Kentaro Toyama

Kentaro Toyama is the W.K. Kellogg Professor of Community Information and Professor of Information in the School of Information at the University of Michigan. Holding a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Yale University earned in 1998 and a B.A. in Physics from Harvard University in 1991, Toyama's early career featured groundbreaking computer science research in computer vision and multimedia at Microsoft Research facilities in Redmond, Washington, and Cambridge, United Kingdom, from 1998 to 2004. There, he received the 2002 David Marr Prize for the best paper in computer vision, and his work contributed to patents used in Microsoft Kinect technology. In 2002, he taught mathematics at Ashesi University in Accra, Ghana. From 2005 to 2009, Toyama co-founded Microsoft Research India, serving as assistant managing director and establishing the Technology for Emerging Markets research group, which launched over fifty projects including MultiPoint for multi-student computer use, Text-Free User Interfaces, and Digital Green—a video-based agricultural extension service that spun off as a non-profit supporting millions of smallholder farmers in the Global South with backing from the Indian government and the Gates Foundation.

Since joining the University of Michigan in January 2015 after a stint as senior researcher at UC Berkeley's School of Information from 2010 to 2014, Toyama has focused on information and communication technologies for development (ICTD), technology's role in social change, human-computer interaction, and artificial intelligence's societal impacts. He authored the book Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change from the Cult of Technology in 2015, which won the Prose Award from the American Publishers Awards and has been translated into Japanese and Russian. Toyama has published 135 refereed papers cited over 18,000 times, including influential works such as "Region filling and object removal by exemplar-based image inpainting" (2004) and "Wallflower: Principles and practice of background maintenance" (1999). He co-founded the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development and co-edited the journal Information Technologies and International Development from 2012 to 2020. In 2025, he earned the ACM SIGCHI Societal Impact Award. At Michigan, Toyama served as faculty director of the residential Master of Science in Information program from 2016 to 2019, co-chair of the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion committee from 2020 to 2023, and president of the Ann Arbor chapter of the American Association of University Professors. He is a fellow of the Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values at MIT.

Professional Email: toyama@umich.edu