What: Kentaro Toyama: What should be our primary focus in international
development?
When: Tuesday, November 5th at 12 noon
Where: The Allen Center, CSE 203
Please join us for this weeks Change talk by Kentaro Toyama as he shares
his views on what the longterm goals of technology in development should
be and lessons that he learned working in both India and Africa.
*Abstract*
After several years of working on ICT-for-development projects in India
and parts of Africa, I came to the conclusion that to first order,
technology only amplifies underlying human forces. Amplification means
that where human forces are corrupt or weak, there is little positive
impact that technology can have - yet corrupt or weak institutions are
exactly the challenge facing many developing-world environments.
That raises the big question of what else development efforts might
focus on, if not providing people the tools to help themselves. I have
some preliminary ideas -- not necessarily friendly to a technological
outlook -- and I look forward to an opportunity to discuss and debate
with people who are also invested in development and social change.
*About the Speaker*
Kentaro Toyama (www.kentarotoyama.org) is a visiting researcher in the
School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley and a
fellow of the Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values at
MIT. He is working on a book arguing that genuine human development, not
technocratic intervention, should be the primary focus of international
development activities. Until 2009, Toyama was assistant managing
director of Microsoft Research India and founder of the Technology for
Emerging Markets research group, which conducts interdisciplinary
research to explore how the world's poorest communities might benefit
from electronic technology. 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.
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