Danny Hillis is Chairman and Co-founder of Applied Minds, LLC. Previously, Hillis was Vice President and Disney Fellow, Research and Development at Walt Disney Imagineering, and a Co-founder of Thinking Machines Corp. Hillis is an inventor, scientist, author and engineer. While completing his doctorate at MIT, he 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. He holds over 150 U.S. patents, and is the designer of a 10,000-year mechanical clock.