Blaise Agüera y Arcas

Blaise Agüera y Arcas (born 1975) is an American AI researcher, software engineer, software architect, author, and Vice President and Fellow at Google Research.

At Google, Agüera y Arcas leads a team that conducts basic research in AI and builds AI-based products and technologies. He also founded the Artists and Machine Intelligence program at Google, which creates art by pairing machine intelligence engineers with artists.

Prior to Google, Agüera y Arcas was a Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft and was the architect of Bing Maps and Bing Mobile.

Agüera y Arcas has published numerous scientific articles, essays, op-eds, and the books Ubi Sunt (2022) and Who Are We Now? (2023). He appears regularly at TED.

Early life and education
Blaise Agüera y Arcas was born in Providence, Rhode Island to a Spanish father and an American mother. He grew up in Mexico City. As a teenager, Agüera y Arcas interned with the U.S. Navy research center in Bethesda, Maryland, where he reprogrammed the guidance software for aircraft carriers to improve their stability at sea, which helped to reduce seasickness among sailors. In 1998 Agüera y Arcas graduated from Princeton University where he received a B.A. in physics.

Career
In 2001, using computational techniques, Agüera y Arcas and Princeton University’s Scheide Librarian Paul Needham published their findings that the punchcutting method for mass-producing movable type attributed to Johannes Gutenberg was likely invented decades after Gutenberg’s Bible, and by a different inventor.

Seadragon
In 2004, he devised a computational method for the Library of Congress to create color composite images of almost two thousand negatives by Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky.

Microsoft
In 2006, Agüera y Arcas sold Seadragon to Microsoft Live Labs. The technology was used to develop Silverlight, Pivot, Photosynth and the standalone cross-platform Seadragon application for iPhone and iPad. Slate called Photosynth "the best thing to happen to digital photography since the digital camera".

At Microsoft, Agüera y Arcas was the architect leading Bing Maps and Bing Mobile and was named a Distinguished Engineer in 2011. He collaborated with Ricoh to make the Theta, a 360º camera whose captured content displayed in Photosynth.

While at Microsoft, Agüera y Arcas suggested that technology should be designed for women. He cited a gap between the extent to which technology is designed for women and the market opportunity women represent, given trends in graduation rates and earnings.

Google


In 2013, Agüera y Arcas left Microsoft to lead a new machine intelligence effort at Google, along with programs in computer vision and computational photography. His departure from Microsoft for Google generated a press cycle, with articles appearing in publications that included the New York Times, Fast Company,  International Business Times, and ValueWalk.

As of 2016, he was working on projects that add deep learning to mobile devices. He founded the Artists and Machine Intelligence program, which fuses machine intelligence and art. The program's first public exhibit was on February 26, 2016 at the Gray Area, where Agüera y Arcas was the keynote speaker. On June 1, 2016, the program held the MAMI (Music, Art, and Machine Intelligence) show.

In 2021, Agüera y Arcas published an opinion on his experience with the latest generation large language models in the form of AI chatbot LaMDA stating that "no objective answer is possible to the question of when an “it” becomes a “who."

Books

 * Ubi Sunt (Hat & Beard Press, Oct. 25, 2022) ISBN 978-1-95-512513-0
 * Who Are We Now? (Hat & Beard Press, Dec. 19, 2023) ISBN 978-1-95-512530-7

Honors & Awards
In 2008, Agüera y Arcas was named one of MIT Technology Review's Innovators Under 35 TR35.

In 2009 and 2014, Fast Company has named Agüera y Arcas one of the "Most Creative People in Business" (2009, 2014).

In 2022, Agüera y Arcas’ book, Ubi Sunt, won AIGA’s 50 Books | 50 Covers award.