Nicholas Negroponte
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Nicholas Negroponte (born 1943) is a computer scientist best known as founder and ex-director of Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab. He is the brother of John Negroponte, United States Director of National Intelligence.
Born the son of a Greek ship owner on New York City's Upper East Side, Nicholas Negroponte attended Choate Rosemary Hall in Wallingford, Connecticut where he graduated in 1961. He then studied at MIT, where as a graduate student he specialized in the field of computer-aided design. He earned a Bachelor's and Master's degree in Architecture from MIT in 1966. He joined the faculty of MIT in 1966. For several years thereafter he divided his teaching time between MIT and visiting professorships at Yale, Michigan, and the University of California, Berkeley.
In 1968 he founded MIT's Architecture Machine Group, a combination lab and think tank which studied new approaches to the human-computer interface. In 1985, Negroponte piloted MIT's Media Lab into existence. It developed into the pre-eminent computer science laboratory for new media and a high-tech playground for investigating the human-computer interface.
In 1992, he became involved in the creation of Wired Magazine as a minority investor. From 1993 to 1998, he contributed a monthly column to the magazine in which he reiterated a basic theme, his credo "Move bits, not atoms."
Negroponte expanded many of the ideas he wrote about in his Wired columns into a bestselling book Being Digital (1995), which made famous his forecasts on how the interactive world, the entertainment world, and the information world would eventually merge. Being Digital was a bestseller and was translated into some twenty languages. However, critics faulted his techno-utopian ideas for failing to consider the historical, political, and cultural realities with which new technologies should be viewed. In the years following the dot-com bust, the book was quickly outdated.
In November 2005, at the World Summit on the Information Society held in Tunis, Negroponte unveiled a $100 laptop computer designed for students in the developing world. The project is part of a broader program by One Laptop Per Child, a non-profit started by Negroponte and other Media Lab faculty, to extend Internet access in developing countries.
Negroponte sits on several boards including Motorola and Ambient Devices. He has invested in over 30 startup companies over the last 30 years, including Zagats, Wired, Ambient Devices, and Skype. Negroponte has left the MIT Media Lab in February 2006 to devote his time to the One Laptop Per Child project. His successor as director is the entrepreneur Frank Moss.
References
- Kirkpatrick, David (Nov. 28, 2005). "I'd Like to Teach the World to Type". Fortune, pp. 37–38.
- Negroponte, N. (1970). The Architecture Machine: Towards a More Human Environment. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. ISBN 0262640104
- Negroponte, N. (1995). Being Digital. Knopf. (Paperback edition, 1996, Vintage Books, ISBN 0679762906)
External links
- Negroponte's homepage at the Media Lab
- Wired interview with Negroponte
- Negroponte's vision - laptops for third world countries
- Negroponte talk about One Laptop Per Child
- Video of Negroponte talk at MIT Technology conference about One Laptop Per Child
- Association for Computing Machinery Video Interview with Nicholas Negroponte
- Speaking at Pop!Tech 2005, on ITConversations.com
- 18 min Talk at TED Conference (2006) Monterey, CA