she says I am being unreasonable…somehow, doesn’t fly! :)
Raja
Posted by: Raja Bala | June 8, 2007 04:36 PM