Blaise Aguera y Arcas

Atheist, Engineer, Environmentalist, Global soul, Idea generator, Inventor, Scientist

Blaise Aguera y Arcas is a Distinguished Scientist at Google. He runs a team focusing on distributed, ethical, and on-device AI at Google’s Seattle office and other locations worldwide. Some publicly visible projects from his team include Federated Learning, Artists and Machine Intelligence, AIY Projects, Hollywood gender equality work with the Geena Davis Institute, and the Google Clips camera, Google’s first “AI device” powered by local neural nets. In 2016 he wrote a widely read essay exploring the relationship between art and technology, and in 2017 he co-authored another popular essay on physiognomy and bias in AI and a refutation of claims that facial structure reveals sexual orientation. The group also works on basic research and new technologies and ideas for Android and Pixel, various Google services, and next-generation devices. Until December 2013, Blaise was at Microsoft, where he served in a variety of roles, from inventor to strategist, and led teams with strengths in interaction design, prototyping, computer vision and machine vision, augmented reality, wearable computing and graphics. His team’s technology powered a number of different products. He was also at various times the Architect of MSN, Bing Mobile and Bing Maps. He joined Microsoft when his startup, 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. He has given widely viewed talks at TED on Seadragon and Photosynth (2007), Bing Maps (2010), and creative neural networks (2016).

The Environment, Human-computer interaction, Machine intelligence, Film, Music

AI, AI Ethics, Computational Neuroscience, computer vision, Deep Learning, Edge Computing, Machine Learning, Mapping, ML Fairness, Music, software, The Early Modern, Typography