John Watlington

Chief Technology Officer

John Watlington brings decades of hardware experience to OLPC. He worked as a Research Specialist at the MIT Media Lab for many years, designing advanced media processing platforms (Cheops, Holographic TV) and developing video compression algorithms, both traditional (subband and MPEG) as well as Object-Based Media.

Since then he has served as director of hardware engineering at AudioVelocity (portable voice/text recorders) and Ucentric Systems (home servers and video thin clients, acquired by Motorola), among others. He also worked as a principal researcher at Orange (France Telecom) R&D, conceiving and developing new services based around a home server.

John is responsible for the architecture, design and manufacturing of both the current XO laptop, and future generations. In the past, he was also responsible for developing the OLPC School Server software.

John holds an S.B. in E.E.C.S. and S.M. in Architecture from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and currently lives in Acton, Massachusetts.