Today I am thrilled to welcome Danny Hillis, inventor of Freebase, the basis of the Google Knowledge Graph, to System as an advisor. 

I’ve long been inspired by Danny’s work and thinking and see the Google Knowledge Graph as a precedent for the kind of large-scale knowledge infrastructure we are building at System. I’m very excited to now have Danny’s perspective and expertise around the table as we scale up.

An inventor, scientist, engineer, author, and visionary, Danny pioneered the concept of parallel computers and their use in AI. He holds hundreds of U.S. patents, is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and received his PhD at MIT under the supervision of Marvin Minsky, Claude Shannon, and Gerald Sussman. His thesis led to the design of a massively parallel computer with 64,000 processors in 1985, called the Connection Machine. He went on to build a legendary team of scientists, engineers, and leaders in various disciplines and industries to develop applications of this technology, including Sydney Brenner, Richard Feynman, Brewster Kahle, and Eric Lander.

In 2005, Danny and his colleagues initiated Metaweb Technologies to develop a semantic data storage infrastructure for the Internet, and Freebase, an “open, shared database of the world's knowledge.” That company was acquired by Google and became the basis of the Google Knowledge Graph.

Danny co-founded Applied Minds and Applied Invention, and co-founded and co-chairs The Long Now Foundation with Stewart Brand.