William Daniel "Danny" Hillis (born September 25, 1956) 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 Corporation, 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 co-founder 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 at the University of Southern California , Professor of Research Medicine at the Keck School of Medicine of USC, and Research Professor of Engineering at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering. He is the Principal Investigator of the National Cancer Institutes's Physical Sciences in Oncology Laboratory at USC.
Video Danny Hillis
Biography
Early life and Academic Work
Born September 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 (programming language) Laboratory under Seymour Papert developing computer hardware and software for children. During this time, he also designed computer-oriented toys and games for the Milton Bradley Company. While still a college student he was co-founder of Terrapin Inc., a producer of computer software for elementary schools.
As a graduate student at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Hillis designed tendon-controlled robot arms and a touch-sensitive robot "skin"
During his college years, Hillis built a computer composed entirely of Tinkertoys. It was previously on display at the Boston Computer Museum and the Boston Museum of Science, and is currently exhibited at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.
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 Machine, and it became the topic of his Ph.D., for which he received the 1985 Association for Computing Machinery Doctoral Dissertation award Hillis earned his doctorate as a Hertz Foundation Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under the mentor ship 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 Stone.
Thinking Machines
Hillis co-founded Thinking Machines Corporation in 1983 while doing his doctoral work at MIT. The company was to develop Hillis' Connection Machine design into commercial parallel supercomputers, and to explore computational pathways to building artificial intelligence. Hillis' ambitions are represented by the company's motto: "We're building a machine that will be proud of us," and Hillis' parallel architecture was to be the main component for this task:
Clearly, the organizing principle of the brain is parallelism. It's using massive parallelism. The information is in the connection between a lot of very simple parallel units working together. So if we built a computer that was more along that system of organization, it would likely be able to do the same kinds of things the brain does.
At Thinking Machines Corporation, Hillis built a technical team with many people that would later become leaders in science and industry including Brewster Kahle, Guy Steele, Sydney Brenner, David Waltz, Jack Schwartz, Stephen Wolfram, and Eric Lander. He even recruited Richard Feynman to spend his summers there. In 1990, Thinking Machines was the market leader in parallel supercomputers, with sales of about $65 million.
Disney Imagineering
During 1994, however, Thinking Machines filed for bankruptcy. In 1996, after a short stint as a professor at the MIT Media Lab, Hillis joined The Walt Disney Company full-time in the newly created role of Disney Fellow and Vice President, Research and Development, Walt Disney Imagineering, which Hillis claimed was an early ambition of his:
I've wanted to work at Disney ever since I was a child... I remember listening to Walt Disney on television describing the 'Imagineers' who designed Disneyland. I decided then that someday I would be an Imagineer. Later, I became interested in a different kind of magic - the magic of computers. Now I finally have the perfect job - bringing computer magic into Disney.
At Disney, Hillis developed new technologies as well as business strategies for Disney's theme parks, television, motion pictures, Internet and consumer products businesses. He also designed new theme park rides, a full sized walking robot dinosaur and various micro mechanical devices.
Applied Minds
Hillis left Disney in 2000, taking with him Bran Ferren, President of the Walt Disney Imagineering, R&D Creative Technologies division. Together, Ferren and Hillis founded Applied Minds, a company aimed at providing technology and consulting services to firms in an array of industries, including aerospace, electronics, and toys. In July 2005, Hillis and others from Applied Minds initiated Metaweb Technologies, Inc. to develop a semantic data storage infrastructure for the Internet, and Freebase, an "open, shared database of the world's knowledge". When Metaweb was acquired by Google, the technology became the basis of Google's Knowledge Graph. Hillis, together with Dr. David B. Agus, cofounded a spinoff of Applied Minds called Applied Proteomics Inc which designed and prototyped a machine that measures the level of proteins in the blood for medical diagnosis.
Hillis' work with Agus on cancer led to the founding of the University of Southern California Physical Sciences-Oncology Center (USC PS-OC), funded by the National Cancer Institute (NCI). Hillis is the principal investigator of this program.
The Long Now Foundation and the Clock of the Long Now
In 1993, with Thinking Machines facing its demise, Hillis wrote about long-term thinking and suggested a project to build a clock designed to function for millennia:
When I was a child, people used to talk about what would happen by the year 2000. Now, thirty years later, they still talk about what will happen by the year 2000. The future has been shrinking by one year per year for my entire life. I think it is time for us to start a long-term project that gets people thinking past the mental barrier of the Millennium. I would like to propose a large (think Stonehenge) mechanical clock, powered by seasonal temperature changes. It ticks once a year, bongs once a century, and the cuckoo comes out every millennium.
This clock became the Clock of the Long Now, a name coined by the songwriter and composer, Brian Eno. Hillis wrote an article for Wired magazine suggesting a clock that would last over 10,000 years. The project led directly to the founding of the Long Now Foundation in 1996 by Hillis and others, including Stewart Brand, Brian Eno, Esther Dyson, and Mitch Kapor.
Maps Danny Hillis
"The Pattern on the Stone"
Hillis' 1998 popular science book The Pattern on the Stone attempts to explain concepts from computer science for laymen using simple language, metaphor and analogy. It moves from Boolean algebra through topics such as information theory, parallel computing, cryptography, algorithms, heuristics, Turing machines, and promising technologies such as quantum computing and emergent systems.
References
External links
- The Rise and Fall of Thinking Machines Corporation, Inc. Magazine, September 1995
Source of article : Wikipedia
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