Nicholas Negroponte | |
|---|---|
 Nicholas Negroponte delivering the Forrestal Lecture to theUS Naval Academy inAnnapolis,MD, on April 15, 2009 | |
| Born | (1943-12-01)December 1, 1943 (age 81) |
| Occupation(s) | Academic andcomputer scientist |
| Children | Dimitri Negroponte |
Nicholas Negroponte (born December 1, 1943) is aGreek American architect. He is the founder and chairman Emeritus ofMassachusetts Institute of Technology'sMedia Lab, and also founded theOne Laptop per Child Association (OLPC). Negroponte is the author of the 1995 bookBeing Digital translated into more than forty languages.[1]
Negroponte was born toDimitrios Negropontis (Greek:Νεγροπόντης), a Greek shipping magnate, competitive alpine skier and member of theNegroponte family. He grew up in New York City'sUpper East Side. He has three brothers. His elder one,John Negroponte, is the formerUnited States Deputy Secretary of State.Michel Negroponte is anEmmy Award-winning filmmaker. George Negroponte is an artist and was President ofthe Drawing Center from 2002 to 2007.
He attendedBuckley School in New York,Fay School in Massachusetts,Le Rosey in Switzerland, andThe Choate School (now Choate Rosemary Hall) inWallingford, Connecticut, from which he graduated in 1961. Subsequently, he studied atMIT as both an undergraduate and graduate student inArchitecture where his research focused on issues ofcomputer-aided design.
Yona Friedman recalls having met Negroponte in 1964 when he was still a student at MIT, where he had discussed with Friedman his idea for an "Architecture Machine".[2][3] The architecture machine is considered by Negroponte to be a machine collaborator, who engages in an ongoing architectural design process with a human peer. Both machine and human participants engage in a process of mutual training and growth with each other, in order to harness the interactive potential found in peer-to-peer collaborations during an architectural design process with man and machine instead.[2]
He earned a master's degree in architecture fromMIT in 1966. Despite his accomplished academic career, Negroponte has spoken publicly about hisdyslexia and his difficulty in reading.[4]
Negroponte later joined the faculty ofMIT in 1966. For several years thereafter he divided his teaching time betweenMIT and several visiting professorships atYale,Michigan and theUniversity of California, Berkeley. He also during 1966, had a role withIBM which could potentially provide funding for research to find means of using computers to helparchitects, planners anddesigners.[5] He attended Avery Johnson's lab and seminars at theMIT Sloan school. He eventually met Warren Brodey, who Negroponte described as being “one of the earliest and most important influences”.[5] According toEvgeny Morozov, it was through Brodey that the ideas of "soft architectures" and "intelligent environments" became established in Negroponte's thinking.[5]
In 1967, Negroponte foundedMIT's Architecture Machine Group, a combination lab and think tank which studied new approaches tohuman–computer interaction.[2] The Architecture Machine Group was primarily concerned in addressing the potential of computers in architecture. Negroponte argued during this period thatcomputer aided design was only making activities such as architecture "faster", and that the underlying spirit of the architectural machine group would be to explore the various possibilities for generating collaborating machines for architectural design.[2][3] The group took funding fromDARPA and other parts ofThe Pentagon to explore early research inhuman-computer interaction andvirtual reality.[5] The contents of the research from the lab were composed into two books:The Architecture Machine: Towards a More Human Environment (1973), andSoft Architecture Machines (1976).[3] Participants in the group included thecyberneticianGordon Pask, who visited Negroponte as a consultant and whose article "Aspects of Machine Intelligence" became the introduction to the section on machine intelligence inSoft Architecture Machines.[6][7]
In 1985, Negroponte created theMIT Media Lab withJerome B. Wiesner.[8] As director, he developed the lab into a laboratory for new media and a high-tech playground for investigating the human–computer interface. Negroponte also became a proponent ofintelligent agents and personalizedelectronic newspapers,[9] for which he popularized the term theDaily Me.
In 1992, Negroponte was the first investor inWired Magazine. From 1993 to 1998, he contributed a monthly column to the magazine in which he reiterated a basic theme: "Move bits, not atoms."
Negroponte expanded many of the ideas from hisWired columns into a bestselling bookBeing Digital (1995),[10] 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 forty languages. Negroponte is a digital optimist who believed that computers would make life better for everyone.[11] However, critics such asCass Sunstein[12] have criticised histechno-utopian ideas for failing to consider the historical, political and cultural realities with which new technologies should be viewed.
In the 1980s, Negroponte predicted that wired technologies such as telephones would become unwired by using airwaves instead of wires or fiber optics, and that unwired technologies such as televisions would become wired—a prediction commonly referred to as theNegroponte switch.[13]
In 2000, Negroponte stepped down as director of theMedia Lab asWalter Bender took over as executive director. However, Negroponte retained the role of laboratory chairman. WhenFrank Moss was appointed director of the lab in 2006, Negroponte stepped down as lab chairman to focus more fully on his work withOne Laptop Per Child (OLPC) although he retains his appointment as professor at MIT (Professor Post-Tenure of Media Arts and Sciences).[14]
In November 2005, at theWorld Summit on the Information Society held inTunis, Negroponte unveiled the concept of a $100 laptop computer,The Children's Machine, designed for students in the developing world.[15] The price has increased to US$180, however. The project was a part of a broader program by One Laptop Per Child, a nonprofit organization started by Negroponte and otherMedia Lab faculty to extend Internet access in developing countries.
Negroponte is anangel investor and has invested in over 30 startup companies over the last 30 years, includingZagats,Wired,Ambient Devices,Skype andVelti. He has sat on several boards, includingMotorola andVelti.[16] He is also on the advisory board ofTTI/Vanguard.
In August 2007, he was appointed to a five-member special committee with the objective of assuring the continued journalistic and editorial integrity and independence of theWall Street Journal and otherDow Jones & Company publications and services. The committee was formed as part of the merger of Dow Jones withNews Corporation.[17] Negroponte's fellow founding committee members areLouis Boccardi,Thomas Bray,Jack Fuller, and the late former CongresswomanJennifer Dunn.
In response to the controversy of the MIT Media Lab accepting funding fromJeffrey Epstein five years after Epstein's conviction for sex trafficking minors, Negroponte told MIT staff, "If you wind back the clock, I would still say, 'Take it.'"[18]
Negroponte said that in the fund-raising world these types of occurrences were not out of the ordinary, and they should not be reason enough to cut off business relationships.[19]
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Academics | |
| Artists | |
| People | |
| Other | |