Hiroshi Ishii (computer scientist)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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", 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. Ishii's inFORM display, released in 2013, is a tactile tabletop device for prototyping interfaces, with an appearance compared to a pin board. The TRANSFORM, a larger-scale shape-changing table, received the A'Design Platinum Award in 2015.

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

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