1. Joichi "Joi" Ito is a Japanese entrepreneur and venture capitalist.
47 Facts About Joi Ito
1. 2.
Joi Ito is the president of Chiba Institute of Technology.
3.
Joi Ito is a former director of the MIT Media Lab, former professor of the practice of media arts and sciences at MIT, and a former visiting professor of practice at Harvard Law School.
4.
Joi Ito wrote a monthly column in the Ideas section of Wired.
5.
Joi Ito's family moved to Canada and then to the United States, when Ito was about three, to a suburb of Detroit, Michigan, where his father became a research scientist and his mother a secretary for Energy Conversion Devices, Inc.
6.
Joi Ito studied at the Nishimachi International School and, for high school, the American School in Japan in Tokyo.
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In that phase of his life, Joi Ito learned "street language, street smarts, and computers".
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One of the few Japanese using modems before networking deregulation reached Japan, in 1985, Joi Ito had found The Source and the original MUD by his teens.
9.
Joi Ito returned to the United States to attend Tufts University as a computer science major, where he met, among others, Pierre Omidyar, later founder of eBay.
10.
Joi Ito enrolled at the University of Chicago in physics but later dropped out as the program was overly oriented towards producing practical engineers rather than teaching an intuitive understanding of physics.
11.
Joi Ito attended Hitotsubashi University, according to his essay in Japanese.
12.
Joi Ito received a doctorate by thesis The Practice of Change from the Graduate School of Media and Governance of Keio University in 2018.
13.
Joi Ito's sister, Mizuko Joi Ito, is a cultural anthropologist, studying media technology use, and the musician Cornelius is his second cousin.
14.
Joi Ito became a disc jockey working in nightclubs in Chicago such as the Limelight and Smart Bar, working with Metasystems Design Group to start a virtual community in Tokyo.
15.
Joi Ito helped bring industrial music from Chicago and later the rave scene, managing a DJ team and visual artists, including importing Anarchic Adjustment to Japan.
16.
Joi Ito was the Chairman of Creative Commons from December 2006 until 2012.
17.
Joi Ito is on the board of Digital Garage, Culture Convenience Club, Tucows, and EPIC, and is on the advisory boards of Creative Commons and WITNESS.
18.
Joi Ito is the founder and CEO of the venture capital firm Neoteny Co.
19.
Joi Ito was on the board of the Open Source Initiative from March 2005 until April 2007.
20.
Joi Ito was a founding board member of Expression College for Digital Arts as well as the Zero One Art and Technology Network.
21.
Joi Ito was a board member of Energy Conversion Devices from 1995 to 2000.
22.
Joi Ito is a venture capitalist and angel investor and was an early stage investor in Kickstarter, Twitter, Six Apart, Technorati, Flickr, Wikia, SocialText, Dopplr, Last.
23.
Joi Ito is Senior Visiting Researcher of Keio Research Institute at SFC.
24.
Joi Ito is a PADI IDC Staff Instructor, an Emergency First Responder Instructor Trainer, and a Divers Alert Network Instructor Trainer.
25.
Joi Ito has written op-eds for the Asian Wall Street Journal and The New York Times and has published articles in numerous other magazines and newspapers.
26.
Joi Ito has written regular columns in The Daily Yomiuri, Mac World Japan, Asahi Pasocom, Asahi Doors, and other media sources.
27.
Joi Ito's photographs have been used in The New York Times Online, BusinessWeek, American Heritage, Wired News, Forbes, and BBC News.
28.
Joi Ito was on the early editorial mastheads of Wired and Mondo 2000.
29.
Joi Ito has hosted televisions shows including The New Breed and SimTV shows on NHK.
30.
Joi Ito is currently the host of a TV show called "Super-Presentation" airing weekly in Japan on NHK.
31.
Joi Ito was listed by Time magazine as a member of the "Cyber-Elite" in 1997.
32.
Joi Ito was named one of the 50 "Stars of Asia" in the "Entrepreneurs and Dealmakers" category by BusinessWeek and commended by the Japanese Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications for supporting the advancement of IT in 2000.
33.
Joi Ito was named by BusinessWeek as one of the 25 Most Influential People on the Web in 2008.
34.
Joi Ito received the degree of Doctor of Literature, honoris causa, from The New School in 2013.
35.
On March 11,2014, Joi Ito was inducted into the SXSW Interactive Festival Hall of Fame.
36.
Joi Ito was a TED speaker at the March 21, TED2014.
37.
In 2014, Joi Ito was awarded the Golden Plate Award by the Academy of Achievement.
38.
On May 17,2015 Joi Ito received a Doctor of Humane Letters, honoris causa, from Tufts University.
39.
Joi Ito was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in April 2017.
40.
Joi Ito's appointment was called an "unusual choice" since Ito studied at two colleges, but did not finish his degrees.
41.
Joi Ito was appointed professor of the practice of media arts and sciences at MIT in 2016.
42.
Joi Ito later admitted to taking $525,000 in funding from Epstein for the lab, and permitting Epstein to invest $1.2 million in Joi Ito's personal investment funds.
43.
On September 6,2019, an article by Ronan Farrow in The New Yorker alleged that the lab led by Joi Ito had "a deeper fund-raising relationship with Epstein" than it had acknowledged, and that the lab attempted to conceal the extent of its contacts with him.
44.
In September 2019, Joi Ito resigned as director of the Media Lab and as an MIT professor shortly after The New Yorker article.
45.
Joi Ito resigned from his visiting professorship at Harvard University.
46.
In December 2021, Joi Ito was appointed as the director of the Center for Radical Transformation at Chiba Institute of Technology, Japan.
47.
In June 2023, Joi Ito was named the 14th President of the Chiba Institute of Technology.