Blaise Agüera y Arcas (born 1975)[1][2] is an American artificial intelligence (AI) researcher, software engineer, software architect, and author.
He is vice president and fellow at Google Research,[3]
where he leads a team that conducts basic research in AI and builds AI-based products and technologies.[3] He also founded the Artists and Machine Intelligence program at Google,[4] which creates art by pairing machine intelligence engineers with artists.[5]
Before he joined Google in 2013, Agüera y Arcas was an engineer at Microsoft and the architect of Bing Maps and Bing Mobile.[6]
Agüera y Arcas has published scientific articles,[7] essays, op-eds, and the books Ubi Sunt in 2022[8] and Who Are We Now? in 2023.[9] He appears regularly at TED.[10]
Early life and education
Blaise Agüera y Arcas was born in Providence, Rhode Island to a Spanish father and an American mother.[2] He grew up in Mexico City.[1][2] As a teenager, Agüera y Arcas interned with the U.S. Navy research center in Bethesda, Maryland, where he reprogrammed the guidance software for aircraft carriers to improve their stability at sea, which helped to reduce seasickness among sailors.[2] In 1998 Agüera y Arcas graduated from Princeton University[11] where he received a B.A. in physics.[1]
Career
In 2001, using computational techniques, Agüera y Arcas and Princeton University’s Scheide Librarian Paul Needham published their findings that the punchcutting method for mass-producing movable type attributed to Johannes Gutenberg was likely invented decades after Gutenberg’s Bible, and by a different inventor.[12][13][14]
In 2003, Agüera y Arcas founded Sand Codex, later renamed Seadragon Software. He moved to Seattle in 2004 to accommodate his wife's new role at the University of Washington.[15] In 2004, he devised a computational method for the Library of Congress to create color composite images of almost two thousand negatives by Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky.[15][16]
Microsoft
In 2006, Agüera y Arcas sold Seadragon to Microsoft Live Labs.[17] The technology was used to develop Silverlight, Pivot, Photosynth and the standalone cross-platform Seadragon application for iPhone and iPad. Slate called Photosynth "the best thing to happen to digital photography since the digital camera".[18]
At Microsoft, Agüera y Arcas was the architect leading Bing Maps and Bing Mobile[6][19] and was named a Distinguished Engineer in 2011. He collaborated with Ricoh to make the Theta, a 360º camera whose captured content displayed in Photosynth.[20]
While at Microsoft, Agüera y Arcas suggested that technology should be designed for women. He cited a gap between the extent to which technology is designed for women and the market opportunity women represent, given trends in graduation rates and earnings.[21]
Google
Blaise Agüera y Arcas (right) with Demis Hassabis (left) in 2014, at the Wired conference in London
As of 2016, he was working on projects that add deep learning to mobile devices.[27] He founded the Artists and Machine Intelligence program,[28] which fuses machine intelligence and art. The program's first public exhibit was on February 26, 2016 at the Gray Area,[29] where Agüera y Arcas was the keynote speaker. On June 1, 2016, the program held the MAMI (Music, Art, and Machine Intelligence) show.[30]
In 2021, Agüera y Arcas published an opinion on his experience with the latest generation large language models in the form of AI chatbot LaMDA stating that "no objective answer is possible to the question of when an 'it' becomes a 'who'."[31]
Publications
Books
Ubi Sunt (Hat & Beard Press, Oct. 25, 2022) ISBN 978-1-95-512513-0
Who Are We Now? (Hat & Beard Press, Dec. 19, 2023) ISBN 978-1-95-512530-7
Demonstrates Seadragon's zooming technology and Photosynth's ability to create 3D models from user photos. Named one of Bill Gates's "13 favorite talks".[33]
_(2).jpg)
