IST-Africa Week Conference 

About: IST-Africa Week Conference is an academic conference. The conference publishes majorly in the area(s): The Internet & Government. Over the lifetime, 439 publications have been published by the conference receiving 1750 citations.

Internet of things technologies in smart cities

Abstract: A smart city is a developed urban area that excels in the area of economy, governance, people and life through strong human capital, social capital and ICT infrastructure. It is a new approach to managing the complexity of city life, increase efficiency, reduce expenses and improve the quality of life of the citizens. This paper is on potential smart cities applications as applied to the domains of smart transport, smart tourism and recreation, smart health, ambient-assisted living, crime prevention and community safety, governance, monitoring and infrastructure, disaster management, environment management, refuse collection and sewer management, smart homes and smart energy. These smart cities applications support the future vision of cities, which aim at exploiting ICTs, namely internet of things technologies (IoT), for value-added service delivery. Furthermore, the paper presents a technical solution for energy control and comfort in a home for proof of concept of a smart city infrastructure application. The demonstrator described here is on how smart applications can manage energy control and comfort in a room that has a varied number of people and electrical appliances, with each being a source of heat.

Using Mobile Moodle to enhance Moodle LMS accessibility and usage at the University of Dar es Salaam

Abstract: Over the last decade, there has been a remarkable increase in the adoption and use of learning management systems (LMS) in sub-Saharan Africa in a bid to improve the quality of on-campus delivery as well as increasing access to education through blended and distance learning. Despite the increased adoption of LMS in the region, their potential has not been fully exploited as relatively few users tend to use them, thereby not justifying the high infrastructure investment costs. The continued penetration and adoption of mobile phones amongst users in the region presents an opportunity to find ways of making LMS accessible to users via mobile phones. However, there are relatively few attempts to enhance accessibility and usage of LMS into users' mobile phones especially in sub-Saharan Africa. This article aims at sharing experiences of configuring and using Mobile Moodle to enhance Moodle LMS usage and accessibility via mobile phones at the University of Dar es Salaam. Through analyzing log of two selected courses, it was revealed that the majority of students used Course View and User List features to read course notes and to check for their fellow students respectively. In addition, students indicated that the Mobile Moodle was easy to use and enable them to accomplish learning activities more quickly through a questionnaire that was distributed to elicit their opinions about the Mobile Moodle. The findings from this study will enable those who are involved in LMS implementation especially in sub-Saharan Africa to widen access of LMS via mobile phones and therefore increase LMS usage.

Smart water leakage detection and metering device

Abstract: Water is a scarce and valuable resource hence proper management of this resource is essential for social and economic development of any country because it is an input to almost all production in key sectors like Agriculture, Industry, Energy and Transport. Smart devices have transformed nearly every aspect of our home and this paper is presenting a practical low-cost Smart Water Meter Device which is capable of determining possible leakages in the customer's property and reporting current household water consumption levels in real time. Flow meter sensors have been deployed to measure the quantity of water consumer by a consumer. In turn, the flow rates and the amount of litres consumed will be displayed on the LCD display and they will also be sent through the GSM/GPRS module to the website. The system has been efficiently and carefully designed to minimise commercial losses.

Blockchain as an enabler for public mHealth solutions in South Africa

Abstract: Blockchain technology underpins a radical rethink of information privacy, confidentiality, security and integrity. As a decentralised ledger of transactions across a peer-to-peer network, the need for a central third party intermediate verification authority is disrupted. To unlock the potential for mHealth, the need for authentication and verified access to often sensitive data, specialised services and transfer of value need to be realised. This paper interrogates current processes and aims to make a case for Blockchain technology as an improved security model that has the potential to lower the cost of trust and an alternative to managing the burden of proof. This is particularly relevant for mHealth that, by its nature, is often a distributed endeavour involving the goal-orientated collaboration of a number of stakeholders.

The effects of a corpus on isiZulu spellcheckers based on N-grams

Abstract: Correct spelling contributes to good content accessibility and readability for textual documents. However, there are few spellcheckers for Bantu languages such as isiZulu, the major language in South Africa. The objective of this research is to investigate development of spellcheckers for isiZulu and, more generally, an approach that can be reused across Bantu languages. To fill this gap in an extensible way, we used data-driven statistical language models with trigrams and quadrigrams. The models were trained on three different isiZulu corpora, being Ukwabelana, a selection of the isiZulu National Corpus, and a small corpus of news items. The system performed better with trigrams than with quadrigrams, and performance depended on the training and testing corpora. When the system was trained with old text (bible in isiZulu), it did not perform well when tested with the two corpora that contain more recent texts, such as the constitution and news items. The highest accuracy obtained was 89%. Given that data-driven statistical language models constitute a language-independent approach, we conclude that data-driven spellcheckers for all Bantu languages are indeed feasible. They are, however, sensitive to the training and testing data. This is less resource-intensive compared to manual specification of rules, and therefore the potential impact on realising spellcheckers for Bantu languages is now practically within reach. The potential societal impact of spellchecker-supported tools and apps is incalculable.