Innovation Forest
Global Innovation Ecosystem
Innovation Forest
Dr. Ashir Ahmed
Ashir Ahmed is an associate professor at the Department of Advanced Information Technology at Kyushu University, Japan and director of the GCC project at Grameen Communications, Bangladesh. He received his PhD in Information Sciences from Tohoku University in 1999.
His research aims to produce and promote ICT-based social services for the unreached communities of the world. In 2007 he joined Kyushu University as a guest associate
professor under the research superstar program conducted by the Japan Science and Technology Agency.
Through this program, he developed a joint collaboration with Grameen and Kyushu University and produced numerous international projects such as GramWeb (a village information platform), ePassbook (an electronic gadget for unreached communities), a $300 portable clinic, and IGPF (Income Generation Project for Farmers) using ICT. At Kyushu University he developed a team of multi-disciplinary researchers who ultimately produced two research organizations, GCL (Grameen Creative Lab) and GTL (Grameen Technology Lab), in 2009.
In 2011 he was involved in the establishment of a social business research institute at the university. He was also a core contributor to the establishment of Grameen Yukiguni Maitake Ltd, an agriculture-based social business in Bangladesh. From 2003 to 2006, Dr. Ahmed worked for NTT Communications to develop SIP-based applications for home electronic devices and represented NTT Communications at international forum IETF to standardize NTT’s technology.
Earlier in his career, from 2000 to 2002, he worked as an MTS1 software engineer at Avaya Labs, Japan to conduct research and development into Avaya’s SIP-based products for the Japanese market. Dr. Ahmed was also a visiting researcher to the JGN (Japan Gigabit Network) project under the Telecommunication Advancement Organization (TAO) and successfully set up a regional TAO office in Sendai, Japan.