Experience: Bennett Kankuzi is a Senior Lecturer in Computer Science and the current head of the Department of Computer Science and Information Technology at the Malawi University of Science and Technology (MUST). Prior to joining MUST in October 2019, he worked as a Senior Lecturer in Computer Science at the North-West University in South Africa from 2016. He joined the University of Malawi (Polytechnic) as a staff associate in 2004 and left as a Senior Lecturer in Computing in 2016. Before joining academia, for three years, he was a system and network engineer, managing a network of 150+ end-user computers and RedHat mail and web servers. From 2009 – 2011, he also worked as a part-time consulting IT specialist for the Malawi Knowledge Network for Research and Development (MAKNET) which was hosted by the Malawi Polytechnic, but funded by the Africa Capacity Building Foundation, a specialized agency of the African Union.
 
Qualifications: Bennett Kankuzi holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Eastern Finland in Finland, an MSc in Computer Science from the University of Botswana and a BSc with Distinction in Computer Science and Mathematics from the University of Malawi. In his PhD thesis, he proposed and validated a new spreadsheet computation paradigm based on the theory of mental models, to address challenges of the current spreadsheet paradigm. In his MSc thesis, he adopted the Markov Clustering (MCL) algorithm, a fast and scalable unsupervised clustering algorithm, to automatically identify semantic units in spreadsheet programs based on the underlying usually very large data flow graphs. The MCL algorithm is also very popular in clustering bioinformatics data, specifically to cluster protein sequences and to cluster genes from co-expression data.

Research: Bennett Kankuzi has also presented in peer-reviewed conferences in computer science in different countries including South Africa, Netherlands, Australia, USA and Finland. He has also attended various research career development short courses including wireless networking at the Abdus Salaam International Center for Theoretical Physics in Italy and Scientific Data Carpentry workshops in Cape Town, South Africa. He has supervised Honours and postgraduate students in Computer Science from different countries including South Africa, Zimbabwe and Nigeria. His current research interests are gravitating towards software defined networking, Big data, artificial intelligence and computer security. He also currently holds a USD75,000 research grant for an AI based platform for improving quality of patient care in hospitals, granted through Peabody Health Philanthropies of California, USA. He also holds a Euro 40,000 grant from Akademiya2063, funded by GIZ, for predicting crop production estimates in Malawi using Artificial Intelligence. His Google Scholar handle is at https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=decczoYAAAAJ&hl=en

Consultancy: Outside academia, he has been doing  IT consulting since 2004 in different  areas including enterprise software development, software architecture, cloud and traditional web hosting, network infrastructure and e-learning.  Recently, he has been engaged in training engineers in long distance fibre optic networking for different companies including TNM, one of the leading telecom providers in Malawi and also Inq., a Pan-African cloud and digital enterprise provider. He has also been consulted on farmer productivity apps in the Agriculture sector in Malawi including MlimiApp (available on Google Play Store), a farmer USSD platform and a farmer virtual collaboration platform. He also currently holds two IT consultancies in the corporate sector in Malawi: National Bank of Malawi as co-Lead; and Illovo Sugar Malawi as Lead.