Hiroshi Ishii

is a Japanese computer scientist and a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is also Associate Director of the MIT Media Laboratory.

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. 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.

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 2005, Ishii, Ullmer, and Robert J. K. Jacob published a token+constraint framework for tangible interfaces.

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. 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".

, he teaches the class MAS.834 Tangible Interfaces at the Media Lab.