Danny Hillis is an inventor, scientist, author and engineer, and is chairman and co-founder of Applied Minds.  Previously, he was Vice President and Disney Fellow at Walt Disney Imagineering and was a co-founder of Thinking Machines Corp. Danny pioneered the concept of parallel computers that is now the basis for most supercomputers, and RAID disk array technology used to store large databases while completing his PhD at MIT.

; He holds over 150 U.S. patents, and is the designer of a 10,000-year mechanical clock.  Danny is also is Judge Widney professor of engineering and research medicine at the University of Southern California, and serves as co-chairman of The Long Now Foundation, and is on the board of the Hertz Foundation.  He is a Fellow of the Association of Computing Machinery, of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the International Leadership Forum, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering.