Jim Baker was the founding President of Fuji Xerox’s Palo Alto Laboratory (FXPAL). He became CEO in 1997 and then Chairman and CEO in 2005. During this period, FXPAL became a leading center of multimedia research with achievements in video capture, storage and retrieval, authoring, and surveillance. Early experiments dealt with digital ink and tablet computing. These technologies were licensed and have made their way into the global market. FXPAL has spawned two start-up companies in Silicon Valley and one in Singapore. Fuji Xerox has several products and services in Asia which have come from FXPAL technologies and experiments. The most notable is the Beat service – a network appliance – which warrants the data of small to medium businesses.
He was also the Director in charge of the three information and computing sciences research laboratories at Lockheed Martin. He was the Director of computer sciences research at Schlumberger in Ridgefield, CT; and later was head of their computer-based engineering center in Austin, TX. At Honeywell, he started the first software research activity at their Corporate Research Center – which eventually led to the formation of the Corporate Computer Sciences Center.
Jim Baker’s early industrial experiences were in the field of Operations Research; their common theme was providing solutions to complex problems. At Honeywell, he invented the first algorithm to refocus the naturally blurred images of a nuclear medicine system. Honeywell developed a special computer to implement this process and he received the H.W. Sweatt Award for outstanding achievement in research and engineering. At Schlumberger, his AI and graphics groups developed the Dipmeter Advisor System which replicated the geological interpretation skills of experts in the search for oil. This was the second industrial AI system in the U.S. At the John Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, he was an expert in probability modeling for war games. His achievements include a new model for predicting the miss distance of objects aimed at a target; and a new model for computing the probability of detecting an object in a clutter background. At General Dynamics in Fort Worth, he contributed to a number of projects including the simulated build-up of a lunar base, an aerial monitoring system to map radio activity in a nuclear accident, and the application of game theory to the problem of arms control.
Jim Baker was educated in mathematics at the University of Texas at Austin and Iowa State University, where he received his Ph.D. in two years. His achievements in mathematics include the solution to a 40 year-old problem: he showed that linear functionals on discontinuous functions could be represented by a new type of Stieltjes integral. He also identified the modified Stieltjes integral which is unique for probability problems. During 1988 he was a Visiting Scholar at the University of Texas where he developed a theorem proving system for the theory of integration.
Jim Baker has served on advisory boards of several universities including the University of Texas and the University of Southern California. He is an invited speaker on the topics of research, innovation and technology transfer in software and system sciences.