Jonathan Serugunda

Dativa K. Tizikara, Jonathan Serugunda, Andrew Katumba

Future communication systems are faced with increased demand for high capacity, dynamic bandwidth, reliability and heterogeneous traffic. To meet these requirements, networks have become more complex and thus require new design methods and monitoring techniques, as they evolve towards becoming autonomous. Machine learning has come to the forefront in recent years as a promising technology to aid in this evolution. Optical fiber communications can already provide the high capacity required for most applications, however, there is a need for increased scalability and adaptability to changing user demands and link conditions. Accurate performance monitoring is an integral part of this transformation. In this paper we review optical performance monitoring techniques where machine learning algorithms have been applied. Moreover, since alot of OPM depends on knowledge of the signal type, we also review work for modulation format recognition and bitrate identification. We additionally briefly introduce a neuromorphic approach to OPM as an emerging technique that has only recently been applied to this domain.

Ben Wycliff Mugalu, Rodrick Calvin Wamala, Jonathan Serugunda et al.

Online information systems currently heavily rely on the username and password traditional method for protecting information and controlling access. With the advancement in biometric technology and popularity of fields like AI and Machine Learning, biometric security is becoming increasingly popular because of the usability advantage. This paper reports how machine learning based face recognition can be integrated into a web-based system as a method of authentication to reap the benefits of improved usability. This paper includes a comparison of combinations of detection and classification algorithms with FaceNet for face recognition. The results show that a combination of MTCNN for detection, Facenet for generating embeddings, and LinearSVC for classification outperforms other combinations with a 95% accuracy. The resulting classifier is integrated into the web-based system and used for authenticating users.

Andrew Katumba, Moses Bomera, Cosmas Mwikirize et al.

Pests and diseases pose a key challenge to passion fruit farmers across Uganda and East Africa in general. They lead to loss of investment as yields reduce and losses increases. As the majority of the farmers, including passion fruit farmers, in the country are smallholder farmers from low-income households, they do not have the sufficient information and means to combat these challenges. While, passion fruits have the potential to improve the well-being of these farmers as they have a short maturity period and high market value , without the required knowledge about the health of their crops, farmers cannot intervene promptly to turn the situation around. For this work, we have partnered with the Uganda National Crop Research Institute (NaCRRI) to develop a dataset of expertly labelled passion fruit plant leaves and fruits, both diseased and healthy. We have made use of their extension service to collect images from 5 districts in Uganda, With the dataset in place, we are employing state-of-the-art techniques in machine learning, and specifically deep learning, techniques at scale for object detection and classification to correctly determine the health status of passion fruit plants and provide an accurate diagnosis for positive detections.This work focuses on two major diseases woodiness (viral) and brown spot (fungal) diseases.