Hiroshi Ishii (computer scientist)

Hiroshi Ishii
Born
Tokyo
Alma materHokkaido University
Known forTangible User Interfaces (TUI)
Scientific career
FieldsComputer Science
Human-Computer Interaction (HCI)
InstitutionsMassachusetts Institute of Technology

Hiroshi Ishii (石井 裕, Ishii Hiroshi, born 1956) is a Japanese computer scientist and a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is also Associate Director of the MIT Media Laboratory.[1]

Early life and education

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Ishii was born in Tokyo and raised in Sapporo, Japan. He received a Bachelor of Engineering degree in electronic engineering (1978), and Master of Engineering (1980) and PhD (1992) in computer engineering, all from Hokkaido University in Sapporo.[1]

Career

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in Boston on April 6, 2012

Ishii worked at Japan's NTT Human Interface Laboratories in Yokosuka, where he made his mark in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) in the early 1990s.[2]

In 1995, he joined the MIT Media Laboratory as a professor of Media Arts and Sciences, and founded the Tangible Media Group and started their ongoing Tangible Bits project.[3]

In 1997, Ishii pioneered Tangible User Interfaces (TUI) in the field of human-computer interaction with the paper "Tangible Bits: Towards Seamless Interfaces between People, Bits and Atoms",[4] co-authored with his then PhD student Brygg Ullmer.

In 2012, he extended his vision of HCI to "Radical Atoms", a hypothetical future generation of materials which can change form and properties dynamically and computationally, becoming as reconfigurable in the physical 3D world as pixels on a 2D graphical user interface (GUI) screen.[1] Ishii's inFORM display, released in 2013, is a tactile tabletop device for prototyping interfaces, with an appearance compared to a pin board.[5] The TRANSFORM, a larger-scale shape-changing table, received the A'Design Platinum Award in 2015.[6][7]

Ishii was elected to the CHI Academy in 2006. In 2019, he received the SIGCHI Lifetime Research Award.[8] He was named to the 2022 class of ACM Fellows, "for contributions to tangible user interfaces and to human-computer interaction".[9]

As of 2025, he teaches the class MAS.834 Tangible Interfaces at the Media Lab.[1]

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  1. ^ a b c d "Tangible Media Group | Hiroshi Ishii".
  2. ^ "HorizonZero Issue 03 : INVENT". www.horizonzero.ca. Archived from the original on October 10, 2006.
  3. ^ Schenker, Jennifer L. "Interview Of The Week: Hiroshi Ishii, MIT Multimedia Lab". The Innovator. Retrieved July 18, 2023.
  4. ^ Ishii, Hiroshi; Ullmer, Brygg (1997). "Tangible bits". Proceedings of the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human factors in computing systems. pp. 234–241. doi:10.1145/258549.258715. ISBN 0897918029. S2CID 462228.
  5. ^ "MIT Invents a Shapeshifting Display You Can Reach Through and Touch". November 12, 2023. Retrieved March 7, 2025.
  6. ^ "TRANSFORM wins A'Design Platinum".
  7. ^ "Hiroshi Ishii - A' Design Award Winner".
  8. ^ "Award Recipients". SIGCHI.
  9. ^ "Global computing association names 57 fellows for outstanding contributions that propel technology today". Association for Computing Machinery. January 18, 2023. Retrieved January 18, 2023.