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Joi Ito's Homepage

Media Lab director Joi Ito is a leading thinker and writer on innovation, global technology policy, and the role of the Internet in transforming society in substantial and positive ways.

A vocal advocate of emergent democracy, privacy, and Internet freedom, Ito is board chair (and former CEO) of Creative Commons, and sits on the boards of the Mozilla Foundation, WITNESS, and Global Voices. In Japan, he was a founder of Digital Garage, and helped establish and later became CEO of the country’s first commercial Internet service provider. He was an early investor in more than 40 companies, including Flickr, Six Apart, Last.fm, Kongregate, Kickstarter, and Twitter. Ito’s honors include TIME magazine’s "Cyber-Elite” listing in 1997 (at age 31) and selection as one of the "Global Leaders for Tomorrow" by the World Economic Forum (2001). In 2008, BusinessWeek named him one of the "25 Most Influential People on the Web." In 2011, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Oxford Internet Institute.

(Photo by Mizuka from Joi's flickr photostream and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license.)


Publications

Publication
Feb 9, 2018

Follow-up Letter to the Members of the Massachusetts Legislature Regarding the Adoption of Actuarial Risk Assessment Tools in the Criminal Justice System

The following open letter — signed by Harvard and MIT-based faculty, staff, and researchers — is directed to the Massachusetts Legislature to inform its consideration of risk…

Publication
Nov 9, 2017

An Open Letter to the Members of the Massachusetts Legislature Regarding the Adoption of Actuarial Risk Assessment Tools in the Criminal Justice System

This open letter — signed by Harvard and MIT-based faculty, staff, and researchers— is directed to the Massachusetts Legislature to inform its consideration of risk assessment…


News

Wired
Mar 1, 2018

The Limits of Explainability

For decades, artificial intelligence with common sense has been one of the most difficult research challenges in the field


Community

Vox

The problem with tech people who want to solve problems

On the latest Recode Decode podcast, Joi Ito says we need to resist the urge to oversimplify the problems we’re solving.

Jun 26, 2019
Wired

It’s OK That Amazon Will (Likely) Get the .amazon Domain

ICANN handed over the top level domain .amazon to Jeff Bezos’ Amazon.com, pending a 30 day comment period

May 25, 2019
Wired

Forget about artificial intelligence, extended intelligence is the future

We should challenge the cult of Singularity. AI won't take over the world

Apr 23, 2019
Harvard Law Today

Medical AI systems could be vulnerable to adversarial attacks

With HMS and MIT faculty, Zittrain and Bowers co-author report in Science Journal

medical machine-learning systems may be uniquely susceptible to attacks

Mar 25, 2019
News

Adversarial attacks on medical AI: A health policy challenge

Emerging vulnerabilities demand new conversations

Technical solutions alone aren't enough to address vulnerabilities in machine learning systems

Mar 21, 2019
Wired

Why Westerners Fear Robots and the Japanese Do Not

How cultural differences account for our feelings about technology

Jul 30, 2018

Events

May 14, 2019 @ 7:00 PM

Everyday Chaos

A Book Talk with author David Weinberger and Joi Ito

VIDEO & PODCAST: In his new book, Everyday Chaos, David Weinberger points to accepted ways we work on the Internet that in fact undo our old assumptions about how the future works…

Event
Apr 11, 2017 @ 12:00 PM

AI & Society

featuring Joi Ito and Iyad Rahwan of the MIT Media Lab

ISIS. Trump. Uber. The 1%. What if all these phenomena reflect the same forces? What if you could understand those forces?

Dec 12, 2008 @ 6:30 PM

The Commons: Celebrating accomplishments, discerning futures

Jamie Boyle, Lawrence Lessig, Joi Ito, Molly S. Van Houweling, and Jonathan Zittrain

Creative Commons and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society present "The Commons: Celebrating accomplishments, discerning futures" tonight.