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. Wisdom, in turn, is best gained through the pursuit of aspirations and an internal climb up Maslow's hierarchy of needs. He argues that wisdom, at individual, societal, and national levels, is the key to economic growth for the poor, political freedom for the oppressed, and sustainability for everyone.
Until 2009, he was assistant managing director of Microsoft Research India, which he co-founded in 2005. At MSR India, he started the Technology for Emerging Markets research group, which conducts interdisciplinary research to understand how the world's poorer communities interact with electronic technology and to invent new ways for technology to support their socio-economic development. The award-winning group is known for projects such as MultiPoint, Text-Free User Interfaces, and Digital Green. Kentaro co-founded the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development (ICTD) to provide a global platform for rigorous academic research in this field.
Prior to his time in India, Kentaro did computer vision and multimedia research at Microsoft Research in Redmond, WA, 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 bachelors degree in Physics. He was born in Tokyo, raised in both Japan and the United States, and now lives in Berkeley, California.