Andrew Lippman has spent his entire learning and teaching career at MIT. For the 2007-2008 academic year, he is on sabbatical as a visiting fellow at Nortel Networks working on developing notions of hyperconnectivity and open communications. He started as an undergraduate, was the founding Associate Director of the MIT Media Lab from 1983 to 2001, and co-directs and the Institute-wide Communications Futures Program and an NSF-funded program on Viral Radio (PDF, 384KB). At the Media Lab, he is the director of the Digital Life Program, a $3Million/year exploration of the impact of bits on personal, social and economic expression. He has testified at Congressional Committees on communications, been associated with startups in areas as diverse as animation and radio ID tags, and is on the board of WaveExpress. He is a Diamond Fellow, and was on the technical advisory board of Robert Kahn's Cross Industry Working Team at the non-profit Corporation for National Research Initiatives. He has nine patents and has worked on IP lawsuits for six others, and he helped develop the MPEG audio and video standards that play both HDTV pictures and MP3 audio. In the past twenty years, he has spoken over 100 times to groups as diverse as the hospitality industry and the board of the Consumer Electronics Association. He is also an avid ocean sailor. He earned his graduate degrees at MIT and at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne.
