Creating the future, today [Women to Watch]

This past summer, Sophie Vandebroek, Xerox's chief technology officer (CTO) and president of the Xerox Innovation Group, set up a part-time home office miles away from the company's headquarters in Webster, New York. She had recently married an IEEE fellow, Jesus del Alamo, an electrical engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and moved to a suburb of Boston. With the advent of new computer technologies, she thought with her old phone number ringing on her laptop and an executive assistant who can send documents straight to her printer--it shouldn't make much of a difference where her office was; she could communicate with most colleagues as easily as if their desks were under the same roof. As a bonus, she could also see firsthand what the future of work life might look like, a key area of Xerox's active research.