Joichi Ito

Director, MIT Media Lab

**Joichi Ito** is the Director of the MIT Media Lab and Chairman of the Board of PureTech Health. He is on the board of The Sony Corporation, The New York Times Company, the MacArthur Foundation, the Knight Foundation, The Mozilla Foundation, The MIT Press, MIT Tech Review and co-founder and board member of Digital Garage an Internet company in Japan. He has created numerous Internet companies including PSINet Japan, Digital Garage and Infoseek Japan and was an early stage investor in Twitter, Six Apart, Wikia, Flickr, Last.fm, Kongregate, Fotonauts/Fotopedia, Kickstarter and other Internet companies. He is the Guild Custodian of the World of Warcraft guild, We Know (http://weknow.to/). He is a PADI Master Scuba Diver Trainer, an Emergency First Responder instructor and a Divers Alert Network instructor. Ito was named by Businessweek as one of the 25 Most Influential People on the Web in 2008. In 2011, Ito was chosen by Nikkei Business as one of the 100 most influential people for the future of Japan and by Foreign Poicy Magazine as one of the "Top 100 Global Thinkers". In 2011, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Oxford Internet Institute in recognition of his role as one of the world's leading advocates of Internet freedom. Ito received the degree of Doctor of Literature, honoris causa, from The New School in 2013 and a Doctor of Humane Letters, honoris causa, from Tufts University in 2015. Read his article, "[Why Bitcoin is and isn't like the Internet](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-bitcoin-isnt-like-internet-joichi-ito "Linked In Article")", Linked In, January 18, 2015.