Conferences

The 41st Annual Conference of the Association for Educational Assessment in Africa (AEAA)

2025-08-25 | Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

The 41st Annual Conference of the Association for Educational Assessment in Africa (AEAA) was held f...

The 41st Annual Conference of the Association for Educational Assessment in Africa (AEAA) was held from August 25 to 29, 2025, in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. This conference served as a vital platform for advancing education innovation and sharing cutting-edge research across the continent under the theme, “Transforming Educational Assessment: Towards Quality Learning and Informed Decision Making.” Although I was unable to attend in person, our colleague Julian Okello Wanican, represented our team by presenting our paper, EduChain: Leveraging Blockchain, Federated Learning, and AI Fraud Detection for Secure Competency-Based Assessment. You can view our full presentation here: https://lnkd.in/dhT9_DZR EduChain is a novel framework developed to enhance Competency-Based Assessment (CBA) across African educational institutions that emphasize skills-based learning. Despite the growing adoption of CBA, challenges such as academic dishonesty, data manipulation, and trust deficits remain prevalent. Our framework addresses these challenges through: 1. The use of blockchain technology to ensure secure, transparent, and tamper-resistant assessment records. 2. Federated learning methods to enable collaborative AI training across institutions while preserving student privacy. 3. AI-driven fraud detection employing advanced machine learning algorithms to identify anomalies and prevent tampering. 4. A scalable architecture designed to accommodate the diversity of African education systems. By integrating differential privacy and secure multi-party computation, our prototype demonstrates EduChain’s capability to deliver secure and scalable assessments. Preliminary results indicate significant potential to strengthen academic integrity, foster institutional trust, and inform policy development for digital education across the continent. Brief Summary of the Paper: EduChain combines blockchain, federated learning, and AI fraud detection to address critical challenges in Competency-Based Assessment in Africa. It offers a scalable, privacy-preserving approach to improve academic integrity and build trust in diverse education systems. Key Highlights: • Addresses fraud, data tampering, and trust deficits in skills-based learning adoption. • Blockchain enables tamper-proof and transparent assessment record-keeping. • Federated learning facilitates decentralized AI training while protecting learner privacy. • AI models successfully detect various fraud types with promising accuracy. • Prototype uses differential privacy and secure multi-party computation to safeguard data. • Early results show potential to strengthen academic accountability and inform policy. • Next step: piloting EduChain in real educational environments for further validation.

Presentation at UNESCO-UIPE / Africa Engineering Week, Kampala 2025

2025-09-15 | Kampala

We are proud to announce that, Mr. Balinda Roland Mujungu, a member of our research team, recently p...

We are proud to announce that, Mr. Balinda Roland Mujungu, a member of our research team, recently presented a research paper at the 11th UNESCO Africa Engineering Week & 9th African Engineering Conference held from 14th to 20th September 2025 at Speke Resort, Munyonyo, Kampala, Uganda. His presentation was titled: “Peer-to-Peer Energy Sharing System for Smart Electricity Utility Meters” About the Conference The UNESCO-UIPE event, also known as Africa Engineering Week and African Engineering Conference, is a flagship gathering of engineers, researchers, industry partners, and policy makers from across Africa and beyond. Its mission is to promote engineering excellence, catalyze innovation, and foster collaborations that advance sustainable infrastructure and technology across the continent. This year’s theme focused on “Engineering for Sustainable Development in Africa: Addressing Climate Change and Building Resilient Infrastructure.” About the Research & Impact In his paper, Mr. Mujungu addresses a notable limitation in Uganda’s electricity metering model. Uganda shifted from postpaid to prepaid metering to enhance revenue security and reduce administration costs. However, under the current system, users cannot directly transfer unused electricity credits between themselves, constraining flexibility. The work proposes and tests an IoT-enabled peer-to-peer (P2P) energy sharing model to enable direct transfer of energy credits between users. Highlights of the approach include: Use of ESP32 microcontrollers, a secure token-based vending platform, and bidirectional data exchange between meters. Experimental results showing meter accuracy within ±5%, reliable credit transfers, and automatic load reconnection. The system closes a service gap by enabling surplus credit sharing without direct utility intervention, promoting collaborative consumption and greater consumer autonomy. Potential alignment with several Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): including SDG 7 (Affordable & Clean Energy), SDG 9 (Industry, Innovation & Infrastructure), SDG 10 (Reduced Inequalities), SDG 12 (Responsible Consumption & Production) and SDG 8 (Decent Work & Economic Growth). This research not only demonstrates a working prototype but also offers a scalable framework that could be adapted to other sub-Saharan contexts, enhancing utility-customer relationships and promoting decentralized energy models. Congratulations & What’s Next We extend our warmest congratulations to Roland for this achievement and for representing our lab at an important continental forum. We look forward to building on this work; refining the prototype, exploring larger deployments, and collaborating with stakeholders (utilities, regulators, communities) to test real-world adoption. We will soon publish the full paper (or proceedings) and share updates on ongoing experiments and deployment plans. Stay tuned!

National ict job fair

2025-04-15 | Mbarara university

Show casing various skills in relation to engineering and connecting with real world proffessionals

East african students conference

2025-05-02 | Nairobi

This is a carreer guidance conference where different experts from al over east Africa will give stu...