Hiroshi Ishii is the Jerome B. Wiesner Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at the MIT Media Lab, where he serves as Associate Director and leads the Tangible Media Group, which he founded in 1995. His research explores visionary approaches to Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), most notably through the concepts of “Tangible Bits” and “Radical Atoms.”

Ishii and his team have presented their work across a wide range of scientific, design, and artistic venues—including ACM SIGCHI, SIGGRAPH, Cooper Hewitt Design Museum, Milan Design Week, Cannes Lions Festival, Aspen Ideas Festival, the Industrial Design Society of America (IDSA), AIGA, Ars Electronica, Centre Pompidou, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and NTT InterCommunication Center (ICC). Their work embodies the principle that innovation demands both scientific rigor and artistic imagination.

In recognition of his contributions, Ishii was elected to the ACM SIGCHI Academy in 2006, received the SIGCHI Lifetime Research Award in 2019, and was named an ACM Fellow in 2022 for his pioneering work on Tangible User Interfaces and Human-Computer Interaction.

Before joining MIT, Ishii led the CSCW (Computer-Supported Cooperative Work) Research Group at NTT Human Interface Laboratories in Japan (1988–1994), where he and his colleagues developed groundbreaking systems such as TeamWorkStation and ClearBoard.