Joi Ito
Director, & MIT Professor of the Practice
MIT Media Lab
Speaker/Panelist 2017
Joi Ito is the director of the MIT Media Lab, Professor of the Practice at MIT and the author, with Jeff Howe, of Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future (Grand Central Publishing, 2016). Ito is Chairman of the Board of PureTech Health and serves on several other boards, including The New York Times Company, Sony Corporation, the MacArthur Foundation and the Knight Foundation. He is also the former Chairman and CEO of Creative Commons, and a former board member of ICANN, The Open Source Initiative, and The Mozilla Foundation.
Ito is a serial entrepreneur who helped start and run numerous companies including one of the first web companies in Japan, Digital Garage, and the first commercial Internet service provider in Japan, PSINet Japan/IIKK. He has been an early-stage investor in many companies, including Formlabs, Flickr, Kickstarter, littleBits, and Twitter. Ito has received numerous awards, including the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Oxford Internet Institute and the Golden Plate Award from the Academy of Achievement, and he was inducted into the SXSW Interactive Festival Hall of Fame in 2014. Ito has been awarded honorary doctorates from The New School and Tufts University.