Hiroshi Ishii (computer scientist)
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Human-Computer Interaction (HCI)
Hiroshi Ishii | |
|---|---|
| Born | Tokyo |
| Alma mater | Hokkaido University |
| Known for | Tangible User Interfaces (TUI) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Computer Science Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) |
| Institutions | Massachusetts 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]
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

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]
During his time at NTT, he co-authored two papers. In 1990 he and Kazuho Arita created the "TeamWorkStation." This device allowed users to record their desk and broadcast it to another user in a video conference, similar to a service like Zoom or Discord.[3] His second project at NTT was the "ClearBoard", which was published in 1992. This piece of technology allowed to users to write on a see-through white-board like device that allowed them to maintain eye contact while collaborating.[4]
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.[5]
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,[6] co-authored with his then PhD student Brygg Ullmer. In 2005, Ishii, Ullmer, and Robert J. K. Jacob published a token+constraint framework for tangible interfaces.[7]
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.[8] The TRANSFORM, a larger-scale shape-changing table, received the A'Design Platinum Award in 2015.[9][10]
Ishii was elected to the CHI Academy in 2006. In 2019, he received the SIGCHI Lifetime Research Award.[11] He was named to the 2022 class of ACM Fellows, "for contributions to tangible user interfaces and to human-computer interaction".[12]
As of 2025[update], he teaches the class MAS.834 Tangible Interfaces at the Media Lab.[1]
External links
- 1 2 3 4 "Tangible Media Group | Hiroshi Ishii".
- ↑ "HorizonZero Issue 03 : INVENT". www.horizonzero.ca. Archived from the original on October 10, 2006.
- ↑ "TeamWorkStation". tangible.media.mit.edu. Retrieved May 20, 2025.
- ↑ "ClearBoard". tangible.media.mit.edu. Retrieved May 20, 2025.
- ↑ Schenker, Jennifer L. "Interview Of The Week: Hiroshi Ishii, MIT Multimedia Lab". The Innovator. Retrieved July 18, 2023.
- ↑ 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 978-0-89791-802-2. S2CID 462228.
- ↑ Ullmer, Brygg; Ishii, Hiroshi; Jacob, Robert J. K. (March 2005). "Token+Constraint Systems for Tangible Interaction with Digital Information". ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction. 12 (1): 81–118. doi:10.1145/1057237.1057242.
- ↑ "MIT Invents a Shapeshifting Display You Can Reach Through and Touch". November 12, 2023. Retrieved March 7, 2025.
- ↑ "TRANSFORM wins A'Design Platinum". April 3, 2015.
- ↑ "Hiroshi Ishii - A' Design Award Winner". September 30, 2014.
- ↑ "Award Recipients". SIGCHI.
- ↑ "Global computing association names 57 fellows for outstanding contributions that propel technology today". Association for Computing Machinery. January 18, 2023. Retrieved January 18, 2023.
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