Welcome Keynote

Dr. Hiroshi Ishii

Hiroshi Ishii's research focuses upon the design of seamless interfaces between humans, digital information, and the physical environment. At the MIT Media Lab, he founded the Tangible Media Group in fall 1995 pursuing a new vision of Human Computer Interaction (HCI): "Tangible Bits." His team seeks to change the "painted bits" of GUIs to "tangible bits" by giving physical form to digital information.

Ishii and his team have presented their vision of "Tangible Bits" at a variety of academic, design, and artistic venues (including ACM SIGCHI, ACM SIGGRAPH, Industrial Design Society of America, AIGA, NTT ICC, Ars Electronica, Centre Pompidou, and Victoria and Albert Museum), emphasizing that the development of tangible interfaces requires the rigor of both scientific and artistic review. A display of many of the group's projects took place at the NTT InterCommunication Center (ICC) in Tokyo in summer 2000. A three-year-long exhibition "Get in Touch" featured the Tangible Media group's work at Ars Electronica Center (Linz, Austria) from September 2001 through August 2004. He was elected to CHI Academy by ACM SIGCHI, and it was announced in CHI 2006 in Montreal. He received Funai Achievement Award in FIT 2010 in Kyushu, Japan.

Prior to MIT, from 1988-1994, he led a CSCW research group at the NTT Human Interface Laboratories, where his team invented TeamWorkStation and ClearBoard. In 1993 and 1994, he was a visiting assistant professor at the University of Toronto, Canada. In 1986~87, he was a visiting researcher at the GMD in Germany.

He received B. E. degree in electronic engineering, M. E. and Ph. D. degrees in computer engineering from Hokkaido University, Japan, in 1978, 1980 and 1992, respectively.