User:Ethanbas/Danny Hillis

William Daniel "Danny" Hillis is an American inventor, entrepreneur, scientist, writer, and visionary who is particularly known for his work in computer science. He is best known as the founder of Thinking Machines, the pioneering parallel supercomputer manufacturer, and subsequently was a Fellow at Walt Disney Imagineering. More recently, Hillis co-founded Applied Minds, the technology R&D think-tank.

Currently, he is cofounder of Applied Invention, an interdisciplinary group of engineers, scientists, and artists that develops technology solutions in partnership with leading companies and entrepreneurs.

Hillis is Visiting Professor at the MIT Media Lab, Judge Widney Professor of Engineering and Medicine of the University of Southern California (USC) , Professor of Research Medicine at the Keck School of Medicine3, and Research Professor of Engineering at the Viterbi School of Engineering4. He is the Principal Investigator of the National Cancer Institute’s Physical Sciences in Oncology Laboratory at the University of Southern California.

Early life and Academic Work
Born Sept. 25, 1956 in Baltimore, Maryland, Danny Hillis spent much of his childhood living overseas, in Europe, Africa, and Asia.

He attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and received his Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics in 1978. As an undergraduate he worked at the MIT Logo Laboratory under Seymour Papert developing computer hardware and software for children5. During this time, he also designed computer-oriented toys and games for the Milton Bradley Co. While still a college student he was cofounder of Terrapin Inc., a producer of computer software for elementary schools6 7.

As a graduate student at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory8, Hillis designed tendon-controlled robot arms9 and a touch-sensitive robot "skin”10.

During his college years, Hillis built a computer composed entirely of Tinkertoys11. It was previously on display at the Boston Computer Museum12 13 and the Boston Museum of Science14, and is currently exhibited at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California15.

At MIT, Hillis began to study the physical limitations of computation and the possibility of building highly parallel computers. This work culminated in the design of a massively parallel computer with 64,000 processors. He named it the Connection Machine16, and it became the topic of his Ph.D., for which he received the 1985 ACM Doctoral Dissertation award17. Hillis earned his doctorate as a Hertz Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under the mentorship of Marvin Minsky, Claude Shannon and Gerald Sussman, receiving his Ph.D. in 1988. He later served as adjunct professor at the MIT Media Lab, where he wrote The Pattern on the Stone18.

Technology Career
Hillis has founded a number of creative technology companies, most notably Thinking Machines, Applied Minds, Metaweb Technologies, Applied Proteomics, and Applied Invention.

Thinking Machines
As a graduate student at MIT, Hillis cofounded Thinking Machines Corp19. to produce and market parallel computers, developing a series of influential products called the Connection Machine. The Connection Machine was used in demanding computation- and data-intensive applications. It was used by the Stanford Exploration Project for oil exploration20 21, and for pioneering data mining applications by American Express22, as well as many scientific applications at organizations including Schlumberger, Harvard University, the University of Tokyo, the Los Alamos National Laboratory, NASA, Sandia National Laboratories, National Center for Supercomputer Applications, Army High Performance Computing Research Center, University of California Berkeley, University of Wisconsin at Madison, and Syracuse University.23

In addition to designing the company's major products, Hillis worked closely with users of his machine, applying it to problems in astrophysics, aircraft design, financial analysis, genetics, computer graphics, medical imaging, image understanding, neurobiology, materials science, cryptography and subatomic physics.

At Thinking Machines, he built a legendary team of scientists, designers and engineers, including legends in the field as well as those who later became leaders and innovators in multiple industries. The team included such luminaries as Sydney Brenner, Richard Feynman24, Brewster Kahle, and Eric Lander.

Among the users of Thinking Machines computers was Sergey Brin, who went on later to found Google, and who used the Connection Machine CM-2 to write parallel processing software while an undergraduate at U of Maryland25.

Walt Disney Imagineering
In 1996, Hillis joined The Walt Disney Company in the newly created role of Disney Fellow26, and as Vice President, Research and Development at Disney Imagineering27. He developed new technologies and business strategies for Disney’s theme parks, television, motion pictures, and consumer products businesses28 29. He also designed new theme park rides, a full-sized walking robot dinosaur30, and various micro mechanical devices.

