Barry Vercoe retired in 2010 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as head of the prestigious MIT Media Lab's music, mind and machinery group, and relocated to be nearer to family and friends in the Bay of Plenty.
Since then, Wellington-born Mr Vercoe has been putting his experience as one of the world's leading technology innovators to use in helping spread the One Laptop Per Child project, which he helped found, throughout Australasia.
"I've settled in Tauranga because I have an aunt there who helped raise me," said Mr Vercoe. "She just turned 100, so I was very happy to throw a big party for her with the family."
Most of Mr Vercoe's career has been spent in the US and he was a founding member of the MIT Media Lab when it was established in 1985. His students at MIT have created a string of digital audio innovations, which have been commercialised by numerous companies in the US and Japan. In 2006, Mr Vercoe was the first investor in The Echo Nest, a music intelligence company founded by two of his MIT students, which was wholly acquired by Spotify in 2014 as its music intelligence engine.
Mr Vercoe is credited by MIT with training a generation of young composers in computer sound manipulation, and pioneered the creation of synthetic music with the development of the Csound software-synthesis language. His group at the lab developed Csound into structured audio technology capable of delivering the complex, high-quality digital sounds quickly and at lower bandwidths without losing quality.