Kentaro Toyama

Former Visiting Scholar

Focus

Global human development, both with and without information technology.

Biography

Until 2009, Kentaro Toyama was assistant managing director of Microsoft Research India, which he co-founded in 2005. At MSR India, he started the Technology for Emerging Markets research group, which conducts interdisciplinary research to understand how the world's poorer communities interact with electronic technology and to invent new ways for technology to support their socio-economic development. He co-founded the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development (ICTD) to provide a global platform for rigorous academic research in this field.

Prior to his time in India, Kentaro did computer vision and multimedia research at Microsoft Research in Redmond, WA, USA and Cambridge, UK, and taught mathematics at Ashesi University in Accra, Ghana.

Kentaro graduated from Yale with a PhD in Computer Science and from Harvard with a bachelors degree in Physics.

For more information, see www.kentarotoyama.org.