Ira Winder

Ira designs coordination systems — the platforms, models, and interfaces through which people, projects, and ideas connect across disciplines and institutions. His work spans software engineering, data architecture, urban systems, and organizational design, with a through-line of making complex systems legible and actionable.

He is currently an Associate Professor at the Chiba Tech Graduate School of Design & Science and a Principal Investigator at the Henkaku Center for Radical Transformation. He maintains an affiliation with MIT Engineering Systems Laboratory (ESL) and is formerly affiliated with The University of Tokyo Graduate School of Frontier Sciences (GSFS). He holds a Master in City Planning (MIT, 2013) and Bachelor of Science in Art and Design (MIT, 2010).

As a Technical Instructor at MIT, Ira helped launch the degree program Urban Science and Planning with Computer Science and taught Computational Urban Science at the undergraduate and graduate levels. As a Research Scientist at MIT Media Lab, Ira invented the tangible interactive matrix (TIM), an integrated hardware and software platform that merges parametric, voxelized simulations with user-friendly tangible interfaces. His work is now a platform for interdisciplinary research, most notably the CityScope Project at the MIT Media Lab’s City Science Group. Ira has spoken and exhibited at venues including Autodesk University, TEDx Boston, US Chamber of Commerce, APA Planning Conference, Singapore World Cities Summit, Big Data Analytics Tokyo, Edinburgh Culture Summit, Guiyang Big Data Expo, The G7 Conference for ICT, the UN World Urban Forum, and Ars Electronica. By special request, he presented a custom interactive simulation to Bill Gates at a summit for affordable housing in Seattle. Ira made an appearance in “A Lego Brickumentary,” and his work has been featured on CBS, Financial Times Magazine, The Atlantic’s CityLab, and a White House report to the President on “Technology and the Future of Cities.”

Ira serves as CTO and Head of Research at Outliers Fund, where he develops financial engineering models and simulation frameworks to inform investment and exit strategies. He also serves on the Board of Directors for the MIT Club of Japan.