The Department of Information and Communication Technology of Mzuzu University celebrates the contribution of Dr. Michael Zimba, Senior Lecturer in the Department, and founding Dean of the Faculty of Science, Technology and Innovation of the University (2018-2021). Dr Zimba is also an African Union Development Agency – New Partnership for Africa’s Development (AUDA-NEPAD) Contributing Expert on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Intelligent Systems in Africa. AUDA-NEPAD is an arm of African Union High Level Panel on Emerging Technologies, (APET).   

Alongside other renowned experts, Dr Zimba co-authored the African Union Technical Report (book) on Artificial Intelligence titled “AI for African: Harnessing Artificial Intelligence for Africa’s socio-economic development” which defines the AI agenda for Africa.  He also reviewed the book on 4IR titled “The Disruptive Fourth Industrial Revolution: Technology, Society and Beyond” published by Springer (2020).

The work of Dr Zimba has been developed into patents ( e.g. Patent CN102184537B: Image region tamper detection method based on wavelet transform
and principal component analysis, China, 2013). Furthermore Dr Zimba enjoys high impact citation rate. Among several technical and scientific papers and theses from all continents of the world that cite Dr Zimba’s work are the following books, all published by Springer: Advances in Electrical and Computer Technologies (2021); Proceedings of International Conference on Advanced Computing Applications (2021); Intelligent Systems Technologies and Applications (2020); Recent trends in Communication, Computing and Electronics (2018); Advances in Electronics, Communication and Computing (2016); Cloud Computing and Security (2016); Advances in Computer Science, Engineering and Applications (2012); Applied Computer Vision and Image Processing (2020), Evolving BCI Therapy, Engaging Brain State Dynamics (2018); and Handbook of Multimedia Information Security, Techniques and Applications (2019).

A Doctor of Engineering [~PhD] in Computer Science and Technology, a distinction MSc in Information Theory, Coding and Cryptography (Information security), and a distinction BSc in Electrical (and Electronics) Engineering with an active profile of projects, publications, awards and recognitions.

Dr. Michael Zimba’s Consultancy, Research and Teaching interests include:  (Big) Data Science/Analytics, DS; Artificial Intelligence, AI,  (and its nested subfields of Machine Learning, ML, and Deep learning, DL,); DS/AI/ML/DL application in various sectors such as 5G/B5G Mobile and Wireless Communication Networks, Agriculture, Energy, Education and Health; Intelligent and Smart Systems; Emerging (e.g. Blockchain, Drone) Technologies, their Impact and Enabling Policies and strategies; Digital Multimedia Signal Processing, Analysis and Forensics; System Automation, Modeling and Simulation; Watermarking, Steganography and Cryptology.