Joi Ito's Web

A week of a student's electrodermal activity

2012-04-30T03:34:43Z

Obviously, this is just one student and doesn't necessarily generalize, but I love that the electrodermal activity is nearly flatlined during classes. ;-) (Note that the activity is higher during sleep than during class...)

"Changes in skin conductance at the surface, referred to as electrodermal activity (EDA), reﬂect activity within the sympathetic axis of the Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) and provide a sensitive and convenient measure of assessing alterations in sympathetic arousal associated with emotion, cognition, and attention."

From:

Poh, M.Z., Swenson, N.C., Picard, R.W., "A Wearable Sensor for Unobtrusive, Long-term Assessment of Electrodermal Activity," IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, vol.57, no.5, pp.1243-1252, May 2010. doi: 10.1109/TBME.2009.2038487 PDF

Reading the dictionary

2012-04-10T10:50:02Z

I have some amazing friends who tell me that when they were young, they read the dictionary from cover to cover. Other friends of mine have read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica.

My sister calls me an "interest driven learner." I think that's code for "short attention span" or "not a good long term planner" or something like that. I can't imagine being able to read the dictionary from cover to cover. In fact, I don't think most people could sit down and read the dictionary from cover to cover.

Although reading the dictionary and the encyclopedia from cover to cover may seem a bit extreme, it often feels like that's what we're asking kids to do who go through formal education.

Courses are organized, sequenced in a very structured way as student scurry from class to class sitting through lectures and expected to pay attention as instructors go on and on about calculus, history and grammar.

Students with the ability to focus and motivate themselves either through the need to achieve good grades or through understanding the long term benefits of a good education are able to succeed.

Personally, I find the dictionary, the encyclopedia and videos online as excellent resources when I need to learn something. I find the need to learn things every day in the course of pursuing interests, preparing for meetings and interacting with exciting people. I'm extremely motivated to learn and I learn a lot.

I love the videos of professors, amateurs and instructors putting their courseware online. They are a great resource for interest driven learners like me. However, I wonder whether we should be structuring the future of learning as online universities where you are asked to do the equivalent of reading the encyclopedia from cover to cover online. Shouldn't we be looking at the Internet as an amazing network enabling "The Power of Pull" and be empowering kids to learn through building things together rather than assessing their ability to complete courses and produce the right "answers"?

Festival of Learning 2012

2012-01-31T08:59:01Z

Over the weekend, I participated in the Festival of Learning at the Media Lab. It was a student organized event in the spirit of the MIT Independant Activities Period, but even scrappier and more agile. It was a blast and reminded me why the Media Lab is so cool.

Festival of Learning

The Festival of Learning was a two-day festival on 27-28 Jan 2012, where anyone from MIT's E14 and E15 could teach, learn, and collaborate!

Check out our EPIC LIST OF FESTIVAL SESSIONS, with photos, slides, source code, blog posts, and descriptions for everything that happened!
Also check out the videos below and our Flickr group to see what happened. We made mochi, painted faces, learned CAD, sang two notes at once, played MMOs, built fighter kites, filled a balloon room, discussed research methods, and much much more :-)

I organized a session on MMOs with Misha and we talked about the history of and the theory behind MMOs and did a demo. We used Star Wars the Old Republic instead of the World of Warcraft because it's the shiny new MMO. We tried to show what a group activity looked like by running a Flash Point, but it turns out that it wasn't that interesting and we lost some of our participants while we tried to quickly go through the instance. One of the problems is that it's hard to focus on playing a game while explaining what's going on. I think that there is a more fundamental difficulty in demoing online worlds, especially immersive ones.

Later we let people roll characters of their own and try playing. I think that part was a bit more successful.

This is the first MMO workshop that I've ever tried to organize and we learned a lot. I'm not positive what the perfect format is, but I'm hoping we get a chance to do it again and that we can iterate on it.

