Nicholas Negroponte

Pioneer in human-computer interaction research, Negroponte joined the faculty of MIT in 1966. For several years thereafter, he divided his teaching time between MIT and several visiting professorships at Yale, Michigan, and the University of California, Berkeley.

In 1967, Negroponte founded MIT's Architecture Machine Group, a combination lab and think tank that studied new approaches to human-computer interaction. In 1985, he created the MIT Media Lab with Jerome B. Wiesner. As director, Negroponte developed the lab into the pre-eminent computer science laboratory for new media and a high-tech playground for investigating the human-computer interface.