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 unparalled intellectual and technological resources, is focused exclusively on study and experimentation with 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 as well as by more than seventy-five corporations worldwide. Negroponte is also co-founder and back-page columnist for Wired magazine.
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 thereafter divided his teaching time between MIT and visiting professorships at Yale, Michigan, and the University of California at Berkeley.
In 1968 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 1980, he served a term as founding chairman of the International Federation of Information Processing Societies' Computers in Everyday Life program. 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.
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