VP and Fellow, CTO of Technology and Society, Google

Blaise Agüera y Arcas is a VP and Fellow at Google, and Google’s CTO of Technology & Society. He leads an organization working on basic research in AI, especially the foundations of neural computing, active inference, evolution, and sociality. In his tenure at Google he has led the design of augmentative, privacy-first, and collectively beneficial applications, including on-device ML for Android phones, wearables, and the Internet of Things; and he is the inventor of Federated Learning, an approach to training neural networks in a distributed setting that avoids sharing user data. Blaise also founded the Artists and Machine Intelligence program, and has been an active participant in cross-disciplinary dialogs about AI and ethics, fairness and bias, policy, and risk. Until 2014 he was a Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft. Outside the tech world, Blaise has worked on computational humanities projects including the digital reconstruction of Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii’s color photography at the Library of Congress, and the use of computer vision techniques to shed new light on Gutenberg’s printing technology. Blaise has given TED talks on Sead­ragon and Pho­to­synth (2007, 2012), Bing Maps (2010), and machine creativity (2016), and gave a keynote at NeurIPS on social intelligence (2019). In 2008, he was awarded MIT’s TR35 prize.  In 2018 and 2019 he taught the course “Intelligent Machinery, Identity, and Ethics” at the University of Washington, placing computing and AI in a broader historical and philosophical context. He has authored numerous papers, essays, op eds, and book chapters, as well two books: a novella, Ubi Sunt, and an interdisciplinary nonfiction work, Who Are We Now? (review by the Financial Times here). His upcoming book, What Is Intelligence?, will be published by MIT Press in 2025.