In Pictures: 10 brilliant minds who are quietly shaping technology

In Pictures: Tech's Top 10 Thinkers

Visionaries, engineers, number crunchers, sociologists: technology’s top thinkers are as diverse as technology itself. These are the ideas people, the worriers and the insightful scientists that can both imagine future directions and predict the impact that new innovations will have.

We haven’t chosen the biggest names, or those who have risen to prominence by talking a good game, because behind the scenes there are often brilliant minds with a vision for the future or engineers with a passion. While they don’t always receive the recognition of Larry Ellison or the late Steve Jobs, these ten are quietly shaping the technology industry in extraordinary ways. [Words: Stewart Mitchell]

The Bug Swatter: Nathan Myhrvold

Independent wealth has set Nathan Myhrvold’s mind free since leaving his role as Microsoft’s chief technology officer in 1999. A true Renaissance man – he is a world-champion barbecue chef, a palaeontologist who has uncovered multiple T-Rex skeletons, a wildlife photographer and a hi-tech cookbook author – Myhrvold spends his days brainstorming innovations with his colleagues at venture capital firm Intellectual Ventures.

The firm makes money by licensing patented ideas and has more than 3,000 still waiting to be fully explored. “We take some of our best inventors and try to come up with ideas for solving problems in the world,” Myhrvold said at a recent Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED) conference. “And we try to solve them with dramatic, out-of-the-box ideas.” Ideas such as using the company’s supercomputer to tackle malaria. Myhrvold’s model covered every road and village in Madagascar, and included rainfall, humidity and temperature data to predict standing pools of water where mosquitoes breed. The model mapped the mosquitoes over a year, showing their movements, and the resulting peaks in malaria infections. His team then used high-speed camera footage to capture the mosquitoes’ wing beats, targeting the insect rather than the disease itself.

Myhrvold describes how mosquitoes could be blasted out of the sky using cheap consumer electronics. “Your Blu-ray player has a very cheap blue laser in it; a scanner has a mirror galvanometer in it that can steer very accurately where a laser is aimed; and there’s signal processing in digital cameras,” he said. “What if we could put all that together to shoot them out of the sky with lasers?”

Protection from malaria is only one role for this laser battery – Myhrvold says that by shining a non-lethal laser on a bug before zapping it, the technology could identify the insect before destruction. This would offer a potential alternative to pesticides, without killing beneficial insects such as bees.

The Free Thinker: Jaron Lanier

Lanier built his reputation on virtual reality, and is often credited with coining the term while developing immersive headgear during the 1980s. But the part-time musician has more than one string to his bow, boasting interests as diverse as biomimetic information architectures, based on copying natural thought processes with computers, to computational methods for highlighting the fundamentals of physics.

Lanier has founded and worked for several start-ups, designing surgery simulators and 3D simulations for vehicle interiors in the process. He also has a habit of ending up at larger companies – including Sun and Google – after they bought the technologies he’d been working on. His experience in virtual reality saw him hired by Microsoft, where he worked on the successful gesture-based controller, Kinect.

A firebrand in an often staid industry, Lanier was among the first to criticise the isolating effect of social networks, where subscribers lose any sense of perspective outside of their immediate circle. His book You Are Not A Gadget: A Manifesto argues that conformity to network norms and following trends is strangling creativity, with a herd mentality channelling today’s thinkers down the same well-trodden paths.

The UI Guru: Indrani Medhi

With billions of people still without computers and unable to read, Medhi has been working on user interfaces that are more inclusive than a South London council. A design graduate now employed by Microsoft Research in India, she is working on non-text interfaces for the world’s illiterate would-be computer users. Medhi believes such interfaces could open up a huge market catering to poor and poorly educated first-time technology users, who could interact with smartphones and PCs without any assistance.

There are inevitable limitations to what non-literate computer users could do online, but Medhi says her research has shown high completion rates for simple tasks. Medhi’s prototype UIs use hand-drawn, semi-abstract cartoons with voice annotation and aggressive mouse-over interaction, which can trigger audio help or menu options as the software walks people through information such as weather reports or job vacancies.

