Kentaro Toyama | TEDxTokyo 2010
After 18 years of researching novel technologies, Kentaro Toyama is ready to try something else. He believes there is a “myth of scale” about technology’s ability to solve complex global problems that distracts us from what really matters. Kentaro spent seven years at Microsoft in Redmond, Washington, and in Cambridge, U.K., working on computer vision, multimedia and geographic information systems, taking a sabbatical in 2002 to teach mathematics at Ghana’s Ashesi University. He later became the assistant managing director of Microsoft Research India, which he co-founded and helped to establish. The Technology for Emerging Markets research group he started there investigates ways the world’s poorer communities can harness technology to drive their socioeconomic development. The Yaleeducated Ph.D. left Microsoft last December to research a book on global human development at UC Berkeley’s School of Information.
Learn more about Kentaro Toyama: Personal website