Herve J. Gallaire

CTO, Xerox Corp.; President, Xerox Innovation Group

Most Important Technology of the Last 40 Years:

Microelectronics.

Most Important Technology for the Coming Decade:

Nanotech and microelectromechanical systems.

Technology That has Evolved in a Surprising Way:

Chemical engineering.

"Work will change because we will have much more powerful systems for understanding documents. We will have algorithms, both for image recognition (whether faces or pure objects) and for text, that will enable us to be much more effective at searching, filing, and retrieving. Today these activities take an enormous amount of time, which is frustrating and which explains why we still keep paper around. To be able to index, search, and cross-reference for different types of objects will really enable significant improvements in the way we work.

"I think globalization will change engineering, together with new tools that enable virtual collaboration. For example, the time to market is much faster than if you were doing it on a conventional basis. It's not the outsourcing that counts, it's what you can do by working across a network and benefiting from the fact that some people wake up when others go to sleep. There are lots of positive ways to look at globalization."