The chief architect of Apple’s virtual assistant Siri – Brian Pinkerton is going to be the keynote speaker at the Wisconsin Entrepreneurs’ Conference next month. It’s a homecoming of sorts for the 56 year old Pinkerton who is a graduate of UW Madison public university.
The conference is scheduled to be held on the 4th of June as a digital event. It is being organized by the Wisconsin Technology Council. The main goal of the conference reportedly is to find ways to help business survive the brunt of the covid-19 pandemic.
The Wisconsin Entrepreneurs’ Conference will include multiple panel discussions and workshops. The theme of course being around the current situations businesses are facing because of covid-19.
Pinkerton studied computer science for his bachelor’s degree at UW Madison. He grew up in Madison and studied in Madison till his bachelors. However, he went to the University of Washington to receive his masters and doctoral degree in computer science.
In an interview with the State Journal, Pinkerton said that he will speak about solving major problems faced by humans with the help of technology. He also added that the focus of technology should be to solve the same.
It is not new for Pinkerton to think of solving problems or creating solutions to help in some scenarios. In 1994, he created the web search engine named WebCrawler which is still up and running. WebCrawler is the oldest surviving search engine on the internet as of today. Pinkerton sold WebCrawler to the major internet player AOL in 1995 and it has changed hands since then.
At present, Pinkerton is the chief architect of Siri, the virtual assistant that runs on macOS, iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, and tvOS. In the past, he has worked at the CTO of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and also served as the VP for search (& General Manager) at A9.com.
