About
About:
Kentaro Toyama is W.K. Kellogg Associate Professor at the University of Michigan School of Information and a fellow of the Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values at MIT. He is author of Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change from the Cult of Technology (PublicAffairs, 2015). Until 2009, 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 poorest communities interact with electronic technology and invents new ways for technology to support their socio-economic development. Prior to his time in India, Toyama did computer vision and multimedia research and taught mathematics at Ashesi University in Accra, Ghana. Toyama graduated from Yale with a PhD in Computer Science and from Harvard with a bachelors degree in Physics.
Selected publications:
Toyama, K. (2015). Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change from the Cult of Technology. PublicAffairs.
Toyama, K. (2010). “Human-Computer Interaction and Global Development.” Foundations and Trends in Human-Computer Interaction, 4(1):1-79.
Burrell, J. and K. Toyama. (2009). "What constitutes good ICTD research?" Information Technologies and International Development, 5(3):82-94.
Teaching
- Information Technology and Global Society
- Contextual Inquiry and Consulting Foundations
- Philosophical Foundations to ICT and Social Change
Affiliation(s):
- School of Information
- African Studies Center
Field(s) of Study:
- Information and communication technologies and development (ICTD)
- Technology and social change
- Human-computer interaction