Why we need to stop SOPA and PIPA

2012-01-15T07:29:42Z

I just posted a blog post on the MIT Media Lab blog officially taking a position against SOPA and PIPA. This is a longer blog post co-authored with Ethan Zuckerman describing the issue in more detail.

SOPA - the Stop Online Piracy Act - and a sister bill, PIPA - the Protect IP Act - seek to minimize the dissemination of copyrighted material online by targeting sites that promote and enable the sharing of copyright-protected material, like The Pirate Bay. While this goal may be laudable, entrepreneurs, legal scholars and free speech activists are worried about the consequences of these bills for the architecture of the Internet. At the MIT Media Lab, we share those concerns, and we oppose SOPA and PIPA as threats to innovation on the Internet.

To limit access to rogue sites, SOPA and PIPA would:

- supersede the "notice and takedown" method of policing for copyrighted material on Internet services and require service providers to police content uploaded by users or prevent users from uploading copyrighted content
- require Internet Service Providers to change their DNS servers and block resolution of the domain names of websites in other countries that host illegal copies of content
- require search engines to modify their search results to exclude foreign websites that illegally host copyrighted material
- order payment processors like PayPal and ad services like Google AdSense to cease doing business with foreign websites that illegally host copyrighted content

Major internet companies, including Google, Facebook, Twitter and others, oppose SOPA and PIPA because it changes the liability rules around copyright infringement. Under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act of 1998, companies are protected from charges of "contributory infringement" on content uploaded by users, so long as the company follows a procedure and remove infringing content when an alert process is followed. SOPA substantially alters this system, and internet companies worry that without protection from contributory infringement, user-generated content sites like YouTube and Twitter would not have come into existence. The burden of reviewing user-submitted content - every blog post, every video, every image - would be impossible for a company to manage, and companies would have likely stuck with the Web 1.0 model of publishing edited, vetted content instead of moving to a Web 2.0 model where users create the content. Several internet companies took out a full-page ad in the New York Times to express their concerns about SOPA and PIPA.

Free speech advocates, like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, worry that SOPA may provide powerful new tools to silence online speech. Confronted with uncomfortable political speech, repressive governments often seek to silence dissent by reporting content as defamatory, slanderous or copyright infringing, hoping the companies hosting the speech will remove the content. SOPA accelerates the process of copyright removal, with a mechanism that permits copyright holders to obtain court orders against sites hosting copyrighted materials and have those sites rapidly blocked. Scholars of online censorship, like Rebecca MacKinnon at the New America Foundation, worry that SOPA may be popular with the Chinese government as with the copyright holders who are lobbying for the bill.

US law already permits the seizure of domestic domain names that are used for piracy, and the US seized 150 domains in November. SOPA is an attempt to enforce copyright provisions across international borders by prohibiting American internet users from accessing certain foreign websites, like The Pirate Bay. In effect, it would create a firewall to prevent users from accessing prohibited intellectual property, much as China's "great firewall" limits access to politically sensitive information.

Harvard legal scholar Lawrence Tribe believes that SOPA is likely unconstitutional, as it can remove constitutionally protected speech without a hearing, a form of "prior restraint". In a memo sent to members of Congress, he points out that SOPA proposes a system where a single instance of prohibited material could lead to the blocking of thousands of unrelated pieces of content.

Internet experts have observed that, beyond being dangerous to innovation, harmful to speech and potentially unconstitutional, SOPA and PIPA are unlikely to work. Countries that block access to prohibited websites by altering the domain name system - as Vietnam does in blocking access to Facebook - find that millions of users are able to circumvent this form of censorship. Millions of Vietnamese users have become Facebook users by entering that site's IP address into their browsers, or configuring their computers to use an uncensored DNS server. It's likely that dedicated US users of The Pirate Bay and other sites will do likewise. Effectively blocking access to sites like The Pirate Bay might require US ISPs to install powerful and expensive "deep packet inspection" software, a cost that would inevitably be passed onto their users.

The progress of the bills was slowed in late 2011 by widespread online activism opposing SOPA and PIPA. Hearings are likely to resume early in 2012, and opponents of the bills are facing off against organized lobbying campaigns by the music and film industries who support the legislation. On November 16, 2011, participatory media company Tumblr took strong online action against SOPA, redirecting requests for content on the site to a page that urged users to call US representatives and oppose the bill - their daylong campaign generated more than 87,000 calls to Congress. Internet community site Reddit plans a site-wide "blackout" on January 18th to inform users of the potential harms of SOPA and PIPA. Wikipedia is considering doing the same.

In the spirit of these protests, the MIT Media Lab has linked this blogpost to all our site pages, encouraging anyone interested in the work we do to learn more about SOPA and PIPA. More information and resources follow below. We believe that SOPA and PIPA would make it harder for Media Lab students, researchers and faculty to do what we do best: create innovative technologies that anticipate the future by creating it. We hope you'll join with us in opposing these bills and, if you are a US citizen, in letting your representatives know your concerns about this legislation.

- Joi Ito, director, MIT Media Lab

Selected resources on SOPA and PIPA

Liz Dwyer, "Why SOPA Could Kill the Open Educational Resource Movement", Good Magazine

Julian Sanchez, "SOPA: An Architecture for Censorship", Cato Institute

Dan Rowinsky, "What You Need to Know about SOPA in 2012", ReadWriteWeb

"Internet Blacklist Legislation", Electronic Frontier Foundation, EFF's email campaign against the legislation and EFF guide to meeting with your representatives.

Media Lab @ Tokyo 2012

2011-12-20T15:46:20Z

On January 17, 2012, we will hold a one-day event - MIT Media Lab @Tokyo 2012 about "The Power of Open: Scaling the Eco System." This is a meeting for existing Media Lab members, industry thought leaders and companies and individuals interested in becoming part of the Media Lab network. It's quite an interesting program.

We will be selling tickets to help cover the cost of producing the event and the seats are limited to 150 so are taking registrations on a first-come, first-serve basis.

You can see the program and the registration here: http://www.media-lab-tokyo.jp/?lang=en

Here are the details:

Title: MIT Media Lab @Tokyo 2012
Theme: Power of Open, Scaling the Eco System
Date: January 17, 2012（Tues）
Registration： 9:30
Conference：10:00~18:30
Reception & Mini-Demo Session：18:30~20:30
※Schedule is subject to change

Place: Dentsu Hall, Dentsu Inc.
1-8-1 Higashi-Shimbashi, Minato-Ku, Tokyo 105-7001

In collaboration with: Dentsu/ISID, Kadokawa Digix Inc., Digital Garage Inc.
Contact us: info@media-lab-tokyo.jp

The Internet, innovation and learning

2011-12-05T21:56:31Z

Here's how the article that I wrote for the New York Times started before it turned into "In an Open-Source Society, Innovating by the Seat of Our Pants". The New York Times version isn't bad, but here's the original "unabridged" version.

--
The Internet, innovation and learning

The Internet isn't really a technology, it's a belief system - a philosophy.

I remember very clearly the day I installed a tiny piece of software, MacPPP on my computer, which connected the programs running on it to the global Internet. It immediately transformed my computer from a fancy telex machine to a very early version of the multimedia Internet that we take for granted today.

I was working in television, motion pictures and music at the time. I remember thinking that the Internet was going to change everything and that I should immediately quit the media business and stop climbing those career ladders and start building the Internet.

My first step in this transition to help build the Internet was to work on the first commercial Internet Service Provider in Japan, PSINet Japan. I became its first CEO. I remember the battle against X.25, a competing standard to the Internet being stewarded by the large standards body affiliated with the UN called CCITT. Large inter-governmental agencies have experts from government and the largest companies in the world gather to work on the standards that govern a variety of the telecommunications infrastructure's DNA - the technical standards that companies build their networks and products against.

The battle between X.25 and the Internet was the battle between heavily funded, government backed experts and a loosely organized group of researchers and entrepreneurs. The X.25 people were trying to plan and anticipate every possible problem and application. They developed complex and extremely well-thought-out standards that the largest and most established research labs and companies would render into software and hardware.

The Internet, on the other hand, was being designed and deployed by small groups of researchers following the credo "rough consensus and running code," coined by one of its chief architects, David Clark. Instead of a large inter-governmental agency, the standards of the Internet were stewarded by small organizations, which didn't require permission or authority. It functioned by issuing the humbly named "Request for Comment" or RFCs as the way to propose simple and light-weight standards against which small groups of developers could work on the elements that together became the Internet.

As we all know, the Internet won. It was the triumph of distributed innovation over centralized innovation.

The belief system of the Internet is that everyone should have the freedom to connect, the freedom to innovate and the freedom to hack without asking permission. No one can know the whole of it; it cannot be centrally controlled and the innovation happens in small groups on the "edges" of the network.

This belief system has created a massive network of distributed innovators. Internet innovators develop standards with each other and share the products of their work in the form of free and open source software. Lately they are even sharing electronics and physical designs.

The architecture of the Internet and the abundance of free software and components has driven the cost of manufacture, distribution and collaboration - the cost of innovation - down massively. Software companies used to cost millions of dollars in venture capital to start - today for little or no money, entrepreneurs are able develop and release a "minimum viable product" and test it with real users on the Internet before they have to raise money from investors.

In fact, it is now usually cheaper to just try something than to sit around and try to figure out whether to try something. The map is now often more complex and often more expensive to create than trying to figure it out as you go. The compass has replaced the map and the idea of "rough consensus running code" has spread from the ideology behind network architecture to a fundamental philosophy for startup companies and the "lean startup" movement.

3D printers, laser cutters, online distribution, supply chain services and even sophisticated manufacturers have become cheaper, standardized and connected via the Internet. We are seeing the emergence of a community of hardware hackers and open hardware designs very reminiscent of the communities of developers who write the open standards and free and open source software of the Internet and I anticipate an explosion of grass-roots innovation around hardware as we saw in software. The Media Lab is very involved in all of the elements of this movement.

At the Media Lab, we have a multi-disciplinary group of faculty, students and member companies working together to invent the future by applying the philosophy of "rough consensus running code" to a wide variety of fields in addition to the future of hardware design.

At the Media Lab we focus on learning through creation instead of instruction. We are empowering individuals to experiment, create, and iterate. We produce demos and prototypes and share and collaborate with the rest of the world through the Internet and a distributed network of connections and relationships. We are not about centralized instruction but rather a node in a broad network of distributed creativity.

What has been a wildly successful model for consumer Internet startups in Silicon Valley turns out to be an extremely good model for learning and for a wide variety of fields and disciplines, and we are trying to empower more and more communities to also have access to technology and the ability to participate and create.

For example, in the High-Low Tech group we are designing new materials and technology to allow an extremely diverse non-technical group of online and real-world communities to learn how to build their own electronics and learn about technology.

In the Lifelong Kindergarten group, we are managing a massive community of young people around the Scratch programming language, which allows very young children to write their own software and share their projects online and build upon one another's code and ideas.

Neoteny, one of my favorite words, means the retention of childlike attributions in adulthood. Childlike attributes include learning, idealism, experimentation, wonder, and creativity. In our rapidly changing world, not only do we need to continue to behave more like children - we can teach our children to retain those attributes that will allow them to be the world-changing, innovative adults who will help us reinvent the future.

Iron Blogger - Strike One

2011-11-22T03:14:53Z

Earlier this month, Mako circulated an email about Iron Blogger. Sounded useful and easy enough so I signed up... and failed. I missed the first deadline and I owe $5.

Off to a bad start, but I'll try not to miss anymore. Looking forward to blogging as well as the meetup.

Mako
I want to blog frequently but usually don't seem to find the time for it. I'm not above tying myself to the mast if it means blogging more.
Iron Blogger is a blogging and drinking club based on this premise. The rules are pretty simple:

Blog at least once a week.

If you fail to do so, pay $5 into a common pool.

When the pool is big enough, the group uses it to pay for drinks and snacks at a meet-up for all the participants.

Nelson Elhage ran the original Iron Blogger for about a year before the effort ran out of steam. I've started a new instance with a couple people from the previous group and a bunch of folks from Berkman, MIT, and beyond.

If you live in Boston and want to join, there are still a couple of spots available. I'm going to cap the current group, at least temporarily, at about 30 people because I think that's the maximum we'll fit into a local pub. Look over the site and send me an email if you're interested.

If you don't live in Boston but want to organize your own Iron Blogger, you can use the software in Nelson's git repository (or my branch) to automate nearly the whole process of tracking posts, generating reports, and updating the ledger of debts.

You are the Power of Open: 2011 Creative Commons Annual Campaign

2011-10-25T19:06:18Z

Today marks the official launch of the 2011 Creative Commons Annual Campaign! As the Chair of the CC Board, I invite you to join us in powering an open future. We've made tremendous progress in the last year, including:
Europeana's new Data Exchange Agreement which releases the metadata for millions of cultural works into the public domain using CC0;
Flickr reaching the 200 million mark in CC-licensed photos;
YouTube adding a CC licensing option;
The US Department of Labor requiring CC BY for a $2 billion grant program;
Brazil and New Zealand introducing CC licensing for government-funded works;
CC releasing The Power of Open, a book showcasing phenomenal use cases of CC licensing.

Creative Commons relies on donations to build and constantly improve the technical and legal tools that enable openness to flourish. The future of openness is bright, but ensuring that future requires urgent and sustained effort. CC is continuing to improve the usefulness of our licenses and helping even more artists, institutions and governments share their works. We are reaching a critical mass and need your support now more than ever. Donate now! https://creativecommons.net/donate/

Learn more at the CC blog: http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/29993.

Thoughts on leadership - IBM100 THINK Forum

2011-09-19T08:53:45Z

Here are some thoughts about leadership as I prepare to participate in IBM's THINK Forum.

The Internet has enabled the cost of the production and distribution of ideas and information to plummet nearly to zero-resulting in an explosion of ideas and a low cost of collaboration. This has prompted a great deal of innovation, but also a complexity, speed and capacity for amplification that makes the world a difficult and dangerous place for many organizations and human-made systems designed for a slower and simpler era.

The cost of planning, predicting and managing rapidly changing, complex systems often exceeds the cost of actually doing whatever is being planned and managed. In fact, it can be often easier to try something and iterate than to try to predict the outcome and manage the risks. Most great ideas as well as dramatic failures have been unpredictable and are only obvious in hindsight. (Don't get me wrong: foreknowledge and planning are useful and, often, necessary; they're just not sufficient.)

In such a world, leadership hinges on the ability to master a broad set of skills and character traits necessary for fostering a robust system, including courage, flexibility, speed, values and a strong vision and trajectory. It's more important to have a strong compass than a detailed street map since the map is probably outdated and wrong.

These kinds of decentralized models of leadership have been evolving and emerging in a variety of situations ranging from battle (virtual and real) to religions. The Internet has just super-charged the importance of this type of leadership in almost every organization.

Managers in large corporations no longer have the promise of promotions and long-term employment to keep employees obedient and hard working. Central corporate R&D and planning organizations can no longer provide detailed maps of the world to their staff and partners. Innovation is happening in the most unlikely parts of the organization-often outside of the organization.

Leadership today is about empowering those around you share your vision, embrace serendipity, have the courage to take risks and learn from failure rather than be crushed by it. Diversity must be embraced and organizational borders made porous. Assets such as intellectual property and lines of software code must not prevent aggressive agility. Organizations must be willing and able to pivot away from attachment to such assets lest these assets become liabilities holding back innovation and progress.

In this new world, leaders must be courageous, visionary and comfortable in an environment where control and complete knowledge are impossible and their pursuit futile and counterproductive.

Designing systems for transparency robustness

2011-09-05T03:58:04Z

I've had some interesting conversations about the role of transparency and privacy and I have an opinion about this. I think that we have a world where those in power have secrecy and citizen are forced to be transparent. I think that modern technology has made this increasingly so. I think that fundamentally, it should be the opposite. Public figures and institutions in power should be forced to be transparent and private citizen should have privacy and the right to speak without fear of retribution or persecution. I think this is essential for democracy and open society and we need to push for and enable this to happen.

As we work on this process of making the powerful transparent, we run into some difficulties because most institutions, even those that are for the most part well-meaning and good, are not robust against transparency because they haven't been designed to be transparent.

It reminds me of software projects that try to "go open source" after they've been written. It's often nearly impossible because the code is a mess. When people write software to be open, they typically write it in a way that is understandable to the outside and isn't embarrassing. For instance, I know some developers who use obscene words for their variables or vent their frustration about their love life in the comments in their code. They'd lose their jobs or their spouses if their code was suddenly "open".

In most powerful institutions, corners are cut and methods are used in a somewhat "ends justify the means" sort of way. There are a lot of things that are done and said behind closed doors that wouldn't survive public scrutiny, but have become common practice. In many cases, these practices aren't necessarily critically wrong, but just embarrassing or politically incorrect in some way.

I believe that Wikileaks is just the beginning of a bigger trend where it will become harder and harder to hide information and citizen counter-surveillance will become a norm rather than an exception.

I think that this will cause a lot of pain to powerful institutions - some will be overthrown or crushed. However, I think that we can build institutions that are robust against transparency if we design them that way from the beginning. It will be harder than learning to write open source software, but I believe that in the end we'll have a society that is better, stronger, more effective and fair.

Safecast and CC0

2011-09-05T02:41:07Z

At Safecast.org, I pushed our team to use the CC0 public domain dedication for the data that we are collecting through our radiation measurements instead of a Creative Commons Attribution license, which would require by law that people give us attribution. The reason is that we must give people the flexibility to use the data as part of an analysis or service that would be encumbered or impossible with the attribution requirement.

Many large data aggregation projects would fail with the attribution requirement. For instance, if each person with each sensor had to be attributed and our data got rolled up into a massive analysis of all historical sensor data to find megatrends, it would be impossible to provide attribution to every single provider of data. Open data is essential to allow people to write software that uses the data freely and combines it with other data.

Providing the Safecast data under a CC0 public domain dedication does not, however, make it ethical for people to take all of the data from Safecast, re-skin it and present it as their own. To understand why this is true, one must understand the difference between what is ethical or normatively true and what is legally true.

Plagiarism is when someone takes someone else's work and represents it as their own. In many cases, this is not illegal, just unethical. For instance, if I take someone's idea and use it in my academic paper, or take Safecast data and make it look like I did it all myself, that would be plagiarism, not a copyright violation. It is unethical, but not necessarily illegal.

On the other hand, using a picture of Mickey Mouse in a presentation could be argued as an illegal copyright violation, but most would probably argue that it is ethical.

It's very important to distinguish the difference between legality and ethics. Most of our society and our behavior is driven and guided by social norms and ethics. Just because something is legal, doesn't mean it's ethical.

In other words, just because you dedicate your data to the public domain, it doesn't mean that you don't have the ethical right to ask someone using your data to cite the source of the data on their website, just like you'd ask someone using your idea in their academic paper to give you credit for if they'd gotten it from you.

Getting my blog voice back

2011-08-24T05:29:04Z

I've been wondering whether I should start blogging again. Twitter satisfied so much of my "updating" needs and I had become so busy that it was easy to stop blogging. It seemed that blog comments also lost their momentum as people took to Twitter to chat and hang out around trending topics.

However, as the years of not blogging have started to pile up, more and more of my thoughts are no longer online. Back in the day, I blogged nearly everything so giving someone my perspective on any topic required only that I copy/paste a URL into a chat window or an email.

These days I have to write a long-winded reponse or find a video of a talk or an interview. Videos tend to be 80% repetitive and difficult to scan or segment. The interviews are also repetitive and short.

As I begin what is might be the biggest transition in my life in my new role as the Director of the MIT Media Lab, it seems like my blog would be a good place to document my thoughts through this transition.

I'm not going to promise anything, but I'm going to make an effort to blog more frequently and try to get my "blog voice" back. Maybe I should read my own tips about blogging that I wrote back in 2005. ☺ And I'll try to stop blogging about blogging.

Blogging

2011-08-23T09:09:36Z

Does anyone read this thing anymore? I'm trying to decide whether I should start blogging actively again or not......

LinkedIn Japan

2011-05-08T20:22:05Z

As many of you know, I've been working closely with Reid Hoffman for years now and one of the things that I've been working with Reid on from the beginning was thinking about LinkedIn, especially in the context of Japan.

As LinkedIn begins its global expansion, Japan is an important priority and recently I've been advising LinkedIn on a more formal basis.

Japan REALLY needs LinkedIn right now. LinkedIn is NOT a social network; it is a professional network. It is a network that allows people to build their professional identity, share business expertise and information, and advance your professional knowledge about subjects important to you. As privacy issues exceedingly become a concern, it's very important to keep your casual, gaming and social networks separated from your professional network. I think LinkedIn will be an essential tool for professionals in Japan as it is in the rest of the world.

So, this is my last "real job" before I transition over completely to the Media Lab role: helping to launch LinkedIn in Japan. And we're looking for the best talent out there. We need an awesome, dedicated team to run LinkedIn in Japan. This team will be responsible for the strategy, product roadmap, and growth in Japan - this the chance to be highly entrepreneurial while having the strength of a global brand behind your team.

We're Hiring!

We're looking for a variety of roles, and they are listed below. We are particularly looking for product and management leaders who want to take on this chance to manage user growth. LinkedIn is serious about Japan and this team would be working directly with a high-quality senior team in the US. I think it's a great career opportunity.

If you think you are a fit for for any of the roles we list below (or know someone who is), please apply for the role through the link below or email japanteam@linkedin.com. Please include your resume and/or a link to your LinkedIn profile.

These roles are currently posted regarding our growth in Japan:

Product Lead, Japan
Design Lead, Japan
Engineering, Japan

We are also interested in general management and product marketing candidates.
I'll be blogging more about LinkedIn in Japan as we get closer to launching the Japanese product, but I wanted to get the word out that LinkedIn is planning to come to Japan in 2011, and we're hiring. Help me put together the dream team.

Joining the MIT Media Lab

2011-04-25T22:03:56Z

I'm happy and honored to announce that I've been named the new executive director of the MIT Media Lab.

In November of last year, I was attending Silicon Valley Comes to Oxford, a very cool event where a bunch of folks from Silicon Valley go to Oxford to hang out with entrepreneurs, students and others. As often is the case with conferences like this, it was a great opportunity to catch up with old friends.

Megan Smith, one of the coolest people I know, was there and we were talking about everything, which often happens when I see Megan. Suddenly, Megan said, "Would you be interested in being the Director of the MIT Media Lab? I'm talking to Nicholas Negroponte on email about that right now." I answered, "Umm. Yeah, of course!" Megan smiled and immediately started tapping into her phone.

A few weeks later, I was in Catalina Island off of Los Angeles trying to complete my Search and Recovery training in a kelp forest with terrible visibility. Between dives, wearing my drysuit, I took a call with Nicholas to talk about the position. The connection was terrible and we could barely get a sentence completed before our calls dropped - a kind of ironic failure in technology. I was able to express my interest and we agreed to try to meet and talk face to face.

Several months later, I found myself at the front entrance of MIT Building E14. It's an amazing building designed by Maki and Associates. Together with the existing Wiesner Building (designed by MIT alumnus I. M. Pei), the two buildings make up the MIT Media Lab.

As I walked into the building, I felt like a pilgrim from the Middle Ages entering a cathedral. I was in awe and a bit of shock wondering if I would fit into an "institution" like the Media Lab and MIT.

After a day of non-stop meetings with a bunch of the faculty and students, I realized that I'd found my tribe. Everyone was super-smart, driven, working on very cool stuff. They weren't afraid to try anything. There was extreme diversity but also a common DNA. I felt a sense of mission that seemed driven by the physical proximity created by the space and the empowering brand and legacy of the Media Lab. It created a power to think long-term with agility that I'd never seen anywhere else.

People talked matter-of-factly about getting sensors from this lab, maybe we need a tissue scientist, and robots from that lab, and visualization from this lab to take this research in this other direction.

It was a firehouse of interconnections and creativity - I was completely energized and felt totally in my element.

While a huge believer in the risk-taking and agility of Silicon Valley venture backed startups, I'd been exceedingly frustrated by the tradeoffs in long-term impact that we often have to make because of the nature of venture capital and the public markets.

Government and large company research labs can be longer-term, but are increasingly unable to move quickly enough or be flexible enough to tackle the high speed and complex problems facing us today.

I had created a life for myself that was scattered across non-profits, venture startups, relationships with large research institutions and networks of people all over the world in my search for long-term yet agile solutions.

John Seely Brown often talks about "The Power of Pull" - how instead of stocking assets and resources, we should pull them, as we need them. Instead of pushing intelligence, orders and "stuff" from the center, one should create a context where we can pull them from our networks. Instead of planning every detail, one could embrace serendipity and chart a general trajectory, pulling the things together in a highly contextual and agile way.

The Media Lab seemed like it had all of the right elements to tackle this problem and attract all of those people like us who thrive in the chaos and complexity that scares most people away. In addition to the people and the mandate to think creatively, the Media Lab had relationships and the ability to have even more relationships so that the impact and the outcomes could be realized in academia, the public sector, in venture startups, in large companies, in the arts, in journalism or in social entrepreneurship and non-profits.

I decided that if I was lucky enough to be offered the job, I would take it. I was, and I did.

In the press release announcing my appointment, Nicholas Negroponte, Media Lab co-founder and chairman emeritus says, "In the past 25 years, the Lab helped to create a digital revolution -- a revolution that is now over. We are a digital culture. Today, the 'media' in Media Lab include the widest range of innovations, from brain sciences to the arts. Their impact will be global, social, economic and political -- Joi's world."

I really felt at home for the first time in many ways. It felt like a place where I could focus - focus on everything - but still have a tremendous ability to work with the team as well as my network and broader extended network to execute and impact the world in a substantial and positive way.

One of my missions will be to integrate my network with the Media Lab so I urge all of my friends to get to know The Lab and its work through the LabCast videos ( http://labcast.media.mit.edu/) , the research areas on the website ( http://www.media.mit.edu/research ), but better, to come visit the Media Lab. Many of your companies are already sponsors of the lab, but I really want to make sure that we're spending enough time together so that our visions become one and the magic happens.

For those of you who aren't sponsors of the Lab, I urge you to come visit and hang out and consider joining the team. I sincerely think that the Media Lab has an essential role in providing context and innovation for the future and the first step is to make sure all of you are at the table and part of the conversation.

In any case, I'll be writing and talking about everything I'm doing at and with the Media Lab and I look forward to interacting with everyone at every level.

John Markoff posted on his blog, The New York Times, before I did! Thanks for the encouraging article John.

The Media Lab has a press release.