Events page

By Mr. Aemiro Bizuneh, Senior Big Data Engineer

Aemro is Lead Data Engineer at Quby Amsterdam in The Netherlands. Quby a leading company offering data driven smart-home and home-security technologies, known for creating the in-home IoT hub and smart thermostat Toon. Aemro has vast experience in designing and implementing robust data driven micro services, data pipelines, and data lakes in the cloud. Our former colleague, Aemro has served Bahir Dar University as lecturer, researcher, and director for the School of Computing and Electrical Engineering.

Aemro will share his experience on solid big data management strategies which enable fast-growing pools of IoT data on AWS Cloud. He will tell how we stream energy, thermostat and home security IoT data to our cloud with increments of multiple terabytes per day. Aemro will share his experience on building data science products from concept to production, handling machine learning pipelines, and big data management at the petabyte scale.

At the end there will be a chance to for questions and discussions on the newly emerging and popular Buzz words based on Aemro’s experience

• Software Develoment Methodlogies:  #Agile, #Scrum, #Kanban
• Software Architecture: #Micro Services #SOA, #REST, #JWT
• Cloud Services:   #Lamda, #AWS, #S3, #API gateway, #DevOps, #serverless, #lammda, #keyValueDB, #DocumentDB, #Azure, #Google-Cloud, #CloudFormation, #IAM , #Route53
• Collaboration Tools:  #git, #Jira, #Confluence, #slack
• Programming  Stacks: #java, #python, #docker, SpringBoot, #Containerization 
• Data Engineering : #Realtime-Streaming , #IoT, #Kinesis, #kafka , #Azure-BlobStorage,#BigTable 

P.S. This session is recommended for Computing and Electrical Engineering academic staff and MSc. Students.

The Bahir Dar Digital Infrastructure Initiative Opportunity

With 110 million people Ethiopia is the second most populous country in Africa. However, with an GDP Annual Growth Rate of over 10% it has one of the fastest growing non-oil economies in the world. Further, over the past year Ethiopia has seen very significant political and economic reforms: since he came to power in April 2018, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has released political prisoners, negotiated peace with Eritrea and is making aspects of state-owned enterprises available for private investment. The telecoms and media sectors are opening up, generating a short window of unprecedented opportunity to design and roll out digital infrastructure and allied services differently. For instance, in such circumstances:

• Could the proverbial digital divide be more equitable and less divisive if digital infrastructures were designed by a coalition between business, government, academia and civil society?
• Does a mid-size city in present day Ethiopia offer a relative ‘green field’, fertile site to explore the opportunity to ‘leapfrog’ older communications technologies and make the internet as accessible to all the city’s residents as its roads?
• What are the risks and dangers associated with such an initiative, and how can these be mitigated?

Participation in the Bahir Dar Digital Infrastructure Initiative (BDDII) workshop offers the opportunity to explore such questions and to contribute the design of new digital infrastructure for Bahir Dar, the capital of the Amhara Regional State (population 26 million). With a population of 170,000, Bahir Dar is Ethiopia’s fifth largest city and typical of a large number of very fast-growing mid-size towns throughout Africa. The city has been identified by the Ethiopian government as suitable for technological investment. It is also home to Bahir Dar University, which has 40,000 students.

BDDII is one of the activities under the umbrella of a partnership between the Bahir Dar Institute for Technology (BIT), directed by Dr Seifu Tilahun, and the University of Cambridge’s network for the UN SDGs, Cambridge Global Challenges. BIT, its Cambridge partners and BDDII invited participants welcome the opportunity to contribute to designing cutting-edge digital infrastructure that prioritises inclusion and equity and advances the wellbeing and economic development of all the city’s residents.

The workshop will be led by Dr Tesfa Tegene, Director of the University’s ICT4D Centre, and Dr Mengiste Abate, Director of the University’s office of the Bahir Dar City Infrastructure Plan Project, which is working with the municipality to develop a Master Plan for the city. BDDII aims to contribute to this Master Plan through workshops in Cambridge, UK, and Bahir Dar to produce a digital infrastructure plan for the city.

On Tuesday the 12^th of March, 2019, a series of presentations will be given by speakers from the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Kenya, Addis-Ababa and Bahir Dar.

On Wednesday the 13^th of March, 2019, participants will form working groups to draft documents and plans on digital infrastructure for Bahir Dar, and Community Networks for the City.

PRESENTATION ABSTRACT

 Over the past year, an open and comprehensive global consultation of environmental flow scientists, practitioners, and policy specialists was conducted to formulate a new international consensus definition of environmental flows and to articulate the essential role of environmental flows in restoring and protecting aquatic ecosystems and safeguarding key aspects of the world’s cultural and natural heritage.  Environmental flows are highlighted as a central element of water resources management, and as a foundation for achieving the water-related Sustainable Development Goals. This consultation resulted in The 2018 Brisbane Declaration and Global Action Agenda on Environmental Flows (Arthington et al. 2018). The Declaration and associated Global Action Plan take into consideration emerging perspectives in eflows globally, including  i) increasing research focus on and new methodological approaches to cope with uncertainty and non-stationarity in hydro-climatic systems, ecological dynamics, and human responses and interventions, ii) recognition of a wider spectrum of objectives in environmental flow assessment, ranging from flow regimes to restore the natural state and evolution of aquatic systems to flow regimes to meet ecological design criteria or sustain novel ecosystems, and iii) increasing attention to the social and cultural aspects of eflows not only as external factors impacting river ecosystems but also specific objectives for flow recommendations. The Declaration also includes an updated definition of environmental flows;  “Environmental flows describe the quantity, timing, and quality of freshwater flows and levels necessary to sustain aquatic ecosystems which, in turn, support human cultures, economies, sustainable livelihoods, and well-being.” Scientists and engineers are called upon to engage with managers and policy makers in the co-design and development of research to i) quantify flow-ecology relationships and ecosystem services for all aquatic ecosystems that depend on fresh water, including groundwater dependent ecosystems, ii) investigate existing, and propose new, mechanisms for integrating e-flows implementation in water resource management, and iii) develop best-practice models to ensure full and equal participation of all cultures and stakeholders in eflow planning, assessment, implementation, monitoring, and adaptive management.