Danny Hillis is Co-Founder, Co-Chairman and Chief Technology Officer of Applied Minds, Inc., a research and development company creating a range of new products and services in software, entertainment, electronics, biotechnology, and mechanical design. Considered a legendary designer of computer architecture, Danny is an inventor, scientist, author, and engineer. He pioneered the concept of parallel computers that is now the basis for most supercomputers, as well as the RAID disk array technology used to store large databases. He is the designer of a 10,000 year mechanical clock and holds over 100 U.S. patents, covering parallel computers, disk arrays, forgery prevention methods, and various electronic and mechanical devices. Previously, he was Vice President of Research and Development at Walt Disney Imagineering and a Disney Fellow, co-founder of Thinking Machines Corp., and an adjunct professor at the MIT Media Lab. He has also worked as a consultant to many companies developing technology-related business strategies and has served on the Presidential Information Technology Advisory Committee. He is also the author of The Pattern On The Stone: The Simple Ideas That Make Computers Work and The Connection Machine. Danny earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from The Massachusetts Institute of Technology.