George Okeyo: The Promise of Data Analytics and Internet of Things

George Okeyo will present the guest lecture: The Promise of Data Analytics and Internet of Things.

Abstract

Data analytics has received widespread attention due to its potential to impact various aspects of society. For instance, there is potential to impact agriculture, food and nutrition security, climate change science, business, and smart cities among others. On the other hand, the proliferation of sensors, actuators and other smart devices has made Internet of Things (IoT) a reality and researchers and industry are in the race to exploit IoT technology in various use cases. The combination of the two technologies promises many opportunities for, but also challenges to, their widespread deployment in most of Africa. Some of the challenges facing IoT and data analytics include limited power and compute capacity for devices such as sensors, poor or intermittent internet connection, difficulty in aggregating information from multimodal sensors, effective communication of analytics results, data traceability, and security and trust of resulting applications. Addressing some of the challenges will enhance widespread implementation and adoption of data analytics and IoT solutions by researchers and industry. This presentation will not only detail my research but also highlight the opportunities and challenges and propose some of the practical steps that both researchers and industry can take to enhance implementation, adoption, and exploitation of data analytics and IoT technologies to solve societal and business problems. Applications in digital and connected health, smart cities, smart agriculture, education technology, climate prediction, and smart grid are considered. In addition, we present a way forward and make recommendations on opportunities for collaboration between researchers and industry to foster technology innovation and entrepreneurship.

Bio

Dr. George Okeyo received his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Ulster (United Kingdom) in 2013. He received his M.Sc. Information Systems at the University of Nairobi (Kenya) in 2007. Dr. Okeyo graduated with a B.Sc. in Mathematics and Computer Science (First Class Honors) from the Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology (JKUAT) (Kenya) in 2001. His research interests are in the areas of intelligent systems and applications including climate prediction, pervasive computing and Internet of Things (IoT), event and activity recognition, scenario recognition, Semantic Web and ontology engineering, and privacy and trust. He is currently a senior lecturer in Computer Science at the School of Computer Science and Informatics, De Montfort University (UK). He was previously a Lecturer at JKUAT and also served as the Chair of the Department of Computing. Okeyo has published several research articles in peer-refereed international conferences and high impact journals. He has successfully supervised four PhD and over 35 M.Sc. theses to completion. Throughout his teaching career, Okeyo has interacted closely with industry and techpreneurs including in helping identify and recommend talent. Email: george.okeyo@dmu.ac.uk; george.okeyo@gmail.com.