DR. ALAN KAY, President of Viewpoints Research Institute, Inc., and Senior Fellow at Hewlett Packard Labs and is best known for the ideas of personal computing, the intimate laptop computer, and the inventions of the now ubiquitous overlapping-window interface and modern object-oriented programming. His deep interests in children and education were the catalysts for these ideas, and they continue to be a source of inspiration to him.

One of the founders of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, (PARC) he led one of the several groups that together developed modern workstations (and the forerunners of the Macintosh), Smalltalk, the overlapping window interface, Desktop Publishing, the Ethernet, Laser printing, and network "client-servers."

Prior to his work at Xerox, Dr. Kay was a member of the University of Utah ARPA research team that developed 3-D graphics. There he earned a doctorate (with distinction) in 1969 for the development of the first graphical object-oriented personal computer. He holds undergraduate degrees in mathematics and molecular biology from the University of Colorado. Kay also participated in the original design of the ARPANet, which later became the Internet.

After Xerox PARC, Kay was Chief Scientist of Atari, a Fellow of Apple Computer for 12 years, and then for 5 years Vice President of Research and Development at The Walt Disney Company. In 2001 he founded Viewpoints Research Institute, a non-profit organization located in Glendale, CA., and in 2002 he joined the Hewlett-Packard Co. as a Senior Fellow.

Dr. Kay has received numerous honors, including the ACM Software Systems Award, the ACM Outstanding Educator Award, the J-D Warnier Prix D'Informatique and the NEC 2001 C&C Prize. He has been elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the Royal Society of Arts, and the Computer Museum History Center. He is a recipient of the ZeroOne Award from the University of Berlin, and recently received an honorary doctorate degree from the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH). He was inducted into the Utah Information Technology Association (UITA) as a "Hall of Fame Member, November 2003. He was awarded the Draper Prize by the National Academy of Engineering in May 2004 and has recently been given an appointment as Sr. Scientist with the Division of Information Technology at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. In June of 2004 He was accorded the Turing award from the Association for Computing Machinery; Also in June of 2004 he was declared a Kyoto Prize Laureate in advanced technology by the Inamori Foundation.

A former professional jazz guitarist, composer, and theatrical designer, he is now an amateur classical pipe organist.

Beyond Edge: Viewpoints Research Institute