Joi Ito is the director of the MIT Media Lab where he combines exceptional academic and practical experience to offer an unmatched bird's-eye view of technology. Ito has an authoritative, unbiased perspective on the business and development of technology, and an unerring eye for the next big thing — he was an early-stage investor in such internet titans as Twitter, Wikia, Flickr, Last.fm, and Kickstarter.

Ito's long career has spanned an incredible variety of sectors. He sits on the boards of Sony Corporation, the Knight Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, The New York Times Company, Mozilla Foundation, WITNESS, and Global Voices, and Creative Commons. 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.

In 2011, Ito was chosen by Foreign Policy magazine as one of the "Top 100 Global Thinkers." Businessweek named him one of the 25 Most Influential People on the Web in 2008. 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. In 2011 and 2012, Ito was chosen by Nikkei Business as one of the 100 most influential people for the future of Japan.

He received the degree of Doctor of Literature, honoris causa, from The New School in 2013.