MIT Media Lab: Making Connections

Joichi Ito is the Director of the MIT Media Lab. He is the Chair of Creative Commons, on the Board of the MacArthur Foundation, on the Board of Trustees of The Knight Foundation, and co-founder and board member of Digital Garage an Internet company in Japan. He is on board of a number of non-profit organizations including The Mozilla Foundation and WITNESS. He has created numerous Internet companies including PSINet Japan, Digital Garage and Infoseek Japan and was an early stage investor in Twitter, Six Apart, Wikia, Flickr, Last.fm, Kongregate, Fotonauts/Fotopedia, Kickstarter and other Internet companies. He is the Guild Custodian of the World of Warcraft guild, We Know (http://weknow.to/). He is a PADI IDC Staff Instructor, an Emergency First Responder Instructor and a Divers Alert Network Instructor. 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 Poicy 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 advocates of Internet freedom.

Andy Bardagjy is a second year masters student at the MIT Media Lab where develops novel imaging and display technologies. When he is not toiling over his research, he is probably brewing beer, building robots, or taking photos. Prior to joining the Media Lab, Andy worked at Georgia Tech where he developed imaging systems and autonomous vehicles. Recently, he has been exploring interactive data visualization and tangible computing.

In one short sentence: Yadid likes to build stuff. In one much longer sentence: Yadid's research explores creating a digital representation of human physiological and affective state by using sensors and mobile phones for gathering physiological and contextual data. He is part of the Affective Computing and New Media Medicine research groups in the MIT media lab.
Prior to MIT, Yadid held various engineering management positions in the mobile, medical and communication system industries. Most recently he was the director of Software in PMC-Sierra, a global leader in communication and storage semi-conductor manufacturing where he oversaw all software research and development activities of the company's optical communications devices.

Dr. Catherine Havasi is a research scientist in computational
linguistics and machine learning at the MIT Media Lab where she runs
the Digital Intuition group. She co-founded the Open Mind Common
Sense project, which uses crowdsourced information about the world
to understand natural language text and
make computers easier to use. She currently manages the Common Sense
Computing Initiative, a research project to collect common sense in
six languages, with ties to companies and research groups around the
world. With students, she re-created the lexical resource ConceptNet
which is used in hundreds of research projects every year. She
received her PhD from Brandeis University in 2009 for research in
machine learning and natural language processing, and a masters from
MIT in 2004 for cognitive modeling in developmental psychology. She
is the co-founder of the text understanding company Luminoso and is on
the co-founder and board member of the education nonproft Learning
Unlimited. She has served as the organizer of the CSIUI series of
workshops at the IUI conference, the AAAI Common Sense Knowledge
Symposium, and guest editor for the ACM Transactions on Interactive
Intelligent Systems.

Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye is a graduate student at the MIT Media Lab engineering stochastic tools to harness the power of rich behavioral datasets, such as human movement data and communication patterns in networks.
Before coming to MIT, he was a researcher at the Santa Fe Institute where he used cell phone data to model the dynamics of urbanization in developing countries. Over a period of 6 years he obtained an M.Sc. from the Université catholique de Louvain in Applied Mathematics, an M.Sc. (Centralien) from Ecole Centrale Paris as part of the Top Industrial Managers for Europe program, an M.Sc. from Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Mathematical Engineering as well as his B.Sc. in engineering at the Université catholique de Louvain.