Research areas

1. Mobile and Pervasive Computing

Advances in pervasive communication and the proliferation of mobile computing devices have
ushered in a new era for mobile computing. The fundamental principles that guide mobile and
pervasive computing environment design evolved with distributed systems, wireless networks,
local area networks, middleware, wide-area networks and the WWW. A key requirement of
mobile and pervasive computing will be the ability to access critical service and data anytime
anywhere regardless of location, which implies interdependence between the elements of a
mobile and pervasive computing system. Mobile and pervasive computing systems require
wireless networking and infrastructure network support. Moreover, they use mobile/pervasive
devices, sensors and actuators, increasingly provide communications capability. Our mobile and
pervasive computing group is engaged in advancing these technologies, both in research and
applications, with projects covering context modeling and reasoning, ontology and semantic web
technologies for knowledge based and smart devices, adaptive, autonomic and context-aware
computing, and mobile application development, wireless networks, ubiquitous and embedded
devices and applications including e-learning, services oriented data accessing, sensors and
actuators data communications.

2. Software Engineering
Software Engineering (SE) is one of the key research and teaching areas within our department.
The Software Engineering Research Team (SERT) focuses on fundamental and applied research
in state-of-the-art software engineering methodologies and techniques, with a strong emphasis on
practical training and skill transfer. Our research projects have included topics such as software
methodologies, object-oriented methodologies, structured/object-oriented design, software
testing, software project management, software engineering education, etc. SERT members have
been very active in applying advanced SE concepts to various applied R&D software projects in
Tanzania. (example of developed systems are Votebook, Research Information Management
System(RIMS) for Higher Education in Tanzania, etc.)

3. Data & Database Management Systems

The digital information of an enterprise contains structured data (e.g. relational database), semi-
structured data (e.g. a web site), and unstructured data (e.g. audio stream and natural language
text). Massive amounts of data are generated by users through mobile, Web, and Web 2.0. The
Data and Database Management System Research Group (DDMSRG) investigates techniques
for storing and retrieving those diverse data types in a secure and scalable manner. We also work
on data mining and knowledge discovery mechanisms that turn the data collections into
knowledge that can be exploited for business advantages. We focus our teaching and research in
efficient query processing, indexing structures, concurrency control, and recovery