Joichi Ito
Director, MIT Media Lab

Joichi Ito is the Director of the MIT Media Lab. He is the Chair of Creative Commons, on the Board of The New York Times Company, the Board of the MacArthur Foundation, on the Board of Trustees of The Knight Foundation, and co-founder and board member of Digital Garage in Japan. He has created numerous Internet companies and was an early stage investor in Twitter, Six Apart, Wikia, Technorati, Flickr, Dopplr, Last.fm, Kickstarter, Path and other Internet companies. He is on the advisory board of Wamda, a platform designed to empower entrepreneurs in the MENA region.

Ito was selected by the World Economic Forum in 2001 as one of the "Global Leaders for Tomorrow", chosen by Newsweek as a member of the "Leaders of The Pack" in 2005, and listed by Vanity Fair as a member of "The Next Establishment" in 2007. Ito was named by Businessweek as one of the 25 Most Influential People on the Web in 2008. In 2011, Ito was chosen by Nikkei Business as one of the 100 most influential people for the future of Japan and by Foreign Policy Magazine as one of the "Top 100 Global Thinkers". 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 Internet advocates.