Alex Kipman | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | 1979 (age 44–45) [1] |
| Other names | Technical Fellow |
| Alma mater | Rochester Institute of Technology |
| Employer(s) | Microsoft (2021–2022) Analog AI (2023–present) |
Alex Kipman (born 1979) is a Brazilian engineer and inventor who is the founder and chief executive officer (CEO) of Analog AI. [2] [3] Previously, he was the lead developer of the Microsoft HoloLens smartglasses and helped develop the Xbox Kinect. [4] [5]
Kipman was born in Curitiba in 1979. [1] [5] The son of a Brazilian diplomat, Kipman grew up around the world. [6] When he was seven or eight, he learned how to program the Atari 2600. [7] Later on he would go to RIT, graduating in 2001 with a degree in software engineering. [8] [9]
Kipman joined Microsoft in 2001, [8] [9] starting development on Microsoft's integrated development environment (IDE) Visual Studio. Starting 2005, he helped in the development of Microsoft Windows, until joining the Xbox department in 2008, [10] where he oversaw the acquisition of the technology for the Xbox Kinect from an Israeli company, [11] PrimeSense. [12] The product was finished two years later. [7]
In 2011, Time magazine named him to its list of its 100 Most Influential People in the World, a list consisting of leaders, artists, innovators, icons and heroes. In a subsequent interview with Fast Company , he said "Software is the only art form in existence that is not bound by the confines of physics." [13] [10] [14] In 2012 he was named Inventor of the Year by the Intellectual Property Owners Association. [15] [16]
In 2013, Kipman gave the commencement speech at his alma mater, the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT). [17] [18]
In 2016, he gave a Ted Talk on mixed reality, called "A futuristic vision of the age of Holograms". [5] [19] [20] In a 2017 interview with Alice Bonasio, he emphasized his passion for mixed reality, stating how it gives him a sense of "displacement superpowers". [21] During the Hololens 2 reveal at the Mobile World Congress in 2019, Alex Kipman talked about how the Hololens 2 would be the "next era" of mixed reality, making it more culturally relevant. [22]
In 2019 while he was developing metaverse technologies, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C named Kipman the winner of an American Ingenuity Award, calling him a pioneer of holographic and augmented reality technology. [23] Later that year he gave a speech in Shanghai announcing that Microsoft's second-generation HoloLens would ship later that year. [24]
In 2021, he received the Longuet-Higgins Prize by the Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (PAMI) Technical Committee at the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) for fundamental contributions in computer vision. [25]
In May 2022, Kipman left Microsoft to found Analog AI. [26] [27] [28] He has been the CEO of Analog AI since 2023. [2]
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