Nicholas Negroponte is the cofounder (with Jerome B. Wiesner) of the MIT Media Lab, which he directed for its first twenty years. A graduate of MIT, Negroponte was a pioneer in the field of computer-aided design and has been a member of the MIT faculty since 1966. He gave the first TED talk in 1984, as well as thirteen since. He is author of the 1995 bestseller Being Digital, which has been translated into more than forty languages. In 2005 he founded the nonprofit One Laptop per Child, which deployed $1 billion in laptops for primary education in the developing world. In the private sector, Negroponte served on the board of directors of Motorola for fifteen years and was general partner in a venture capital firm specializing in digital technologies for information and entertainment. He has personally provided startup funds for more than forty companies, including Zagat and Wired magazine.

Participating units at UC Berkeley: Berkeley Center for New Media; Arts, Technology and Culture Colloquia; Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation