Alan Kay

Currently Vice-President of Creative Technology, Research and Development for Walt Disney Imagineering, and a Disney Fellow, Kay is known for the idea of personal computing, the conception of the ultimate laptop computer, and the inventions of the now ubiquitous overlapping window interface and modern object-oriented programming. Before coming to Walt Disney Imagineering, Kay was an Apple Fellow with Apple Computers Inc. for thirteen years. Kay co-founded the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center which was instrumental in the development of modern workstations, laser printing, and network "client-servers". Prior to his work at Zerox, Kay was a member of the University of Utah ARPA research team that developed 3-D graphics. A graduate of the University of Colorado in mathematics and molecular biology, Kay earned his Ph.D. at the University of Utah in 1969. Kay is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Society of Arts and the World Economic Forum. A former professional jazz guitarist and composer, he is now an amateur classical pipe organist.