Dar es Salaam Insitute of Technology Principal honored DIT Google Team “The google geeks”

As the institute's culture,DIT awards the students who have toped their class for each academic year.

Normally the awards are presented to these students during the best students ceremony which is always conducted one week prior to the institute's graduation ceremony.

This year the ceremony was conducted at the institute function hall “ASA LOUNGE” on January 18^th ,2013 in which the guest of honor were Mrs Christine Kilindu who is the Director of  Confederation of Tanzania Industries.

During the ceremony the guest of honor together with the principal awarded the best students and also issued a special statement to honor the Dar es Salaam Institute of Technology Google Team,”The Google Geeks”.The Principal honored the team for their exceptional contribution in making DIT community active in terms of technology and urge the team to continue with the energy they have shown so far.

Mr Ashery Mbilinyi who is the Google Student Ambassador for DIT and the founder and leader of the team,praised the recognition they have received by the principal and promised to put much more energy.

“We are very happy for the recognition we have received .We cant real say we have done a lot so far as most of our goals are not yet accomplished. We have mapped the whole university campus during Africa Map Up week and held 7^th position between 65 African Sub Saharan Africa Universities and held small trainings to our fellow students about Google Apps and Google's APIs. We have also created google groups for each class in computer studies department as a start and deployed Google Apps for Education with Students Organization (DITSO) domain www.ditso.ac.tz.Currently we are working on registering students to start using firstname.lastname@ditso.ac.tz email address which is g mail in back end. A DIT where students will practice and live technology everyday is our dream” Ashery said

Currently the team have 8 members who are Ashery Mbilinyi BEng10 Computer Engineering,Emmanuel Mboso BEng10 Computer Engineering,Abdul Bashiru,Elibariki Augustino,Joseph Luvanda and Steve Mgaya who are both BEng11 Computer Engineering,Michael Mjata BEng11 Electronics and Telecommunication Engineering and John Mwangulangu BEng12 Computer Engineering but is open for any DIT student passionate with tech who will want to join.

For more information please visit:http://goo.gl/pLH2v

The DIT Principal introducing the Google Geeks to DIT Community during Best Students Ceremony

DIT Google Geeks pose for a picture with Principal,Guest of Honor and other college administration officials.

Harvard Top Computer Science Students To Apply Computer Science Skills in Tanzania

Four Harvard students are spending their winter break in Tanzania applying their computer science skills to help improve health infrastructure for clinics and hospitals.

The project is the pilot program for Tech in the World, a newly created student organization that seeks to send top computer science students to work on coding projects in developing countries. From Dec. 22 to Jan. 19, Brandon Liu ’14, Joshua K. Lee ’14, Salvatore R. Rinchiera ’14, and Christian C. Anderson ’13 will live in Dar es Salaam creating a solution to better the current management system of electronic medical records for maternal health care.

Liu, co-founder of Tech in the World, said he got the idea for the organization this summer after reading “Mountains Beyond Mountains,” a book focused on University Professor Paul E. Farmer’s work at hospitals in Haiti.

“As I was reading it, I was thinking that I really wanted to see how I could contribute to his work,” Liu said. “I started to talk to people in global health who said that they wanted more computer science people to get involved.”

The team plans to collaborate with students from Dar es Salaam Institute of Technology and a local Tanzanian entrepreneurship group in order to share their knowledge and ensure the long-term value of their projects.

“A lot of trips like these can be branded as volunteerism  where you are ostensibly providing value but, in reality, are really just a burden to whoever’s hosting you,” Liu said. “Pairing with someone locally tries to offset that to train people and have something sustainable.”

The group is also partnering with the Bienmoyo Foundation, an organization that matches volunteers with global health projects, and the Association of Private Health Facilities in Tanzania, an umbrella organization for all private health facilities in the country.

The four students will be joined by Mateus C. Falci ’14, a visual and environmental studies concentrator who will make a documentary of the experience.

The students plan to return to Dar es Salaam for the next few years to continue their service work.

“It’s good to have that continuity, to develop the relationship and build on prior work,” Liu said.

Though Tech in the World did not have a formal application process this year, Liu and his co-founder Lee hope to expand the team in the future to include strong computer science students from other schools, including Brown University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“We definitely want people to be comfortable in the environment and, from day one, to be able to start coding,” Lee said.

You can learn more about Tech in the World through http://www.techintheworld.org/

This article has been quoted from http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2012/12/12/students-tanzania-computer-science/ and it is written by CHRISTINE Y. CAHAILL WHO IS A CRIMSON STAFF WRITER

—Staff writer Christine Y. Cahill can be reached at christinecahill@college.harvard.edu.

