Prof. Ciira Maina

Designation: Associate Professor
Email: ciira.maina@dkut.ac.ke
Department: Electrical and Electronic Engineering
http://www.ciirawamaina.com/, https://dsail.dkut.ac.ke/

Academic Background
Qualification Institution Year
PhD Drexel University, USA 2011
BSc. Electrical Engineering University of Nairobi 2007

Areas of Expertise

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

Work Experience

  • October 2022 – To Date: Associate Professor, Dedan Kimathi University of Technology
  • 2019 – To Date: Director, Centre for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (DSAIL)
  • 2015 – October 2022: Senior Lecturer, Dedan Kimathi University of Technology
  • 2014 – 2018: Chairman, Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering
  • 2013 – 2015: Lecturer, Dedan Kimathi University of Technology
  • 2011 – 2013: Postdoctoral Research Associate, University of Sheffield
  • 2007 – 2011:Research and Teaching Assistant, Drexel University

Other University and National Responsibilities

  • 2017: DeKUT MSc in Telecommunication Engineering curriculum development.
  • 2014 – 2018: Chairman, Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering.
  • 2017: Reviewer, National Research Fund
  • Kenya Education Network, Special Interest Group on Engineering Education.
  • 2017 – To Present: External Examiner – JKUAT Telecommunication and Information Engineering.
  • 2015 – To Date: Data Science Africa Organizing Committee.
Journal Publications
  1. Kabi, J. N., wa Maina, C., Mharakurwa, E. T., & Mathenge, S. W. (2023). Low cost, LoRa based river water level data acquisition system. HardwareX, 14, e00414.
  2. Mugambi, L., Kabi, J. N., Kiarie, G., & wa Maina, C. (2023). DSAIL-Porini: Annotated camera trap image data of wildlife species from a conservancy in Kenya. Data in Brief, 46, 108863.
  3. Babirye, C., Muyoya, C., Mazumdar, S., Jimenez, A., Maina, C., Matogoro, J., & Kleine, D. (2022). Data science for empowerment: understanding the data science training landscape for women and girls in Africa. Gender, Technology and Development, 26(3), 437-462.
  4. Kiarie, G., Kabi, J., & wa Maina, C. (2022). DSAIL power management board: Powering the Raspberry Pi autonomously off the grid. HardwareX, 12, e00337.
  5. Mutai, V. K., Mwangi, E., & wa Maina, C. (2022). A Cubic B-Splines Approximation Method Combined with DWT and IBP for Single Image Super-resolution. International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications. 13(2).
  6. Nahshon Mokua, Ciira wa Maina and Henry Kiragu (2021). A Raw Water Quality Monitoring System using Wireless Sensor Networks. International Journal of Computer Applications 174(21):35-42.
  7. Nahshon Mokua, Ciira wa Maina and Henry Kiragu (2021). Anomaly Detection for Raw Water Quality – A Comparative Analysis of the Local Outlier Factor Algorithm and the Random Forest Algorithms. International Journal of Computer Applications 174(26):47-54.
  8. Memeu, D.M., Sallorey, A.M., Maina, C. and Kinyua, D.M.(2021) Review of Photoacoustic Malaria Diagnostic Techniques. Open Journal of Clinical Diagnostics, 11, 59-75.
  9. Girma, S. T., Konditi, D. B., & Maina, C. (2019). Frequency re-use distance calculation in cellular systems based on Monte-Carlo simulation. Heliyon, 5(3), e01302.
  10. 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
  11. 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
  12. 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.
  13. 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).
  14. wa Maina, C., Muchiri, D., & Njoroge, P. (2016). A Bioacoustic Record of a Conservancy in the Mount Kenya Ecosystem. Biodiversity data journal, (4).
  15. Mureithi, W., Langat, K., Maina, C., & Oduol, V. (2015). Using UNII-3 Wi-Fi Frequencies to Establish Long Distance Point-to-Point Links: Experimental Validation. JOURNAL OF SUSTAINABLE RESEARCH IN ENGINEERING, 1(4), 11-20.
  16. 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.
  17. 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.
  18. Walsh, J. M., Weber, S., & wa Maina, C. (2009). Optimal rate–delay tradeoffs and delay mitigating codes for multipath routed and network coded networks. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, 55(12), 5491-5510.

