TED Community » Blaise Aguera y Arcas

About Me

Blaise Aguera y Arcas is a Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft. He works in a variety of roles, from designer and coder to strategist, and he leads an Advanced Engineering team of researchers and engineers with strengths in social media, computer vision and graphics. He joined Microsoft when his startup company, Seadragon, was acquired by Live Labs in 2006. Shortly after the acquisition of Seadragon, Blaise directed his team in a collaboration with Microsoft Research and the University of Washington, leading to the first public previews of Photosynth several months later. His TED talk on Seadragon and Photosynth in 2007 is still rated “most jaw-dropping”.

Blaise has a broad background in computer science and applied math, and has worked in a variety of fields, including computational neuroscience, computational drug design, data compression and others. In 2001 he received press coverage for his discovery, using computational methods, of the printing technology used by Johann Gutenberg. Blaise’s work on early printing was the subject of a BBC Open University documentary, “What Did Gutenberg Invent?”. He has published essays and research papers in theoretical biology, neuroscience and history in The EMBO Journal, Neural Computation and Nature. In 2008-9 he was a recipient of MIT Technology Review’s TR35 award (35 top innovators under 35) and Fast Company’s MCP100 (“100 most creative people in business”).
Blaise's wife and occasional coauthor, Adrienne Fairhall (http://depts.washington.edu/pbiopage/people_fac_page.php?fac_ID=10), is a computational neuroscientist and professor at the University of Washington in Physiology and Biophysics. They live in Seattle and have a son, Anselm, and a daughter, Eliot.