Medhi has also been monitoring how low-income families use a computer and how it impacts their behaviour as a family, inside and outside the home.

The Big Thinker: Urs Hölzle

When your company has datacenters the size of two football pitches, you need a big brain to keep them running smoothly. Nobody is closer to the cutting edge of this than Urs Hölzle. An “old-school” computer scientist, Hölzle has been key in the move to massive datacenters at Google, in part due to his work writing compilers to make code work across platforms.

Hölzle has reshaped the way people think about computing at scale, solving problems that have hampered mainframes for decades. In The Datacenter as a Computer, Hölzle argued that modern datacenters were different from traditional hosting facilities and shouldn’t be viewed as a collection of co-located servers. Instead, Hölzle says it’s crucial to treat the datacenter as one warehouse-scale computer that can be tweaked to improve performance. And in today’s green and cost-conscious environment, Hölzle is developing new ideas for choosing the type of processors and number of cores used in datacenters.

Large-scale computing is least efficient when it’s doing the most regular tasks, he wrote in The Case for Energy-Proportional Computing. “Addressing this perfect mismatch will require significant rethinking of components and systems – energy proportionality should become a primary design goal.” He has outlined how improvements in the energy profile of every system component, particularly the memory and disk subsystems, could double server efficiency.

With the number of internet users still growing exponentially, Hölzle has also been improving the way Google handles the millions of cores in its datacenters. Complex equations predict which processors give the best results for the millions of parallel requests coming in from users every minute. “In warehouse-scale systems throughput is more important than single-threaded peak performance, because no single processor can handle the full workload, and maximising single-threaded performance costs power through larger die area,” he said in a recent IEEE presentation.

The Freedom Fighter: Jonathan Zittrain

Technology is more than software and boxes, and few people have a better understanding about the complex relationship between the legal and the functional than Harvard Law School professor Jonathan Zittrain.

As the first person to study China’s firewall, and a campaigner for the open web, Zittrain has a deep understanding on the complex relationships between The Establishment and online consumers. In his book, The Future Of The Internet And How To Stop It, Zittrain mourns the loss of “generativity” in which computers and networks evolved through collaboration, before locked-down systems such as the Xbox and iPhone and ever-more restrictive licences from rights holders and developers became commonplace. The book stands as a call to arms for anyone who believes in open platforms and user innovation.

To help website owners contest the scarily worded Cease and Desist orders that have become the corporates’ calling card for copyright infringement, Zittrain and his colleagues established the Chilling Effects website.

Zittrain is also an active proponent of the OpenNet Initiative, which aims to investigate, expose and analyse internet filtering and surveillance in a credible and non-partisan fashion.

As a spin-off, the former Oxford don also works on the Psiphon project – a censorship circumvention tool that allows users to access blocked web pages in countries where the internet is restricted.

The Network Mastermind: Patrik Faltström

Cisco’s Patrik Faltström has had a lot to think about recently, not least how to persuade the entire internet to migrate to a new protocol. He was a key player in establishing the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and the Internet Architecture Board (IAB), which co-ordinate the internet’s technical development.

As we run out of IPv4 addresses, Faltström says governments will be key to a successful transition to IPv6. “Governments are huge purchasers, and if they were to change and demand IPv6 compliance then a lot more companies would move over more quickly,” he said in a RIPE video.

“Subsidy doesn’t work very well, legislation is too slow, but if governments say ‘this has to do this or we won’t buy it’, then people will change.”

The Cloud Evangelist: Paul Maritz

Cloud computing is the current IT buzzphrase, but Rhodesian-born Paul Maritz has been banging that particular drum for longer than most. As the CEO of VMware, his company is among the vanguard of cloud pioneers.

It’s a far cry from creating tools to help developers for Intel’s x86 platform, his role before joining Microsoft in 1986. Now, Maritz believes the industry needs to move away from an outdated mentality that he traces back to the 1970s and its client-server framework, and a set of overbearing prescribed technologies. With a varied set of devices in the workplace, he believes companies need to be more flexible.

