Garry Kasparov

Garry Kasparov

Avast Security Ambassador

Garry Kasparov was born in Baku, Azerbaijan, in the Soviet Union in 1963. He became the youngest world chess champion in history in 1985 and was the world’s top-rated player for 20 years, until he retired in 2005. His matches against the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue popularized chess and machine intelligence in unprecedented ways.

Kasparov became a pro-democracy leader in Russia and an outspoken defender of individual freedom around the world, a mission he continues as the chairman of the New York-based Human Rights Foundation. He is a Visiting Fellow at the Oxford-Martin School, where his lectures focus on human-machine collaboration.

Kasparov is a provocative speaker who appears frequently before business, academic, and political audiences to speak about decision-making, strategy, technology, and artificial intelligence. His writings on politics, cognition, and tech have appeared in dozens of major publications around the world. His new book, Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins comes out in May 2017.

In 2016, he was named a Security Ambassador by Avast Software, where he discusses cybersecurity and the digital future.