SPEAKER: NICHOLAS NEGROPONTE

Author, Being Digital

The world's pre-eminent speaker on information technology is a visionary who foresees new ways of accessing and understanding information. He explains how digital technology is fundamentally changing telecommunications and gives insights into the digital age.

His presentations draw from his bestseller, Being Digital, the definitive guide to the information superhighway. Published in more than thirty languages, it earned a spot on The New York Times bestseller list just weeks after its 1995 release.

Until recently, Negrponte was a senior columnist for the widely read magazines, Wired. His work has appeared both in print and on the Web at www.hotwire.com. He recently started a venture capital fund, Portos, for early stage Internet companies.

Negroponte is a founder and chairman of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's uniquely innovative Media Laboratory.

The ten-year-old Media Lab, an interdisciplinary, multi-million dollar research center of unparalleled intellectual and technological resources, focuses exclusively on the study and experimentation of future forms of human and machine communication.

Key Topics:
           Things That Think
           News in the Future
           Television of Tomorrow
           Perceptual Computing
           Learning and Common Sense

Negroponte studied at MIT, where as a graduate student he specialized in the then new field of computer-aided design. He joined the Institute's faculty in 1966, and for several years divided his teaching between MIT and visiting professorships at Yale, Michigan, and the University of California at Berkeley.

In 1968, he founded MIT's pioneering Architecture Machine Group, a combination lab and think tank responsible for many radically new approaches to the human-computer interface. Out of this experience came several influential texts, including: The Architecture Machine, Soft Architecture Machine, and Computer Aids to Design and Architecture.

In 1980, he was founding chairman of the International Federation of Information Processing Societies' Computers in Everyday Life program in Amsterdam. Two years later, Negroponte accepted the French government's invitation to become the first executive director of the World Center for Personal Computation and Human Development, an experimental project designed to explore technology's potential for enhancing primary education in under-developed countries.

Beyond his work with Wired and his bestselling book, he is a special general partner in a venture capital fund dedicated to new technologies for information and entertainment.