| Michail Bletsas | |
| Birth Date: | 1967 |
| Birth Place: | Chania |
| Occupation: | Academic and Computer Scientist |
Michail Bletsas (born March 19, 1967) is a Greek research scientist and the Director of Computing at the MIT Media Lab.
Bletsas was born in Chania, Crete. He studied at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and received a master's degree in computer engineering from Boston University.[1]
Before joining the Media Lab, Bletsas was a Systems Engineer at Aware Inc.[1] He is one of the founders of the Greek mobile advertising and marketing company Velti S.A.[1] and he was also one of the leaders in an effort to provide wireless networking to the island of Patmos, Greece.[2] [3]
Since June 23, 2010, Bletsas is an Independent Non-Executive Director of Hellenic Telecommunications Organization SA (Athens, Greece).[4]
Michail Bletsas is one of the designers of OLPC's XO laptop.[5] He was one of the principals of the OLPC team [6] where he made various contributions, including the design and implementation of the first embedded layer-2 wifi mesh stack. From February 2006 to January 2009, he was OLPC's Chief Connectivity Officer and VP Advanced Technology[7] and he was member of the group which received the Community category award of the 2007, for the design of the OLPC XO-1 laptop computer.[8] [9]
He was a keynote speaker at the 4th and 5th Annual IEEE Consumer Communications & Networking Conference in Las Vegas, Nevada, 2007[10] and 2008[11] respectively, at the 8th International Conference on Computer Based Learning in Science in Heraklion, Crete, 2007,[12] at Disruptions 2007 in Athens, Greece,[13] and at the 4th Balkan Conference in Informatics in Thessaloniki, Greece, 2009.[14]