In his research, Kentaro studies digital technology and social change. Recent projects include considerations of AI's impact on society, digital storytelling to support global maternal health, and applications of critical race theory to human-computer interaction (before critical race theory became front-page news).
One outcome of Kentaro's research is technology's "Law of Amplification": the theory that for the most part, technology amplifies underlying human forces -- improving things where individuals and institutions are well-intentioned and capable, but having little or negative impact where human forces are indifferent, dysfunctional, or corrupt. Often, technology amplifies the impact of good, bad, left, right, optimistic, and pessimistic human inclinations simultaneously, leading to society's deeply ambivalent relationship with technology. Amplification offers a predictive, balanced alternative to theories that suggest that technology's impact on society is mostly good, or mostly bad, or mostly too complex to capture concisely. Through the book Geek Heresy, these ideas have had broad impact on those in the technology sector hoping to do good (e.g., Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in talks about education), as well as those in international development working with digital technology (e.g., the World Bank's Human Development Report 2016: Digital Dividends).
At the University of Michigan, Kentaro has served as faculty director of the residential Master of Science in Information program (2016-2019), overseeing a time when enrollment grew from ~100 to nearly ~300 students, and as the faculty co-chair of UM School of Information's Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion committee (2020-2023). He has also been active in university faculty governance, serving at various times on the Senate Assembly, and on its executive committee (SACUA, 2020-2023); and re-establishing the Ann Arbor campus chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) as president.
Previously, Kentaro was a researcher at UC Berkeley and assistant managing director of Microsoft Research India, which he co-founded in 2005. At MSR India, he played a key role in the lab's growth, overseeing a variety of functions as it grew to over 60 full-time research staff. He also established the Technology for Emerging Markets research group, which conducted 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. Kentaro helped spin off one of the group's projects as the non-profit, Digital Green, which has supported millions of smallholder farmers in the Global South through evidence-based research and support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, USAID, and MacKenzie Scott. In 2006, he co-founded the International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development (ICTD) to provide a global platform for rigorous academic research in this field; from 2012 through 2020, he was co-editor-in-chief of the journal Information Technologies and International Development.
Prior to his time in India, Kentaro did computer vision, artificial intelligence, and human-computer interaction research at Microsoft Research in Redmond, WA, USA and Cambridge, UK. His research won the David Marr Prize in computer vision and laid a foundation for the Xbox's Kinect input device. In 2002, he taught calculus to the inaugural class of 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 Ann Arbor, Michigan.