30/05/2019
Engr. Dr. Ifeyinwa Ajah, a senior lecturer and the Head of the Department of Computer Science, Ebonyi State University (EBSU), for the second time in two consecutive years, 2017 and 2018 has attracted Carnegie African Diaspora Fellowship Program (CADFP) on a collaborative project to develop young Computer scientist skill in Algorithm, Theory of Computation and Human Computer Interaction (HCI). The 2018 project will feature a workshop in HCI on 1st-5th July 2019 and an evidence-based research (for a duration of 90 days ) that will contribute gainfully in reducing Mother –Child Mortality in Rural Africa.
The collaborative project will be done with an African Diaspora scholar, Prof. Rita Orji , a world recognized expert in HCI. Prof. Orji is one of the directors of the HCI research Group at Dalhousie University Canada and one of the few experts in Persuasive Technologies (PTs) worldwide.
The workshop will be hosted at Ebonyi State University, Abakaliki. See the poster below.
To participate in this workshop, click https://tinyurl.com/EBSUHCI-19 to register .
HCI deals with designing interactive systems for solving practical problems that puts users at the center of the design – user-centered design. This entails considering target users characteristics cultural, social, organizational, cognitive, and perceptual factors that could be unique to the target audience that may influence their interaction and system use. Most real-life problems such as Mother-Child Mortality can be influenced by the aforementioned consideration. Thus, the importance of HCI study for designing and solving many indigenous problems in Africa cannot be overemphasized. Capacity training in this area will build young academia with teaching skills, and strengthen and develop new research skill to effectively handle projects on designing technologies to solve numerous indigenous problems using gained HCI skills. One key interest of this project is HCI for solving the problem of Mother- Child Mortality in rural Africa.
According to the report released by the Inter-Agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation (IGME), at current trends, 60 million children (half of them new-born) will die before their fifth birthday between 2017 and 2030. Nigeria is one of those African countries that have witnessed high maternal to child mortality till date. UNICEF report shows that Nigeria loses about 2,300 under-five year olds and 145women of child bearing age daily, making the country the second largest contributor to under-five and maternal mortality rate in the world. This motivates this project of exploring possible technology based intervention that could contribute to solving this problem.
The CADFP is a scholar fellowship program for educational projects at African higher education institutions. It is designed to reverse Africa’s brain drain, build capacity at the host institutions, and develop long-term, mutually-beneficial collaborations between universities in Africa and the United States and Canada. Offered by the Institute of International Education (IIE) in collaboration with the Advisory Council of prominent African academics, and United States International University-Africa (USIU-Africa), the program is partly funded by Carnegie Corporation of New York (CCNY). To deepen the ties among the faculty members and between their home and host institutions, the program is providing support to several program alumni to enable them to build on successful collaborative projects they conducted in previous years.
