"The Mind of an Inventor"

Newsweek (10/10/05) Vol. 146, No. 15, P. 48; Levy, Steven

Developing futuristic but practical technologies is the motivation behind Applied Minds, a company whose gadgets are a testament to the childlike imagination of its co-founder, inventor Danny Hillis. Applied Minds' first commercialized product, developed in collaboration with the Herman Miller office furniture company, was Babble, a device designed to increase the privacy of office cubicle workers by masking their conversation with a soundtrack of scrambled, nonsensical vocal fragments. Meanwhile, Hillis' company is developing a personal robot dubbed "the mule" with Northrop Grumman that seeks to relieve soldiers from the burden of carrying their own water, communications equipment, and batteries. The mule, which trails behind the soldier, produces water from air and has broadband built-in. Another fascinating Applied Minds product is the 2.5-D Display, a table that can present topographical information of any location on Earth as a detailed physical model. As a student at MIT, Hillis envisioned the concept of a thinking machine, which inspired him to re-imagine the computer's "brain" as a combination of thousands of interoperating processors rather than one processor. His idea of "parallel processing" inspired a doctoral thesis as well as a company, Thinking Machines. Despite his many accolades and patents, Hillis asserts that "people tend to overestimate the individual inventor and underestimate the system that makes their inventions real."

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