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.