Applied Minds

William Daniel "Danny" Hillis is an American inventor, entrepreneur, and author. He co-founded Thinking Machines Corporation, a company that developed the Connection Machine, a parallel supercomputer designed by Hillis at MIT. He is also co-founder of the Long Now Foundation, Applied Minds,... Metaweb, and author of The Pattern on the Stone: The Simple Ideas That Make Computers Work. Daniel Hillis was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1956. His father, William Hillis, was a US Air Force epidemiologist studying hepatitis in Africa and relocated with his family through Rwanda, Burundi, Zaire, and Kenya. He spent a brief part of his childhood in Calcutta, India when his father was a visiting faculty at ISI, Calcutta. During these years the young Hillis was home schooled by his mother Aryge Briggs Hillis, a biostatistician, and developed an early appreciation for mathematics and biology. His younger brother is David Hillis, a professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Texas at Austin, and his sister is Argye E. Hillis, a professor of neurology at Johns Hopkins University.
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William Daniel "Danny" Hillis is an American inventor, entrepreneur, and author. He co-founded Thinking Machines Corporation, a company that... developed the Connection Machine, a parallel supercomputer designed by Hillis at MIT. He is also co-founder of the Long Now Foundation, Applied Minds, Metaweb, and author of The Pattern on the Stone: The Simple Ideas That Make Computers Work. Daniel Hillis was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1956. His father, William Hillis, was a US Air Force epidemiologist studying hepatitis in Africa and relocated with his family through Rwanda, Burundi, Zaire, and Kenya. He spent a brief part of his childhood in Calcutta, India when his father was a visiting faculty at ISI, Calcutta. During these years the young Hillis was home schooled by his mother Aryge Briggs Hillis, a biostatistician, and developed an early appreciation for mathematics and biology. His younger brother is David Hillis, a professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Texas at Austin, and his sister is Argye E. Hillis, a professor of neurology at Johns Hopkins University.
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Bran Ferren is a co-founder and Chief Creative Officer of Applied Minds and is an American designer of movie and theater special effects. Bran Ferren... is the former president of research and development of Walt Disney Imagineering, as well as the co-founder of Associates and Ferren, a visual effects company who supplied visual effects for Star Trek V, Altered States, Little Shop of Horrors, and The Manhattan Project.
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Dan Burstein founded Millennium Technology Ventures in 2000 and co-founded Millennium Technology Value Partners in 2004. He serves as a Managing... Partner of both funds. Dan has made personal venture capital investments since 1983, when he first worked as a consultant in Silicon Valley. He began making institutional venture capital investments as the Chief Investment Officer for PS Capital Holdings and PS Capital Ventures, the predecessor funds of Millennium. In the second half of the 1990s, Dan articulated and led the investment thesis of those funds, focusing on early stage companies that were building backbone infrastructure for the Internet and enhancing the security, reliability, and user experience of the web. For twelve years, from 1988 to 2000, Dan was Senior Advisor at The Blackstone Group. Over the course of his career, he has served as a consultant to the CEOs and senior executives of major global corporations including Sony, Toyota, Microsoft, and Sun Microsystems. In January 2000, Dan founded Millennium Technology Ventures. The fund invested at a conservative pace in the 2000-2001 environment before shifting its strategy to focus on a unique blend of value-oriented, late stage, and post-public technology investments. The fund has had several successful realizations to date, including the sale of portfolio company Phobos to publicly-traded SonicWALL, as well as more recent public market realizations in companies including Internap and DOV Pharmaceutical . Over the last eight years, Dan has served as a director or observer on more than a dozen technology company boards. In addition to Phobos, Dan served on the board of a small public company, Lumisys, where he was involved in the merger and acquisition process that led to a successful sale to Kodak. He is currently on the boards of Applied Minds, a leading-edge research and development lab in the Millennium Technology Ventures portfolio, and GlobalOptions Group, Inc., an international risk management and security company. Dan is the author of six books on new technology trends and global economic issues, including Road Warriors, a 1995 book about the birth of digital media and the Internet. He has also written books about the future of China, Japan, and the European Union. His 1988 book on Japanese finance was an international sensation, landing on best-seller lists in the U.S., Japan, and Australia. Dan has been a forum fellow at the World Economic Forum in Davos and has been honored many times for his books and journalistic work, including awards from the Overseas Press Club and Sigma Delta Chi. He has emerged as an expert on PIPE transactions for venture capital investors, has spoken at many conferences on this subject, and contributed a chapter to a current Bloomberg Press-published book on PIPEs. Dan has also worked and traveled extensively in China for many years. In addition to his well-known book on China's long-term future, Big Dragon, Dan contributed a chapter on leveraged buyouts in China to a Euromoney book on global private equity. He is a frequent guest expert on television programs ranging from CNBC, CNN, Fox, and Bloomberg to Charlie Rose and Oprah. Most recently, Dan Burstein has edited the New York Times-bestselling blockbusters, Secrets of The Code: The Unauthorized Guide to the Mysteries Behind the Da Vinci Code and Secrets of Angels & Demons: The Unauthorized Guide to the Bestselling Novel. These books are bestsellers not only in the United States but also in more than two dozen international editions, with over two million books in the "Secrets" series now in print around the world.
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