Applied Minds
In 2000, Hillis cofounded the R&D think-tank Applied Minds31 with his Disney colleague, Bran Ferren. Drawing on the founders’ interdisciplinary backgrounds, Applied Minds built a team of engineers, scientists, and designers that provided design and technology services for clients. The uniquely creative environment and the diverse projects it undertook gained Applied Minds abundant media attention. “It's as if Willy Wonka's chocolate factory just yawned wide to welcome us. Only here, all the candy plugs in”, said an article in Wiredmagazine32. Work done at the firm covered the gamut of industries and application domains, including satellites33, military helicopters34, and educational facilities35.

While at Applied Minds, Hillis designed and built a large-scale computer datacenter for Sun Microsystems (the Sun Modular Datacenter36) that would fit into a standard 20’ shipping container37 38, solving, among others, the problems of accommodating processor capacity, cooling, power requirements, and storage39 within a uniquely portable solution. This “datacenter in a box”, which may be transported to any location and requires minimal infrastructure, has now become a common method for building large datacenters40.

For Herman Miller, Hillis designed an audio privacy solution41 42 based on phonemic jumbling – Babble43 – which was received in the media as a version of the Cone of Silence44, and was marketed through a new company, Sonare. Also for Herman Miller, Hillis developed a flexible reconfigurable power and lighting system45 46, which was marketed through another new company, Convia47.

As part of an early touch-screen map table interface, Hillis patented inventions on the use of multiple touch points to control a zoom interface48. One of these patents was the basis for the USPTO decision49 to reject Apple’s claim on a “pinch-to-zoom” patent in its legal dispute with Samsung.

Metaweb Technologies
In 2005, Hillis and others from Applied Minds founded Metaweb Technologies50 to develop a semantic data storage infrastructure51 for the Internet, and Freebase52, an open, structured database of the world's knowledge53. That company was acquired by Google54, and its technology became the basis of the Google Knowledge Graph55.

Applied Proteomics
Danny Hillis cofounded56 Applied Proteomics (API)57 with Dr. David Agus58, a leading oncologist and innovator in molecular medicine applications, to make proteomics-based biomarker discovery practical and productive59. Using their combined expertise in oncology, proteomics, systems control, and computation, at API, Hillis and his colleagues developed groundbreaking protein biomarker discovery platforms and a blood test for early stage colon cancer60. API was named one of the 13 “fiercest medical devices and diagnostic companies” of 201361.

Applied Invention
Hillis’s latest venture is Applied Invention, another interdisciplinary group of engineers, scientists and artists, where he is cofounder. Applied Invention develops technology solutions in partnership with leading companies and entrepreneurs.

Applied Invention is a partner and co-owner of The Dark Sky Company62, a weather forecasting technology company with consumer web and mobile applications63 as well as offerings for third-party developers and corporations.

Hillis is a prolific inventor, holding over 300 patents64, in fields including parallel computers, touch interfaces, disk arrays, forgery prevention methods, electronic and mechanical devices, and bio-medical techniques, RAID disk arrays, multicore multiprocessors and for wormhole routing in parallel processing65 66 67

The Long Now Foundation and the Clock of the Long Now
In 1986, Danny Hillis expressed the alarm that society has a “mental barrier” of looking at the year 2000 as the limit of the future68. He proposed a long-term project to overcome this – a mechanical clock that would last 10,000 years. This project became the initial project of The Long Now Foundation69 70, which he co-founded with Stewart Brand71 and where he serves as co-chairman. A prototype of the Clock of the Long Now72 is on display at the London Science Museum. A full-scale prototype is being installed at a site inside a mountain in western Texas73.

Awards
Hillis is the recipient of numerous awards, including the inaugural Dan David Prize for shaping and enriching society and public life in 2002, the 1991 Spirit of American Creativity Award for his inventions, the 1989 Grace Murray Hopper Award for his contributions to computer science74, and the 1988 Raanujan Award for his work in applied mathematics.

Hillis is a Member of the National Academy of Engineering75, a Fellow of the Association of Computing Machinery76, a Fellow of the International Leadership Forum, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences77.