Technical Reports

  1. Antony Mwangi & Ciira wa Maina, NeeFlex: A wearable device for measuring knee flexion angles in rehabilitating patients. DSAIL Technical Report, DSAIL-2022-001, 2022
  2. Jason Kabi & Ciira wa Maina.. Leveraging IoT and Machine Learning for Improved Monitoring of Water Resources – A Case Study of the Upper Ewaso Nyiro River. DSAIL Technical Report, DSAIL-2021-001,  2021
  3. Gabriel Njoroge & Ciira wa Maina. Raspberry Pi Based Recording System for Acoustic Monitoring of Bird Species. DSAIL Technical Report, DSAIL-2020-001,  2020
  4. Ciira Maina et al. Comparison of acoustic monitoring of bird species and point counts in the Mt Kenya National Park – Report to African Bird Club, 2019

Preprints and Manuscripts in Preparation

  1. wa Maina, C. Leveraging Citizen Science and Low Cost Recorders for Acoustic Monitoring of Bird Species: A Case Study in Kenya
  2. wa Maina, C., Muchiri, D., & Njoroge, P. (2016). Cost effective acoustic monitoring of biodiversity and bird populations in Kenya. bioRxiv

Conference Publications

  1. Kimanuka, U., wa Maina, C. & Buy, O. B. (2023). Speech Recognition Datasets for Low-resource Congolese Languages. ICLR 2023 Workshop AfricaNLP.
  2. Mugambi, L., ZÜHLKE, L., & wa Maina, C.  (2022). Towards AI Based Diagnosis of Rheumatic Heart Disease: Data Annotation and View Classification. In 2022 IST-Africa Conference. IEEE.
  3. Jason Kabi & Ciira wa Maina. (2021). Leveraging IoT and Machine Learning for Improved Monitoring of Water Resources – A Case Study of the Upper Ewaso Nyiro River.  In 2021 IST-Africa Conference IEEE.
  4. Gabriel Njoroge & Ciira wa Maina. (2021). Raspberry Pi Based Recording System for Acoustic Monitoring of Bird Species. In 2021 IST-Africa Conference IEEE.
  5. Jared Makario & Ciira wa Maina. (2021). A Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) Based System for Livestock Tracking and Localization. In 2021 IST-Africa Conference IEEE.
  6. Njeru, M., Maina, C., & Langat, K. (2021). Mammalian Species Detection Using a Cascade of Unet and SqueezeNet. In 2021 IEEE AFRICON. IEEE.
  7. Behr, D., C. wa Maina, & Marivate, V. (2021). An empirical investigation into audio pipeline approaches for classifying bird species.  In IEEE AFRICON, 2021
  8. Makario, J., Ngetich, K., & wa Maina, C. (2019). Long Range Low Power Sensor Networks for Agricultural Monitoring-A Case Study in Kenya. In 2019 IST-Africa Conference IEEE.
  9. Girma, S. T., Konditi, D. B., & Maina, C. (2019). Efficient co-channel interference suppression by hybrid of a binomial array and uniform linear array. In 2019 IEEE International Conference on Computational Science and Engineering (CSE) and IEEE International Conference on Embedded and Ubiquitous Computing (EUC) (pp. 48-56). IEEE.
  10. Girma, S. T., Konditi, D. B., & wa Maina, C. (2019). Downlink Throughput Statistics in interference-limited cellular systems based on Monte-Carlo Simulation Method. In 2019 11th International Conference on Computational Intelligence and Communication Networks (CICN) (pp. 27-30). IEEE.
  11. wa Maina, C. (2017). IoT at the Grassroots–Exploring the Use of Sensors for Livestock Monitoring. In IST-Africa Conference. IEEE.
  12. Memeu, D., Merenga, S., wa Maina, C. (2017). Photoacoustic Sensing In Tissue Using Optical Scattering Modulation. In IEEE AFRICON, 2017

Awards, Scholarships and Recognition

  • 2022: DeKUT Research Award
  • 2015 – 2017: KENET Travel Grants
  • 2015: DeKUT Resource Mobilization Award
  • 2007: Drexel Provost Fellowship

