Xerox Corp has joined forces with Cornell University, Ithaca, New York to form a Design Research Institute to explore methods of machine design: under the agreement, a group of Xerox scientists and engineers will work at Cornell’s Ithaca campus, and the partners also plan to seek the involvement of other corporations as well as federal funding for the Institute’s activities; one aim of the Institute will be the development of a computer system that will interactively work with a human designer to design a new machine, being able to respond to the designer’s unique methodology and anticipate needs for data, so that realistic models of machines can be build and tested on a computer screen, reducing the need for building expensive prototypes.
