Nicholas Negroponte

Nicholas Negroponte is the Wiesner Professor of Media Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and founding chairman of MIT’s Media Laboratory.

Professor Negroponte also serves as chairman of Media Lab Europe, the Lab’s sister institution in Ireland. Financially supported by federal funds and 75 international firms, the Media Lab is one of the most important research centre for the study and development of new ways of human communication, in the van of experimentation both in the educational and entertainment field.

Professor Negroponte studied at MIT and specialized in the newly born field of computer aided design. He has been an MIT faculty member since 1966 and began his career teaching at MIT and, as visiting professor, at the University of Yale (Michigan) and of California (Berkeley).

In 1980, for a semester, he was president of the International Federation of Information Processing Societies’ Computers in Everyday Life Program and, two years later, he accepted the invitation of the French Government to manage the World Centre for Personal Computation and Human Development in Paris, an experimental project to promote the use of information technology in schools in the developing countries.

In 1995, he published The New York Times bestseller Being Digital, which has been translated into over 40 languages.

He serves on the board of directors for Motorola, Inc., and was a founder of WiReD magazine. Most recently, Professor Negroponte helped to establish, and serves as chairman, of the 2B1 Foundation, an organization dedicated to bringing computer access to children in the most remote and poorest parts of the world.