Research Funds

  • 2021 – 2025: IDRC Grant on Gender Analysis GeJUSTA
  • 2022: NVIDIA Hardware Grant
  • 2022 – 2023: Safaricom Grant – Integrated Forest Management
  • 2021: Google Grant AI for Rheumatic Heart Disease
  • 2021: DSA Affiliated Centre grant to DSAIL
  • 2021 – 2023: IDRC Grant Mapping Policy and Capacity for Artificial Intelligence for Development in Africa
  • 2020: ARM support for Undergraduate Research Assistant Program
  • May 2020 – Oct 2021: Gender-Just Digital Innovation in Africa (GeDIA)
  • 2019: Google Focussed Research Award
  • 2015 – 2019: Data Science Africa
  • 2018 – 2020: Ecological monitoring of the Ewaso Ngiro river basin – NRF (With KEFRI, UoN and NMK)
  • 2017 – 2018: ESRC Grant : Co-convener on the project “Digital Development: Leveraging Data Science and Digital Participatory Practice for Development Impact”, PI – Prof. Dorothea Kleine, University of Sheffield
  • 2016: Kenya Bioacoustics Project – Funded by the African Bird Club
  • 2014 – 2015: Re-imagining Electrical Engineering Education Using the Raspberry Pi – Funded by KENET

Postgraduate Thesis Supervision
Completed

  1. Zelalem Hailu – PAU, PhD Graduated 2018. Thesis Title – Signal transmission and detection scheme for energy and spectrally efficient indoor optical wireless communications.<.li>
  2. Solomon Teshome – PAU, PhD Graduated 2019. Thesis Title – Mitigating co-channel interference due to high traffic congestion in a wireless communication network.
  3. Nahshon Mokua MSc – DeKUT, Graduated 2021 – Thesis Title – A Water Quality Monitoring System using Wireless Sensor Networks.
  4. Victor Mutai MSc – DeKUT, Graduated 2022 – Thesis Title – A Cubic B-Splines Approximation Method Combined with Discrete Wavelet Transform and Iterative Back Projection for Single Image Super-Resolution.
  5. Kelvin Kiptoo MSc – DeKUT, Graduated 2023 – Thesis Title – Development of a Kiswahili Text-to-Speech System based on WaveNets.

Defended
  1. Jason Kabi – MSc – DeKUT, Expected Graduation 2023 – Thesis Title – River Water Monitoring and Catchment Analysis Based on Wireless Sensor Networks and Machine Learning.

Ongoing

  1. Gabriel Kiarie – MSc DeKUT
  2. Cedric Kiplimo – MSc DeKUT
  3. Lorna Mugambi – MSc DeKUT
  4. Abdel Nasser SOUMANA – PhD PAUSTI
  5. Ussen Kimanuka – PhD PAUSTI

Postgraduate Thesis Examination
PhD

  1. “Predicting Infectious Disease Density in Urban Settings using Convolutional Neural Networks” By Rahman Sanya, Makerere University 2021.
  2. “Two-stage Spectrum Sensing Method in Cognitive Radio” by Bonny Said Mgawe, Pan African University Institute of Basic Sciences, Technology and Innovation, 2019.
  3. “Traffic Flow Speed and Congestion Monitoring in Resource Constrained Crowded Cities” by Rose Nakibuule, Makerere University, 2019.

MSc

  1. “Design of wind and PV-Solar energy hybrid system for TEM equipment in Geophysical Exploration for Geothermal Energy” by Martin Musila, DeKUT 2019.
  2. “Automated Computer Vision technique for Symptom Measurement in Cassava” by Flavia Ninsiima Delmira, Makerere University, 2018.
  3. “Suppression of Impulse Noise in Colour Images Using Quaternion Transformation and Vector Median Filtering” by Rabiu Aminu, PAU, 2018
  4. “Adaptive Channel Equalization Using Decision Feedback Equalizer Feedforward Neural Networks” by Emmanuel Kiprop Chemweno, JKUAT, 2018
  5. “Blind Signal Processing of Two Input Two Output Linear System for Separating Audio Signals Using Independent Component Analysis Applied in Natural Gradient Algorithm” by James Paul Chibole, JKUAT, 2018.
  6. “Performance Evaluation of Direction of Arrival Estimation Using Uniform and Non-uniform Linear Arrays” by Eva Kwizera, PAU, 2017.
  7. “An Investigation on the direction of arrival estimation for correlated signals in wireless communication systems” by Joseph Nkurunziza, PAU, 2017.
  8. “Vision Based Automatic Road Traffic Density Estimation and Vehicle Classification for Both Stationary and Free Flowing Traffic Scenes Using an Ensemble Pattern Classifier” by Daniel Arani Osuto, JKUAT, 2016.
  9. “Channel Equalization Using Self-Organizing Maps” by Elijah Olukohe Otieno , PAU, 2014.

Affiliation/Membership to Professional Bodies

  • Engineers Board of Kenya (EBK)
  • The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)