Nicholas Negroponte Speaker Profile

Nicholas Negroponte is one of the foremost futurists on the international scene today. He is a fine speaker with a base of knowledge and a history of valuable insight about innovation, technology and their impact on business and culture that few can match. He is the Wiesner Professor of Media Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is the founding Chairman of MIT's Media Lab, an interdisciplinary, multimillion-dollar research center focused on human-machine communication.

Professor Negroponte was the first to predict and describe how digitalization—the move from atoms to bits—would affect every industry in every part of the world. He has proven remarkably accurate in his predictions about how all media, from publishing to telecoms, would evolve in the digital age. He is the author of The New York Times best seller Being Digital, which has been translated into over 40 languages. Negroponte is currently working on a new book, Geo-Digital, that probes the implications of digital globalization and global digitalization.

Most recently, Professor Negroponte helped to establish and serves as chairman of the 2B1 Foundation, an organization focused on information technology and global development issues. Among other missions, 2B1 is dedicated to bringing computer access and education to children in the most remote and poorest parts of the world. His current focus is rural Cambodia.

In addition to founding the incredibly successful and influential Media Lab, he also founded MIT's pioneering Architecture Machine Group, a combination lab and think tank responsible for many radically new approaches to the human-computer interface.

In the private sector, Professor Negroponte serves on the board of directors for Motorola, Inc., and as a special general partner in a venture capital firm focusing in technologies for information and entertainment. A former columnist for The New York Times, he was a founder of WiReD magazine and has been an angel investor for over 40 start-ups, including three in China. Professor Negroponte also serves as Chairman of Media Lab Europe, the Lab's sister institution in Ireland.

Nicholas Negroponte studied at MIT and has been an MIT faculty member since 1966.