“If you look at what the industry has been trying to do for the past 30 years, starting with Xerox Parc back in the late 1970s, we were trying to automate a 1970s-era desk,” he told the Wall Street Journal recently. “You can see it in our terminology, files and folders and a typewriter and an inbox-outbox. “IT departments can no longer say that they have control over either the specification or the ownership of the device that the user has in their hands. The industry has to move to a workspace that is device independent. You are not going to want to have your workspace held captive by any particular device.”

The Energy Guru: Vinod Khosla

An Indian success story in Silicon Valley, Khosla took his electrical engineering degree from Delhi, built himself a fortune in the US, and is now spending it on social-technology projects.

His CV reads like an A-Z of tech landmarks. He established Daisy as a design tool for developers, before leaving to co-found Sun Microsystems, a company which he hoped would change the proprietorial landscape with standards-based computing.

With Sun established, Khosla moved on again, this time joining venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, where he worked with another start-up – this time a rival to Intel in the shape of Nexgen/AMD.

Armed with a career’s worth of experience and a bank balance to make grown men green, Khosla now runs his own venture capital company, specialising in green and “social impact” technology. He’s trying to bring the start-up mentality that’s served him so well in technology to the alternative energy market.

He dispels the notion that biofuels are unable to compete commercially with oil. “It is critical to continue nurturing the next-generation biofuel landscape,” he wrote in a recent white paper. “The winners will be big winners, and some of the ‘losers’ in the fuels market will still be able to find reasonably sized niche markets, such as billion dollar speciality solvent markets. “Four years ago, I’d have expected a 70% to 90% failure rate in our biofuels portfolio. Today, I expect more than 50% of our technology bets will be successful.”

The Crowd Sourcerer: Luis von Ahn

“I build systems that combine humans and computers to solve large-scale problems that neither can solve alone,” Luis von Ahn writes on the Carnegie Mellon University website. “I call this Human Computation, but others sometimes call it crowdsourcing.” Whatever it’s called, von Ahn’s work can be frustrating: he was the brains behind the CAPTCHA system that prevents spambots from filling in web forms, although frequently stops humans from doing so too by asking them to identify illegible phrases. Despite its flaws, it was bought by Google. Its successor, reCAPTCHA, takes advantage of the fact that 200 million people were, in von Ahn’s words, “wasting 500,000 hours a day typing annoying CAPTCHAs”.

Von Ahn thought those wasted hours could be put to better use, and now reCAPTCHA asks people to fill in two words: one regular puzzle and another that Google’s OCR has failed to identify during its attempt to digitise millions of books. Why? Because humans are better at converting images to text than the fallible OCR software. As a result, reCAPTCHAs placed on sites such as Google, Facebook and Twitter are used to digitise more than two million books a year.

His latest idea, Duolingo, uses crowd sourcing to translate the web, with von Ahn claiming that computer translators don’t work, while paying professional translators is prohibitively expensive. Von Ahn overcame concerns that there wouldn’t be enough bilingual people to achieve his aim, and that it would be impossible to motivate them. His solution? Turning the scheme into an educational program where participants learn a language while they translate web content.

Von Ahn claims the results rival those of professional translators, while “students” are shown increasingly complicated sentences to improve their skills. With a million users, von Ahn says Duolingo could translate Wikipedia from English to Spanish in 80 hours, for free – $15 million less than using human linguists.

The Silicon Visionary: Hermann Hauser

He may have recently been awarded “Visionary” status by Silicon Valley’s respected SDForum – joining icons such as Bill Gates, Vint Cerf and Lou Gerstner – but it’s his work closer to home that earns Dr Hermann Hauser the final spot in our top ten.

One of the original Micro Men, Hauser famously founded Acorn with Chris Curry in 1978. He subsequently helped to spin off ARM as a separate company, before setting up venture capital firm Amadeus Capital Partners, and becoming one of the most enlightened and enthusiastic supporters of tech start-ups in Cambridge’s Silicon Fen.