W. Daniel Hillis brings talents to USC

W. Daniel Hillis, holder of more than 100 U.S. patents covering parallel computers, disk arrays, forgery prevention methods, and various electronic and mechanical devices, has joined the Viterbi and Keck Schools as a Research Professor.

Hillis, known to friends as "Danny," is Chairman and Co-founder 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.

Previously, he was Vice President, Research and Development at Walt Disney Imagineering, and a Disney Fellow. He was Co-founder of Thinking Machines, and 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.

As co-chair of The Long Now Foundation, Hillis is also the designer of a 10,000-year mechanical clock. He has served as a consultant to many companies and as an advisor to the U.S. government, and is the author of The Pattern on the Stone.
 
Hillis is the recipient of numerous awards, including the inaugural Dan David Prize for shaping and enriching society and public life, the Spirit of American Creativity Award for his inventions, the Hopper Award for his contributions to computer science and the Ramanujan Award for his work in applied mathematics.

He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the Association of Computing Machinery, a Fellow in the International Leadership Forum, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering.