Blaise Aguera y Arcas

In 2004 he founded Seadragon, Inc., to develop ideas in scalable architectures and user interfaces for interacting with large volumes of visual information, potentially over a narrow-bandwidth connection. Microsoft bought Seadragon at the beginning of 2006. The Seadragon team’s most visible project to date is Photosynth (labs.live.com/photosynth), a collaboration with researchers at Microsoft Research and the University of Washington.

Blaise has a broad background in computer science and applied math, and has been writing software for more than 20 years, with special empasis on graphics, machine learning and data analysis. He graduated from Princeton University with a BA in Physics in 1998, and attended the PhD program there in Applied Math. His experience includes extensive independent research, consulting and freelance software design in a variety of areas, including computational neuroscience, graphics, computational drug design, data compression and others. In 2001 he received worldwide press coverage for his discovery, using computational methods, of the printing technology used by Johann Gutenberg, considered the inventor of printing from movable type in the West. This technology differs markedly from later printing technologies, suggesting a reassessment of Gutenberg's traditional historical role. Blaise's work on early printing was the subject of a BBC Open University documentary, entitled What Did Gutenberg Invent? (www.open2.net/renaissance2/doing/gutenberg.html). He has published essays and research papers in theoretical biology, neuroscience and history in The EMBO Journal, Neural Computation and Nature.