Events
Daimarilab Presents Three Papers at the 10th National Conference on Communications (NCC 2026)
Date: 24–25 September, 2026
Location: Makerere University, Kampala, Uganda
DAIMARILAB was represented at the 10th National Conference on Communications (NCC 2026) by founder Dr. Abubakhari Sserwadda, together with members Joseph Walusimbi and Patricia Ankunda. Convened by the Uganda Communications Commission (UCC) under its "Connected Uganda 2030" agenda, in partnership with the Ministry of ICT and National Guidance and Makerere University, the conference brought together researchers, ICT professionals, academics, industry players and government officials under the theme "Accelerating Market-Driven Innovation for Uganda's Development" to share research findings and explore practical solutions to challenges facing Uganda's communications sector.
Papers presented:
A Data-Driven AI System for Prediction of Students' Success in Biomedical Sciences Integratable into Academic MIS for Tertiary Institutions in Uganda
Patricia Ankunda, Abubakhari Sserwadda, Clement Munguiko, Ali Najib, Desire Kawala, Aisha Babirye and Excellence Favor
Aletheia: An Offline-First Clinical Decision Support System for Low-Resource Healthcare Settings in Sub-Saharan Africa
Joseph Walusimbi, Ann Move Oguti, Abubakhari Sserwadda, Precious Boss Kasasira, Charles Brian Okoboi and Bikuwa Denis
EIMS: An Offline-First, Multi-Channel Electronic Immunization Management System (EIMS) for Proactive Vaccination Adherence in Low-Resource Settings
Shimon Nomwesigwa, Joseph Walusimbi and Abubakhari Sserwadda
Daimarilab Wins Best Oral Presentation and AI/ML Innovation Award at IUEA International Conference
Date: 6th–10th September, 2026
Location: International University of East Africa (IUEA), Kansanga, Kampala, Uganda
DAIMARILAB was represented at the International Conference on Entrepreneurial Technology and Sustainable Development, hosted by the International University of East Africa (IUEA), under the theme "Entrepreneurial Technology Paradigm Shift for Food Security in Africa: An Imperative of Academic Discourse for Education, Scholars and Researchers." The team presented a research abstract and was also coopted to chair sessions during the conference.
We are glad to report that:
1. We won the Best Oral Presentation award.
2. We won the Overall Innovation Award in the category of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning.
3. We were also awarded Best Session Chair during the conference.
We are grateful to Prof. Ejobi and the entire Soroti University (SUN) community for creating the platform that allowed us to showcase our research and innovation in AI, IoT, robotics, and mechanical and electrical food and agriculture systems and technologies ideal for Africa — including work addressing the Karamoja food challenge.
Paper presented: Towards High-Quality Text-to-Speech for Ugandan Languages
Lynn Tar Janet Gutu, Rashid Kisejjere, Reuben Magala, Abubakhari Sserwadda, Loyce Namataka, Excellence Favor
Uganda has over 40 indigenous languages, yet current text-to-speech (TTS) systems offer minimal support for them, restricting access to voice assistants, accessibility tools, and educational technology. This project develops and evaluates TTS systems for four Ugandan languages — Luganda, Acholi, Ateso, and Runyankole — alongside English, emphasizing both intelligibility and emotional expressiveness. We introduce a novel dataset, VoTexUg TTS, comprising multi-speaker recordings across the five languages, annotated with emotion prompt tags (e.g., "<laugh>", "<giggles>"). To our knowledge, no existing multilingual TTS corpus captures emotional expression in African languages. Using this dataset, we fine-tuned two model architectures: a 3-billion-parameter Orpheus model with low-rank adaptation and two XTTS variants (443 million parameters), one for Luganda alone and one for multilingual synthesis across the Ugandan languages. Evaluation was conducted on 100 utterances per language using word error rate (WER), UTMOS-predicted naturalness, and real-time factor on a T4 GPU. Luganda achieved the strongest performance among the Ugandan languages, with the lowest WER (45.75%) and highest UTMOS score (2.74), approaching the English baseline (48.38% WER; 2.88 UTMOS). Runyankole, Acholi, and Ateso showed markedly weaker results, with WERs ranging from 92.99% to 113.67% and UTMOS scores between 2.16 and 2.31. Luganda's advantage stems from its larger digital footprint and stronger representation in existing language resources, benefiting the base model's linguistic representations, tokenizer coverage, and ASR evaluation accuracy. Notably, the architectures showed complementary strengths: Orpheus 3B more reliably realized prompted paralinguistic events, likely owing to its native support for textual control tags, whereas XTTS produced more natural-sounding speech but followed these prompts less consistently. This suggests that expressive control and perceived naturalness are not yet jointly optimized, so architecture choice should reflect application priorities. This study offers the first comparative TTS benchmark across these four Ugandan languages and English, establishing baseline metrics for future research in African language TTS.
