William Daniel "Danny" Hillis was born on September 25,1956 and is an American inventor, entrepreneur, and computer scientist, who pioneered parallel computers and their use in artificial intelligence.
23 Facts About Danny Hillis
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Danny Hillis founded Thinking Machines Corporation, a parallel supercomputer manufacturer, and subsequently was Vice President of Research and Disney Fellow at Walt Disney Imagineering.
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Danny Hillis is a visiting professor at the MIT Media Lab.
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Danny Hillis attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and received his bachelor of science in mathematics in 1978.
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At MIT, Danny Hillis began to study Artificial Intelligence under Marvin Minsky.
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Danny Hillis named it the Connection Machine, and it became the topic of his PhD, for which he received the 1985 Association for Computing Machinery Doctoral Dissertation award.
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Danny Hillis earned his doctorate as a Hertz Foundation Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, under the supervision of Marvin Minsky, Claude Shannon and Gerald Sussman, receiving his PhD in 1988.
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Danny Hillis later served as an adjunct professor at the MIT Media Lab, where he wrote The Pattern on the Stone.
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Danny Hillis has founded a number of technology companies, including Thinking Machines Corporation, Applied Minds, Metaweb Technologies, Applied Proteomics, and Applied Invention.
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Danny Hillis has over 300 issued patents 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 processing.
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In 1996, Danny Hillis joined The Walt Disney Company in the newly created role of Disney Fellow and as Vice President, Research and Development at Disney Imagineering.
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Danny Hillis developed new technologies and business strategies for Disney's theme parks, television, motion pictures, and consumer products businesses.
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Danny Hillis designed new theme park rides, a full-sized walking dinosaur, and various micro mechanical devices.
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Also for Herman Miller, Danny Hillis developed a flexible reconfigurable power and lighting system, which was marketed through another new company, Convia.
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In 2012, Danny Hillis helped to create a research program on cancer and proteomics as Professor of Research Medicine at the Keck School of Medicine of USC, and the principal investigator of the National Cancer Institute's Physical Sciences in Oncology Laboratory at USC.
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Danny Hillis co-founded Applied Proteomics with David Agus to make proteomics-based biomarker discovery practical.
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Danny Hillis has academic appointments as the 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.
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Danny Hillis was the first principal investigator of the National Cancer Institute's Physical Sciences in Oncology Laboratory at USC.
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In 2015, Danny Hillis co-founded Applied Invention, an interdisciplinary group of engineers, scientists, and artists.
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In 1986, Danny Hillis expressed alarm that society had what he called a "mental barrier" of looking at the year 2000 as the limit of the future.
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Danny Hillis proposed a project to build a mechanical clock that would last 10,000 years.
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Danny Hillis is the recipient of 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 science, and the 1988 Ramanujan Award for his work in applied mathematics.
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Danny Hillis is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, a fellow of the International Leadership Forum, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.