Name: Engineer Bainomugisha
Title: Head of Department – Computer Science / Assoc. Professor
Highest Qualification: PhD
Awarding institution(s): Vrije Universiteit Brussel, 2012
Area of specialisation: Programming languages, Distributed systems, software engineering, mobile computing, data structures and algorithms
Professional Summary
Engineer Bainomugisha is an Associate Professor of Computer Science and the Chair of the Department of Computer Science at Makerere University. His research focuses on Computer Science-driven solutions to the prevailing world challenges. He is also passionate about contributing to quality Computer Science education that is of sufficient breath and depth, practical and fast enough. Currently, he leads several innovative and research initiatives that aim to create and apply computational methods and tools that can improve the quality of life especially in the developing world setting. Engineer Bainomugisha believes in the transformative power of computational technology and intelligence to tackle complex society challenges and improve people’s lives. His current research projects include building and deploying distributed systems of miniature IoT/mobile devices to: measure and derive trends of air quality in over 50 urban centers in Uganda to tackle the growing air pollution challenge in developing countries; monitor soil conditions to help farms make smart decisions; measure the quality of road infrastructure in Uganda to help municipalities and road users. Together with my team we are also building a multi-cloud solution that supports portability of apps and services between private and public clouds while taking into account unique African realities like bandwidth constraints, Internet and power outages.
Previously he investigated and developed programming languages and software tools to help programmers easily write highly adaptive and distributed mobile software without worrying about low-level concerns. My research in this area helped create iScheme and Flute programming languages.
He is also the Principal Investigator for several research projects including “Probabilistic low-cost air pollution monitoring”; “Centre for Data Technology”; “Build Research Capacity for Innovative ICT4D”; and “African Virtual Cloud Initiative”;.
He received a Ph.D. (with Greatest Distinction – “Summa cum laude”) and MSc. (with Great Distinction) in Computer Science from Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium in 2008 & 2012, respectively. I received a B.Sc. (First Class Honors) in Computer Science from Makerere University in 2006, where he also received the Best Science and Overall Best graduate award for that year. Prior to returning to Makerere University he worked as a pre-doctoral and postdoctoral researcher at the Software Languages Lab, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium Prior to that I worked in the Software Development industry and IT Management in Uganda.