Kentaro Toyama

 

 

Kentaro will be leaving Microsoft permanently in December, 2009. Starting January, 2010, he will spend a year at UC Berkeley's School of Information as a researcher, where he plans to write a book on global human development. Please see his new website: http://www.kentarotoyama.org. He will be leaving MSR India and the TEM group in good hands. Sriram Rajamani takes over as assistant managing director, and Ed Cutrell will manage the Technology for Emerging Markets group.

Until December, 2009, Kentaro Toyama was assistant managing director of Microsoft Research India (MSR India), which opened in Bangalore in January, 2005; he played a critical role in establishing the lab and was responsible for helping guide its direction and growth. In addition to his responsibilities to MSR India overall, Kentaro built the Technology for Emerging Markets research group as a principal researcher, and is a co-founder of the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development (ICTD).

Before being named assistant managing director of MSR India, Kentaro spent seven years in MSR Redmond, Washington, U.S.A., and in Cambridge, U.K., working on computer vision, multimedia and geographic information systems. Kentaro earned his Ph.D. in computer science at Yale University and received a bachelor’s degree in physics from Harvard University. During the autumn of 2002, he took personal leave from Microsoft to teach mathematics at Ashesi University in Ghana.

Research

The Technology for Emerging Markets (TEM) research group applies both social-science research and technology innovation towards 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. The group contributes to worldwide efforts in ICT4D (or “information and communication technology for development”) and to Microsoft’s Unlimited Potential efforts in emerging markets.

 

The Digital Geographics Research (DGR) group seeks to further the state-of-the-art in the representation, analysis, and visualization of digitized geographic information. As location-aware technologies such as GPS and geographic information systems (GIS) proliferate in the market, there is more data to mine and more demand for intuitive visualizations that can help make sense of massive amounts of data. The group publishes its work in geography and GIS-related conferences and journals and contributes technology to Microsoft’s Virtual Earth, maps.live.com, and other geography-intensive products.

 

As part of the Interactive Visual Media group, Kentaro worked on facial image analysis, automated photo and video editing, and object tracking in video.

 

 

 

Recent Talks

 

 

Contact Information

 

Last updated: June 3, 2007

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