Nicholas Negroponte

Nicholas Negroponte (born 1943) is a Greek-American computer scientist best known as founder and director of Massachusetts Institute of Technology s MIT Media Lab. Thanks to his personal charisma and his aura of a technological visionary, he has been very successful at attracting corporate sponsors for the Media Lab, a skill for which he is greatly admired. He is the brother of United States Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte.

Born the son of a Greece ship owner on New York City s Upper East Side, Nicholas Negroponte studied at MIT, where as a graduate student he specialized in the field of computer-aided design. He joined the faculty of MIT in 1966. For several years thereafter he divided his teaching time between MIT and visiting professorships at Yale University, University of Michigan, and the University of California, Berkeley.

In 1968 he also 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 dated quickly. Yet one can still appreciate the unique quality of the author s vision, and draw inspiration from the sense of speculative possibility that washes over the reader.

In 2005, Negroponte announced the $100 laptop initiative at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. A non-profit, One Laptop Per Child, started by Negroponte and other Media Lab faculty, aims to extend Internet access in developing countries by providing children with simple, inexpensive laptops.

Negroponte remains Chairman of the MIT Media Lab, as well as sitting on several boards including .

=References=

*Negroponte, N. (1995). Being Digital . Knopf.  (Paperback edition, 1996, Vintage Books, ISBN 0679762906)

=External links=

*[http://www.media.mit.edu/people/bio_nicholas.html Negroponte s homepage at the Media Lab] *[http://archives.obs-us.com/obs/english/books/nn/bd1101bn.htm Wired interview with Negroponte] *[http://www.laptopical.com/cheap-hundred-dollar-laptops.html Negroponte s vision - laptops for third world countries]