Joi Ito is a leading thinker and writer on innovation, global technology policy. The Japanese-American activist has received recognition for his role as an entrepreneur focused on internet and technology companies. Ito was born 1966 in Kyoto, Japan. His family moved to Canada and later on to Detroit in the United States, when he still was a small child. Aged 14 he returned to Japan with his family. He studied at the Nishimachi International School and later visited the American School in Japan for high school. He then returned to the United States to attend Tufts University near Boston as a computer science major. After a short university break, he enrolled at the University of Chicago in physics. In 1985 he became the first student to register for a pioneering programme of online courses offered by Connected Education Inc. for undergraduate credit from the New School for Social Research. In Japan, he was a founder of Digital Garage. He helped establish and later became CEO of the country's first commercial Internet service provider. A vocal advocate of emergent democracy, privacy, and Internet freedom, Ito has served as both board chair and CEO of Creative Commons, and sits on the boards of Sony Corporation, Creative Commons, Knight Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, The New York Times Company, Mozilla Foundation, WITNESS, and Global Voices. He was an early investor in more than 40 companies, including Flickr, Six Apart, Last.fm, Kongregate, Kickstarter, and Twitter. In 2011 he has become Director of the MIT Media Lab in Boston, Massachusetts. Ito's honors include TIME magazine's "Cyber-Elite listing in 1997 (at age 31) and selection as one of the "Global Leaders for Tomorrow" by the World Economic Forum (2001). In 2008, BusinessWeek named him one of the "25 Most Influential People on the Web." In 2011, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Oxford Internet Institute. In 2013, he received an honorary D.Litt from The New School in New York City.