Skip to main content

Chris Csíkszentmihályi

Associate Professor Information Science

A pale man holds an infant in his arms as they both stand in front of a sparkling background. The man has glasses and wears a yellow shirt.

Chris Csíkszentmihályi is an artist, technologist, humanist, and designer. He combined his early work producing hip hop with technology to create the world's first scratching robot, touring from Nagoya to Berlin, and receiving death threats from DJs who feared replacement. He has built products for dystopian futures and robots to automate protests. He's currently working on an autonomous goose to surveille polluting bitcoin mines, collecting environmental data for community activists.  His work is focused on designing information and communications technologies for justice, and assisting communities in mitigating the negative aspects of globalism. He is an Associate Professor Information Science at Cornell University where he leads the Redistributive Computing Systems Group, is a fellow at the Atkinson Center for Sustainability, and coordinates the Public Interest Technologies University Network. Before coming to Ithaca, he served as a European Research Area Chair in Portugal, and founded the RootIO Radio project, which launched interactive community radio stations in over 8 countries. Prior to that he was a professor at MIT, co-founded and directed the MIT Center for Civic Media, and the Computing Culture research group at the MIT Media Lab.