Hiroshi Ishii is a Muriel R. Cooper Professor of Media Arts and Sciences, at the MIT Media Lab. He joined the MIT Media Laboratory in October 1995, and founded the Tangible Media Group to pursue a new vision of Human Computer Interaction (HCI): "Tangible Bits." His team seeks to change the "painted bits" of GUIs to "tangible bits" by giving physical form to digital information and computation. Since July 2002, he has co-directed the Thing That Think Consortium at the MIT Media Lab. In 2006 ACM SIGCHI elected Ishii to the CHI Academy recognizing his substantial contributions to the field of Human-Computer Interactions through the creation of new genre called "Tangible User Interfaces." He received B. E. degree in electronic engineering, M. E. and Ph. D. degrees in computer engineering from Hokkaido University, Japan, in 1978, 1980 and 1992, respectively. He was born in Tokyo in 1956, and started to play with PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) in 1958.
Hiroshi Ishii's research focuses upon the design of seamless interfaces between humans, digital information, and the physical environment.
Ishii and his students have presented their vision of "Tangible Bits" at a variety of academic, industrial design, and media art venues including ACM SIGCHI, ACM SIGGRAPH, Industrial Design Society of America, and Ars Electronica, emphasizing that the development of tangible interfaces requires the rigor of both scientific and artistic review. A display of many of the group's projects took place in "Tangible Bits" exhibition at the NTT InterCommunication Center (ICC) in Tokyo in summer 2000. A new, three-year-long exhibition "Get in Touch" that features the Tangible Media group's work opened at Ars Electronica Center (Linz, Austria) in September 2001.
He was named Associate Director at the Media Lab in May 2008.
Prior to MIT, from 1988-1994, he led a CSCW research group at the NTT Human Interface Laboratories, where his team invented TeamWorkStation and ClearBoard. In 1986 and 1987, he was a visiting research associate at GMD (The German National Research Centre for Computer Science) in Bonn, Germany. In 1993 and 1994, he was a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Computer Systems Research Institute of the University of Toronto, Canada.
He served as an Associate Editor of ACM TOCHI (Transactions on Computer Human Interactions) and ACM TOIS (Transactions on Office Information Systems). He also served as a program committee member of many international conferences including ACM CHI, CSCW, UIST, SIGGRAPH, Multimedia, Interact, ISMAR, and ECSCW.
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Photo credit: Webb Chappell