By Lavender Nafula

In January 2016, Kenya Education Network (KENET) subscribed to Elsevier Scival web-based research analytic tool that researchers among KENET member institutions to visualize their research performance, benchmark relative to peers, develop strategic partnerships, identify and analyze new, emerging research trends, creating uniquely tailored reports. The data gathered from Elsevier Scival is used to measure research productivity and to discover research champions in areas such Engineering, Computer Science, Material Science, Earth and Planetary Sciences and Agricultural and Biological Sciences. KENET use the data to advise members on emerging research trends and the ranking of research publications depending on how highly ranked the publications are.

Dr. Leah Mutanu Mwaura, an Associate Professor and Chair of Department, Computing and Informatics, USIU-Africa recently won the coveted Top Ranked Female Researcher award in the Special Interest Group (SIG), Computer Science. The award was based on the number of publications according to (2018-2023) Scival Scopus with her research having 10 citations and h-index 3. The two (2) most highly cited publications were "Leveraging IOT solutions for enhanced information exchange" and "Enhancing Computer Students' Academic Performance through Predictive Modelling - A Proactive Approach" which was presented at the 14th IEEE International Conference on Computer Science & Education (IEEE-ICCSE), Toronto, Canada.

Dr. Mutanu's research focus areas include Software Engineering, Machine Learning, Internet of Things (IoT) Technology and Autonomic Computing. The research is based on using technology in healthcare, agriculture and education by finding solutions for poor maternal and infant health, enhancing food security by addressing the issue of crop pests and livestock diseases and enhancing academic performance in computer science education. Her publications have been centered on five (5) main areas include citizen observatories of disease outbreaks, self-adaptation solutions around health, remote patient monitoring, health information exchange and computer science education. Citizen observatories of disease outbreaks involve collecting data from citizens through web platforms and mobile applications which allow consumers to key in the symptoms experienced enabling the system to determine the possibility of a disease outbreak in a location. Self-adaptative solutions train themselves and work autonomously to pick services which consume less resources in a resource constraint environment. Remote patient monitoring focuses on how the caregiver/doctor can monitor a patient when they are different locations using IoT technology and Health Information exchange solutions. The transfer could be from the patient to the caregiver or from the caregiver to a health center. Remote patient monitoring solutions have made timely interventions possible.

Dr. Mutanu has collaborated with research institutions such as Kenya Medical Research Institute (KEMRI) on research focused on health and The International Centre of Insect Physiology (ICIPE) focused on research focused on pests to source grants which can fund the research. She has also been an international beneficiary recipient grants on IoT devices which aid in data collection leading to publications on the research conducted. Some of her research papers presented in international conferences include "Consumer-centered validation for runtime adaptation in service-oriented system" in the 2016 IEEE 9th International Conference on Service-Oriented Computing and Applications (SOCA), Macau, China and "What, where, when, how ad right of runtime adaptation in service-oriented systems" in the International Conference on Service-Oriented Computing in Malaga, Spain. Her paper titled "Enhancing health care access through remote infant screening" won the best paper award at the 9th European Alliance for Innovation (EAI) Conference on Smart Objects and Technologies for Social Good.

As an Associate Professor, Dr. Mutanu has supervised graduates researching on managing information systems, software development and Machine Learning. She has also utilized the KENET Virtual Lab (VLab) for computing and storage services while conducting her research. The VLab is a virtual cloud environment that provides research ICT services to the Kenyan community of researchers on different areas by allowing researchers to provision their own instances of pre-configured appliances (images) loaded with specific scientific software for sharing code and visualizations. The platform provides select pre-configured virtual appliances running software tracks such as statistical analysis, Quantum Espresso, NumPy/Scikit which can be deployed on demand. Users can then self-provision the virtual machines by specifying the then select amount of CPU, RAM and Disk Space desired to run the appliance. The VLab has been used for research and educational purposes to seamless computing resources management. The platform is secure and isolated only accessible for use by approved users affiliated to KENET member institutions.

When asked what the future of Computer Science looks like, Dr. Mutanu painted a bright future citing the demand for computing skills and the need to adopt a multidisciplinary approach in computer science. "There is a need to incorporate other disciplines in the training part to create more creators of technology rather than consumers of technology in the face of unique challenges," highlighted Dr. Mutanu.