Dr. Ciira wa Maina

Job title: Senior Lecturer

Contacts Details:

Tel: +254(0)716196331
Email: ciira.maina@dkut.ac.ke
Twitter: @CwaMaina
Personal Website: https://sites.google.com/site/cwamainadekut/

Academic Background:
Qualification                                                 Institution                                            Year
BSc. Electrical Engineering               University of Nairobi                         2007

PhD                                                                 Drexel University, USA                  2011

Areas of Expertise:

  • Signal Processing
  • Machine learning
  • Bio-acoustics
  • Data Science

Work Experience:

  • Senior Lecturer, Dedan Kimathi University of Technology 2015 to date
  • Chairman, Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, 2014 to 2018a
  • Lecturer, Dedan Kimathi University of Technology 2013 to date
  • Postdoctoral Research Associate, University of Sheffield, 2011 to 2013
  • Research and Teaching Assistant, Drexel University, 2007 to 2011
Research interests:
  • Wireless communication applications for development
  • Statistical signal processing for speech applications
  • Data organisation and analysis for traditional systems of knowledge
  • Computational Biology

Other University and National Responsibilities

  • Chairman, Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, 2014 to June 2018
  • Reviewer, National Research Fund, 2017 to date
  • Kenya Education Network, Special Interest Group on Engineering Education
  • External Examiner
  • Data Science Africa Organizing Committee 2015 to date
Major Publications:
  1. Girma, S. T., Konditi, D. B., & Maina, C. (2018). A Novel Radio Wave Propagation Modeling Method Using System Identification Technique over Wireless Links in East Africa. International Journal of Antennas and Propagation, 2018.
  2. Gebeyehu, Z. H., Langat, P. K., & Maina, C. (2018). BER Performance of Stratified ACO-OFDM for Optical Wireless Communications over Multipath Channel. Journal of Computer Networks and Communications, 2018.
  3. Memeu, D. M., Sarroney, M. A., & Maina, C. (2018). Photo-Thermal Induced Optical Scattering Modulation Sensor for Malaria Diagnosis. Open Journal of Biophysics, 8(04), 185.
  4. wa MAINA, C. (2017). IoT at the Grassroots–Exploring the Use of Sensors for Livestock Monitoring. In IST-Africa Conference. IEEE.
  5. Memeu, D., Merenga, S., wa MAINA, C. (2017). Photoacoustic Sensing In Tissue Using Optical Scattering Modulation. In IEEE AFRICON, 2017
  6. Hailu, Z., Langat, K., & wa Maina, C. (2017). Stratified ACO-OFDM Modulation for Simultaneous Transmission of Multiple Frames Both on Even and Odd Subcarriers. Journal of Communications, 12(5).
  7. wa MAINA, C., Muhia, A., & Opondo, J. (2016). A low cost laboratory for enhanced electrical engineering education. In IST-Africa Conference. IEEE.
  8. wa MAINA, C. (2016). Data Science Africa–An Initiative to Bridge the Data Science Skills Gap in Africa. SciDataCon [link]
  9.  wa Maina, C., Muchiri, D., & Njoroge, P. (2016). A Bioacoustic Record of a Conservancy in the Mount Kenya Ecosystem. Biodiversity data journal, (4).
  10. wa Maina, C. (2016). Cost Effective Acoustic Monitoring of Bird Species. In Interspeech (pp. 2617-2620).
  11. wa Maina, C. (2015). Bioacoustic approaches to biodiversity monitoring and conservation in Kenya. In IST-Africa Conference IEEE.
  12. wa Maina, C. (2015, September). Audio diarization for biodiversity monitoring. In IEEE AFRICON, 2015 (pp. 1-5). IEEE.
  13. wa Maina, C., et al (2014). Inference of RNA polymerase II transcription dynamics from chromatin immunoprecipitation time course data. PLoS computational biology, 10(5), e1003598.
  14. wa Maina, C., & Walsh, J. M. (2011). Joint speech enhancement and speaker identification using approximate Bayesian inference. IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing, 19(6), 1517-1529.
  15. wa Maina, C., & Walsh, J. M. (2011). Log spectra enhancement using speaker dependent priors for speaker verification. In IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), (pp. 4540-4543).
  16. Walsh, J. M., Weber, S., & wa Maina, C. (2009). Optimal rate–delay trade-offs and delay mitigating codes for multipath routed and network coded networks.IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, 55(12), 5491-5510.
  17. wa Maina, C., & Walsh, J. M. (2009). Joint speech enhancement and speaker identification using monte carlo methods. In Proc. Interspeech (pp. 1375-1378).
  18. wa Maina, C., & Walsh, J. M. (2008). A cost function level analysis of Auto-correlation Minimization based blind adaptive channel shorteners. In 42nd Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems and Computers, 2008 (pp. 2193-2197). IEEE.
  19. Walsh, J. M., Weber, S., & wa Maina, C. (2008). Optimal rate delay trade-offs for multi-path routed and network coded networks. In IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory, 2008. ISIT 2008. (pp. 682-686). IEEE.

Awards, Scholarships and Recognition

  • KENET Travel Grants (2015-17)
  • DeKUT Resource Mobilization Award
  • Drexel Provost Fellowship

Research

  • Ecological monitoring of the Ewaso Ngiro river basin – NRF
  • Technological Interventions to mitigate human wildlife conflict
  • Kenya Bioacoustics Project – Funded by the African Bird Club
  • Re-imagining Electrical Engineering Education Using the Raspberry Pi – Funded by KENET

Postgraduate Thesis Supervision and Examination

  • Daniel Memeu – Kenyatta University, PhD
  • Zelalem Hailu – PAU, PhD Graduated 2018

Affiliation/Membership to Professional Bodies

  • IEEE
  • EBK