Our keynote speaker this year is Nicholas Negroponte of MIT, founder of One Laptop Per Child. Professor Negroponte is also co-founder and Chairman of the MIT Media Lab.

Professor Negroponte studied at MIT, where as a graduate student he specialized in the then-new field of computer aided design. He joined the Institute's faculty in 1966, and for several years thereafter divided his teaching time between MIT and visiting professorships at Yale, Michigan, and the University of California at Berkeley.

In 1968 he founded MIT's pioneering Architecture Machine Group, a lab and think tank responsible for radically new approaches to the human-computer interface. In 1980, he served as founding chairman of the International Federation of Information Processing Societies' Computers in Everyday Life program. Later, Professor Negroponte accepted the French government's invitation to become the first executive director of the Paris-based World Center for Personal Computation and Human Development, an experimental project originally designed to explore computer technology's potential for enhancing primary education in underdeveloped countries.

Professor Negroponte sits on several boards, including Motorola, Velti and Ambient Devices. He is also on the advisory board of TTI/Vanguard. He has invested in over 30 startup companies over the last 30 years, including Zagats, Wired, Ambient Devices, Skype and Velti.

Spotlight MIT 2008, premier event of the MITCNC calendar, draws hundreds of members of the MIT community for a night of great company, food and drink. It celebrates the impact MIT has had both on its graduates and on evolution of science and technology.

One Laptop per Child: http://www.laptop.org/ MIT Media Lab: http://www.media.mit.edu/