Award-winning computer scientist to visit SAU
Source: Spring Arbor University
Spring Arbor University is proud to welcome Kentaro Toyama — professor at the University of Michigan’s School of Information, author, computer scientist and international problem solver — as the speaker for SAU’s Community of Learners lecture on Friday, October 14, at 10 a.m.
Toyama will be in the Ralph Carey Forum on Spring Arbor University’s campus for a discussion and signing of his latest book — Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change from the Cult of Technology. It is the winner of the 2016 PROSE Award in Business, Finance & Management. Toyama’s book argues that technological advances alone are not enough to make a difference — they must be paired with wise and innovative application. There will be copies of his book available for sale at the event.
Toyama was born in Tokyo and raised in both Japan and the United States. He graduated from Harvard with a bachelor’s degree in physics, and from Yale with a Ph.D. in computer science. Toyama previously worked with computer vision and multimedia research at Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington, USA, and in Cambridge, UK, also teaching mathematics at Ashesi University in Accra, Ghana. He was a researcher at UC Berkeley and assistant managing director of Microsoft Research India, which he co-founded in 2005.
He also started the Technology for Emerging Markets research group at MSR India, which conducts interdisciplinary research to learn how the world’s underprivileged communities interact with technology, and to invent new ways technology can support their socioeconomic development. This award-winning group is known for projects like MultiPoint, Text-Free User Interfaces and Digital Green. Toyama co-founded the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development (ICTD) to create a global platform for more research in the field. He is also co-editor-in-chief of the journal Information Technologies and International Development.
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