ICSE

Characterization of smallholder farmers has been conducted in various researches by using machine learning algorithms, participatory and expert-based methods. All approaches used end up with the development of some subgroups known as farm typologies. The main purpose of this paper is to highlight the main approaches used to characterize smallholder farmers, presenting the pros and cons of the approaches. By understanding the nature and key advantages of the reviewed approaches, the paper recommends a hybrid approach towards having predictive farm typologies. Search of relevant research articles published between 2007 and 2018 was done on ScienceDirect and Google Scholar. By using a generated search query, 20 research articles related to characterization of smallholder farmers were retained. Cluster-based algorithms appeared to be the mostly used in characterizing smallholder farmers. However, being highly unpredictable and inconsistent, use of clustering methods calls in for a discu...

Background: A number of health facilities in the United Republic of Tanzania use different Hospital Management Information Systems (HoMISs) for capturing and managing clinical and administrative information for report generation. Despite the potentials of the data in the systems for use in epidemic diseases surveillance, timely extraction of the data for integrated data mining and analysis to produce more informative reports is still a challenge. This paper identifies the candidate data attributes for epidemic diseases surveillance to be extracted and analyzed from the Government of Tanzania Hospital Management Information System (GoT-HoMIS). It also examines the current reporting setup for epidemic diseases surveillance in Tanzania from the health facilities to the district, regional, and national levels. Methods: The study was conducted at the Ministry of Health, Community Development, Gender, Elderly, and Children (MoHCDGEC), Tumbi Designated Regional Referral Hospital (TDRRH), M...

E-Government Maturity Models (eGMMs) are widely used as a tool for guiding the development and implementation of e-Government services. The government of Tanzania recognizes that e-Government services can accelerate the achievement of a sustainable social and economic development in the country. However, despite the good benefits provided by e-Government services, information security and privacy are the most significant obstacles for e-Government services adoption. Unfortunately, very few designs of e-GMMs have considered security as a specific issue. However, even these few security responsive models consider security mostly at the transaction stage. Responding to this security weakness of eGMMs, in our earlier work a holistic secure e-Government maturity model that includes security layers consisting of technical and non-technical security related aspects in each of its four maturity stages was developed, but the model was not yet tested and evaluated. This paper reports on the t...

Globally, of all cancer diseases, breast cancer is the number one killer in women. The diseases commonly occur in high income countries, but recently there is rapid increase of breast cancer in middle and low income countries in Asia, Latin America and Africa. This is due to increase in life expectancy, increased urbanization and adoption of western cultures. Although, some strategies to reduce the risks of occurrence of breast cancer are being implemented in developed countries, the case in middle and low income countries is that majority of breast cancer patients are affected by the disease due to diagnosis at late stages of the disease. Therefore, early detection of breast cancer is needed to overcome this problem. In this paper, a holistic diagnosis tool for early detection of breast cancer is proposed. The tool is software based utilizing a novel prediction model for breast cancer survivability developed by using available data mining (DM) technologies. Specifically, five popul...

E-Government Maturity Models (eGMMs) are widely used in the implementation and development of e-Government services. These models outline various stages for e-Government development. Information security and privacy are considered as the most significant challenges in implementing e-Government services, but unfortunately very few designs of eGMMs have considered security as a specific issue. However, even these few security responsive models consider security mostly at the transaction stage, and as such it is insecure to depend on security mechanisms provided at transaction stage only. This paper develops a four-stage holistic secured eGMM for protecting e-Government services with Tanzania used as a case study. The proposed secured e-Government maturity model has been designed by including the security layers which consist of technical and non-technical security related aspects in each of its four maturity stages. The model design process is based on the ISO/ IEC 27002 security stan...

Livestock sector has been constrained by various factors including extension services and lack of access to on-farm and off-farm information for decision making by policy makers and other stakeholders. This paper reports how application of ICT was used to solve problems by using the web and mobile technologies which are fast-growing within the livestock value chain in Sub-Saharan Africa. The developed platform provides records keeping features that allow farmers to use their mobile phones to store data into online databases. Posted data are analyzed and easily be used for decision making and project long term benefits to farmers and other decision makers. Moreover, keeping this information for a long time can help identifying risks and predicting the future. Furthermore, this technology is going to assist farmers to access extension services online through mobile phones. By linking farmers with extension workers, the platform has the potential to increase effectiveness in extension ...

This research article published by TRANSACTIONS ON MACHINE LEARNING AND ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, Vol 8, No. 5Research on agricultural and rural development (ARD) systems in general, and farming as a business (FAAB) in particular, face the limitation of availability of credible and reliable benchmarking data, both for on-farm support for farm management decision making and off-farm support for research, investment and policy decision making. One of the main part of this limitation is to obtain reliable benchmarking data for decision making, both for current conditions and under scenarios of changed bio-physical and socioeconomic conditions. This paper presents a framework for mobile application development to support farming as a business via benchmarking (FAABB). This is done with a model that distinguishes between internal and external sources of data and between codified and computed information. Also, the paper demonstrates and emphasizes how integration should be considered as a requirement when developing a typical mobile application for ARD. The paper ends with a description of an ongoing research project at Nelson Mandela African Institution of Technology (NM-AIST) in Tanzania that aims to develop a new framework to facilitate development of mobile applications for FAABB

Due to changes in the livestock sector and the rise of consumer demand for comprehensive and integrated food security and safety, there has been a concern on the use of farm data in enhancing animal traceability and decision-making by farmers and other decision-makers in the livestock sector. To ensure high production through effective decision-making and auditable standards, producers are required to have better traceability and record systems. Therefore, this study aimed at (1) reviewing the current recording/data management and animal traceability systems used by small-scale farmers in developing countries and (2) analyzing how data management systems should be designed to enhance efficient decision-making and animal traceability from farm to fork. This study found that, still, a majority of small-scale farmers do not keep records leading to poor decision-making on the farm and policymaking. We also found that those who keep records do not store their data in electronic format, w...