Michael Dertouzos

He was born in Athens. As a Fulbright scholar, he studied at the University of Arkansas and then went to MIT, where he received his PhD, later becoming a member of its faculty. In 1968 he founded Computek Inc, a firm that designed the first intelligent terminals, which he sold in 1974. The same year, he became director of the MIT Laboratory of Computer Science. He was a corporate and government advisor on the future of information technology. During the Carter administration, he chaired an advisory group that redesigned the White House Information Systems. In 1995 he represented the US to the G7 Conference on the Information Society, and in 1998 he co-chaired the World Economic Forum on the Network Society in Davos.

He had focused his research on forecasting the future technological needs and he was an advocate of a radical change in the design and use of the computers, of what he called "human-centric computing". His belief that the separation of technology and humanism was a mistake, led him to the conviction that technology must meet the human needs. Speech understanding, automation, finding what you want, collaboration of work among people across space and time, and customization to the individual needs, are the steps for making technology useful to humanity.