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Abstract for Seminar
The past decade has seen incredible interest in applying information and communication technologies for international development, an endeavor often abbreviated "ICT4D." What value is technology to a farmer earning a dollar a day? Can mobile phones be used to improve rural healthcare? How do you design user interfaces for an illiterate migrant worker?
ICT4D projects seek to answer these kinds of questions, but the excitement has also generated a lot of hype about the power of technology to solve the deep problems of poverty. Drawing on six years of experience running a research lab in India that focused on ICT4D, I argue that the area of human-computer interaction is well-suited to balancing hype with realistic solutions.
Bio: Kentaro Toyama is a visiting researcher in the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley. He is working on a book arguing that increasing human and institutional wisdom should be the primary focus of international development activities. Until 2009, Toyama was assistant managing director of Microsoft Research India, which he co-founded in 2005. There, 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 to invent new ways for technology to support their socio-economic development. The group's award-winning research has been seminal in the field of ''information and communication technologies for development'' (ICT4D). Prior to his time in India, Toyama did computer vision and multimedia research and taught mathematics at Ashesi University in Accra, Ghana. Kentaro graduated from Yale with a PhD in Computer Science and from Harvard with a bachelors degree in Physics.
More info: www.kentarotoyama.org