Biography:

Joichi has had an elaborate career spanning the US and Japan. He has been recently appointed as the new Executive Director of the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), starting his functions on September 2011. He is also General Manager of Neoteny Labs, a startup fund focusing on Asia and the Middle East. Ito was previously a board member on ICANN and has made investments in Twitter, Last.FM and Flickr. Moreover he was an early participant in the open-source software movement and is a board member of the Mozilla Foundation, which oversees the development of the Firefox Web browse, as well as being the co-founder and chairman of Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization that has sought to create a middle ground to promote the sharing of digital information. He has written opinion editorials for the Asian Wall Street Journal and The New York Times and has published articles in many other magazines and newspapers. In 2008, Ito was named by BusinessWeek as one of the 25 Most Influential People on the web and received this year 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.