                                            Liu with DIT Computer Engineering Students

Liu with Ashery Mbilinyi,DIT Google Student Ambassador

Cognitive Computing: When Computers Become Brains

IBM researchers reverse engineered a macaque brain as a start to engineering one of their own

The gnomes at IBM’s research labs were not content to make merely a genius computer that could beat any human at the game of jeopardy.  They had to go and create a new kind of machine intelligence that mimics the actual human brain.

Watson, the reigning jeopardy champ, is smart, but it’s still recognizably a computer.  This new stuff is something completely different.  IBM is setting out to build an electronic brain from the ground up.

Cognitive computing, as the new field is called, takes computing concepts to a whole new level.  Earlier this week, Dharmendra Modha, who works at IBM’s Almaden Research Center, regaled a roomful of analysts with what cognitive computing can do and how IBM is going about making a machine that thinks the way we do.  His own blog on the subject is here.

First Modha described the challenges, which involve aspects of neuroscience, supercomputing, and nanotechnology.

The human brain integrates memory and processing together, weighs less than 3 lbs, occupies about a two-liter volume, and uses less power than a light bulb.  It operates as a massively parallel distributed processor.  It is event driven, that is, it reacts to things in its environment, uses little power when active and even less while resting.  It is a reconfigurable, fault-tolerant learning system.  It is excellent at pattern recognition and teasing out relationships.

A computer, on the other hand, has separate memory and processing.  It does its work sequentially for the most part and is run by a clock.  The clock, like a drum majorette in a military band, drives every instruction and piece of data to its next location — musical chairs with enough chairs.  As clock rates increase to drive data faster, power consumption goes up dramatically, and even at rest these machines need a lot of electricity.  More importantly, computers have to be programmed.  They are hard wired and fault prone.  They are good at executing defined algorithms and performing analytics.

With $41 million in funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the scientists at the Almaden lab set out to make a brain in a project called Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics (SyNAPSE).

The rough analogy between a brain and a computer posits roles for cell types — neurons, axons, and synapses — that correspond to machine elements — processors, communications links, and memory.  The matches are not exact, as brain cells’ functions are less distinct from each other than the computer elements.  But the key is that the brain elements all reside near each other, and activity in any given complex is stimulated by activity from adjacent complexes.  That is, thoughts stimulate other thoughts.

Modha and his team set out to map and synthesize a wiring diagram for the brain, no trivial task, as the brain has 22 billion neurons and 220 trillion synapses.  In May 2009, the team managed to simulate a system with 1 billion neurons, roughly the brain of a lower mammal.  Except that it operates at one-thousandth of real time, not enough to perform what Modha called “the four Fs”: food, fight, flight, and mating.

But the structure of this machine is entirely different from today’s commercial computers.  The memory and processing elements are built close together.  It has no clock.  Operations are asynchronous and event driven; that is, they have no predetermined order or schedule.  And instead of being programmed, they learn.  Just like us.

Part of getting the power down to brain-like levels is not storing temporary results (caching, in industry jargon).  Sensing stimulates action, which is sensed and acted upon further.  And so on.

The team recently built a smaller hardware version of the brain simulation, one with just 256  neurons, 262,000 programmable synapses, and 65,000 learning synapses.  The good news is that this machine runs at within an order of magnitude of the power that a real brain consumes.  With its primitive capabilities, this brainlette is capable of spatial navigation, machine vision, pattern recognition, and associative memory and can do evidence-based hypothesis generation.  It has a “mind’s eye” that can see a pattern, for example, a badly written number, and generate a good guess as to what the actual number is.  Already better than our Precambrian ancestors.

Modha pointed out that this type of reasoning is a lot like that of a typical right hemisphere in the brain: intuitive, parallel, synthetic.  Not content with half a brain, Modha envisions adding a typical von Neumann-type computer, which acts more like a reasoning left hemisphere, to the mix, and having the two share information, just like a real brain.

When this brain is ready to go to market, I’m going to send my own on holiday and let Modha’s do my thinking for me.

Oh, and, by the way, in case you were wondering whether the SyNAPSE project has caused Watson to be put out to pasture, nothing could be further from the truth.  Watson is alive and well and moving on to new, more practical applications.

For example, since jeopardy contestants can’t “call a friend,” Watson was constrained to the data that could be loaded directly into the machine (no Internet searches), but in the latest application of Watson technology — medical diagnoses — the Internet is easily added to the corpus within the machine, allowing Watson to search a much wider range of unstructured data before rendering an answer.

Watson had to hit the bell faster than the human contestants, but the doctors seeking advice on a strange set of symptoms can easily wait a half hour or longer.  So, Watson can make more considered choices.  Watson at work is a serious tool.