Nicholas Negroponte is a founder and the director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's uniquely innovative Media Laboratory. The ten-year-old Media Lab, an interdisciplinary, multi-million dollar research center of unparalleled intellectual and technological resources, focuses exclusively on the study and experimentation of future forms of human communication, from entertainment to education. Programs include: Television of Tomorrow, School of the Future, Information and Entertainment Systems, and Holography. Media Lab research is supported by Federal contracts and by more than seventy-five corporations worldwide.Negroponte studied at MIT, where as a graduate student he specialized in the then-new field of computer-aided design. He joined the Institute's faculty in 1966, and for several years divided his teaching time between MIT and visiting professorships at Yale, Michigan and the University of California at Berkeley. In 1968 he founded MIT's pioneering Architecture Machine Group, a combination lab and think tank responsible for many radically new approaches to the human-computer interface. Out of this experience came several influential texts by Negroponte, including: The Architecture Machine, Soft Architecture Machine and Computer Aids to Design and Architecture.
In 1980, he served a term as founding chairman of the International Federation of Information Processing Societies' Computers in Everyday Life program in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Two years later, Negroponte accepted the French government's invitation to become the first executive director of the Paris-based World Center for Personal Computation and Human Development, an experimental project originally designed to explore computer technology's potential for enhancing primary education in underdeveloped countries. Since then, Negroponte has traveled extensively throughout the world as a lecturer. He has delivered hundreds of presentations, including the prestigious Murata "People Talk" address in Kyoto in 1990. In addition, he consults to both government and industry, serves as an active member on several corporate boards of directors and is a special general partner in a venture capital fund dedicated to new technologies for information and publishing. Negroponte is senior columnist for Wired magazine and the author of the new book BEING DIGITAL, published by Alfred A. Knopf. (Negroponte, 1995)
on the web
Bio from Bush Symposium, 1995
http://www.eecs.mit.edu/AY95-96/events/bush/nn.html
Home Page, Media Lab
http://web.media.mit.edu/~nicholas/