Dr. Kentaro Toyama has joined ITID as Co-Editor-in-Chief with Dr. François Bar!

In this role, Kentaro will work to ensure the highest research standards are maintained in everything we publish with an emphasis on innovation and outreach. Kentaro is well known to the ITID community as an eminent ICT4D scholar, and has served previously as an ITID associate editor.

Kentaro's research spans several areas including ICT4D, development studies, computer vision, human-computer interaction, and information systems.  He is currently a visiting researcher at the University of California, Berkeley School of Information and is the co-founder of the ICTD Conference series along with AnnaLee Saxenian and Raj Reddy.  Until 2009, he was assistant managing director of Microsoft Research India, which he co-founded in 2005.  Prior to his time in India, Kentaro did computer vision and multimedia research at Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington, USA and Cambridge, UK, and taught mathematics at Ashesi University in Accra, Ghana.  Kentaro graduated from Yale with a PhD in computer science, and from Harvard with a bachelor's degree in physics.  He was born in Tokyo, raised in both Japan and the United States, and now lives in Washington.

In addition to his work with ITID, Kentaro is working on a book tentatively titled A Different Kind of Growth: Wisdom in Global Development.  He hopes to make the case that greater wisdom is the optimal goal of global development, where wisdom is defined as the knowledge, virtue, and action required to generate well-being in oneself and others, now and into the future.

Kentaro follows in the footsteps of Mike Best who, as ITID co-editor-in-chief has now stepped down from that role and moved to an emeritus position on the editorial board. We are delighted that he will continue to be associated with the journal and we extend our deep appreciation for his vision that has brought ITID to its level of prestige today.