Africa Cybersecurity Consortium gave congratulations to Mr. Hilary MURAMIRA, one of the co-founders of who presented his paper “Applying blockchain Technology to Enhance Security in Smart Home Systems” and received an award today at the Meeting of the Minds 2019. The Meeting of the Minds 2019 was hosted by Carnegie Mellon University Africa (CMU-Africa) in partnership with Mastercard Foundation.
The inaugural Meeting of the Minds annual research symposium was hosted from 15th to 16th March 2019 in Kigali, Rwanda at Kigali Serena Hotel. This year’s theme was “Harnessing Africa’s potential through research”. The main goal was to explore ways in which academia can catalyze Africa’s innovation economy through research with a specific focus on STEM innovations that can address problems and opportunities in Africa, said MasterCard Foundation.
These research presentations brought together current scholars, and alumni of a MasterCard Foundation Scholars Program and other institutions including: Ashesi University, University of Abomey-Calavi, University of Gondar, African Institute for Mathematical Sciences, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, University of Cape Town, FAWE, CAMFED, African Leadership University, University of Pretoria, Makerere University, University of Rwanda, and Carnegie Mellon University Africa.
Mr. Muramira received a third award after Ms. Natalia Dambe who got the 1st place award and Mr. Maxwell Aladagoa who got the 2nd place award. Ms. Dambe presented a paper on flood modeling using GIS and remote sensing techniques. Mr. Aladagoa presented a paper on semantic segmentation of the growth stages of plasmodium parasites using convolutional neural networks. Congratulations to Muramira, Dambe and Aladagoa.
Mr. Muramira’s paper abstract “Privacy is today’s discussion in many parts of the world. How do you ensure the privacy of your information as a smart home owner? This paper discusses the issues with smart home systems from the security and privacy perspective. Related research work is investigated to efficiently highlight the privacy problem in smart home systems. While this is ongoing research, this paper mainly raises the awareness of society about the security issues associated with smart home systems. Moreover, we analyze possible security challenges based on common factors of network security: Confidentiality, integrity, authentication and availability. This paper concludes by proposing the use of blockchain technology to improve the privacy of information in smart home systems.”
