Michail Bletsas is the Chief Connectivity Officer for One Laptop Per Child (OLPC). OLPC is a new nonprofit dedicated to research to develop a $100 laptop—a technology that could revolutionize how we educate the world's children.

Before joining OLPC, Michail was director of computing at the MIT Media Laboratory, where he worked with Nicholas Negroponte in conceiving the $100 laptop. He designed and deployed most of the Internet network infrastructure systems at the Media Lab. His research involves experimenting with wireless networks that are implemented using off-the-shelf, low-cost components to provide broadband Internet access to underserved areas. Before joining the Media Lab, he was a systems engineer at Aware, Inc., where he designed and wrote high-performance software libraries for Intel's distributed-memory parallel supercomputers, and was involved in the development of one of the first ADSL Internet-access test beds. He holds a diploma in electrical engineering from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece and an MS in computer engineering from Boston University. 

Session: The $100 laptop: simplicity can be complicated