Kentaro Toyama
Assistant Managing Director
Microsoft Research India
Microsoft Corp.

Kentaro Toyama is assistant managing director of Microsoft Research India, which opened in Bangalore in January 2005. In addition to helping guide the lab’s direction and growth, Toyama leads research groups in the areas of technology for socio-economic development and digital geographics.

One of Toyama’s main responsibilities is leading the Technology for Emerging Markets research group. Through social science research and technology innovation, this group seeks to address the needs and aspirations of two kinds of communities worldwide: emerging markets, whose members are increasingly able to afford computing technologies and services, and underserved communities, for whom access to computing remains largely out of reach. Research from this group has contributed to projects including Windows MultiPoint (which enables multiple mice and students per PC for resource-constrained computer classrooms), text-free UIs (creating user interfaces for nonliterate users), Digital StudyHall (creating video-mediated instruction for rural schools), Digital Green (creating video-mediated instruction for agriculture extension) and Warana Unwired (a mobile-phone-based reporting system for a sugar cane cooperative); as well as investigations into rural PC kiosks, the information ecology of micro-entrepreneurs, and technology for microfinance.

Before being named assistant managing director of Microsoft Research India, Toyama spent seven years in Microsoft Research’s labs in Redmond, Wash., and Cambridge, England, working on computer vision, multimedia and geographic information systems. In the area of computer vision, he worked on facial image analysis, automated photo and video editing, and object tracking in video. A paper he co-authored on object tracking won the David Marr Prize at the 2001 International Conference on Computer Vision. The World-Wide Media eXchange (WWMX), another project he led involving geo-coded photographs, spun off as PlanetEye.

Toyama earned his Ph.D. in computer science at Yale University and received a bachelor’s degree in physics from Harvard University. He joined Microsoft Research in November 1997. During the autumn of 2002, he took personal leave from Microsoft Corp. to teach mathematics at Ashesi University in Ghana.

A native of Tokyo, Toyama grew up in Japan and the United States with a love for Japanese martial arts and Western classical piano. He lives in Bangalore, India.