Joi Ito

I’m the Director of the MIT Media Lab. I’m the chair of the board of PureTech Health and serve as a board member for various organizations including The New York Times Company, the MacArthur Foundation, the Knight Foundation and Digital Garage.

I’m passionate about learning new things, spending time with interesting people and the future of art, science, design and engineering. I spend most of my time supporting the research of the Media Lab research groups, centers and initiatives. We have around 400 projects.

I’ve invested in various companies through various vehicles and as an angel investor. I continue to make small investments through my current fund, Neoteny 3. You can see most of my portfolio on my Angel List page.

I recently co-authored a book with Jeff Howe called Whiplash.

I’ve taught a class called Principles of Awareness three times with the Venerable Tenzin Priyadarshi where we explore meditation and mindfulness and will be teaching it again for the spring 2018 semester.

I taught a class in January with Jonathan Zittrain at Harvard called Internet & Society: The Technologies and Politics of Control. We are having MIT students join the class together with the members participating in The Berkman Assembly. We will be doing the class again for the spring 2018 semester including another cohort of the Berkman Assembly.

I’m a scuba instructor and love to scuba dive. Recently I’m pretty excited about my rebreather. Having said that, I don’t get to go nearly as often as I would like to.

I’ve been the host of a weekly TV show on NHK in Japan called Super-Presentation since April 2012. On the show, we watch a TED Talk and talk about the presentation and the topic. I’ve have a number of co-hosts and my current co-host is Media Lab Assistant Professor, Sputniko. (You can find a list of all of the TED Talks that we’ve covered on the Japanese Wikipedia page for the show.)

You can find a more complete bio on my bio page. My LinkedIn page has the more precise record of my various roles past and present. My conflict of interests page lists all of my investments and affiliations categorized by the type of relationship.