Dataset: huggingface.co/datasets/kukuzaai/TTS-dataset
TTS benchmark: github.com/Kukuza-AI-Lab/Benchmarks
Keywords: Low-Resource Languages, Multilingual TTS, Ugandan Speech, Africa NLP
Daimarilab team Wins at ABQ Cloud Launch 2026
Date: 26 Feb, 2026
Location: EDIC-Deep Tech Centre of Excellence
DAIMARILAB members Joseph Walusimbi together with his team Geresem Ogwapit and Sophie Okolong Kiyai emerged winners as Team SunTech in the Industry 4.0+ Hackathon at the ABQ Cloud Launch — Uganda’s first Sovereign Cloud.
Project: ML-based industrial fruit sorting system (prototype)
Daimarilab team Wins Medal of Excellence 2025
2025
Joseph Walusimbi and Joshua Benjamin Ssentongo, members of DAIMARILAB, were recognized as Second Runners-Up at the Medal of Excellence 2025 (4th Edition) for their innovation project titled Smart Kara: A Card-Based Electricity Access and Subscription System.
Smart Kara enables automatic electricity top-ups without the use of 20-digit SMS tokens. The also system supports remote electricity top-ups from anywhere across the country thus removing the need for physical presence at the electricity location.
The system further allows users to sign out their card and relocate with remaining electricity units. Electricity is linked to the user’s card rather than a fixed location, making access flexible and portable.
DAIMARILAB Members Recognized for Their Publication
Date: 05/June/2025
Members of DAIMARILAB have been recognized for their outstanding contribution to research with the recent publication of their work in a peer-reviewed journal. This achievement highlights the lab's commitment to advancing knowledge in data science, artificial intelligence, and machine learning.
Read the Publication: Click here to view the publication
Presentation by Mr. Ibrahim Mayanja at IEEE Conference SIU 2025 – Istanbul, Türkiye
Date: 2025
DAIMARILAB member Mr. Ibrahim Mayanja delivered a presentation on "Orange Disease Detection and Classification", featuring a multi-class orange fruit dataset and deep learning models. The research was a result of collaboration with fellow researchers from Soroti University, Uganda, and KTO Karatay University, Türkiye.
IEEE Conference Presentation
Date: 2025
Our work accepted for presentation at 33rd IEEE SIU 2025 conference
Details:
Click here for details
Congratulations to our DAIMARILAB Authors
Congratulations to Mr. Kisejjere Rashid and Dr. Abubakhari Sserwadda on their publication.
Details:
Click here for details
AI for Mitigating Climate Change in Africa
DAIMARILAB member, Mr. Rashid Kisejjere presenting in 2025 Society for Advancement of Science in Africa(SASA) CONFERENCE organised by Kabale University
Date:25th to 26th April 2025
Details:
Click here for details
NCHE Exhibition 2025
Location: Mbarara district, Uganda
National Council for Higher Education (NCHE) exhibition in Mbarara district 2025 edition.
Theme: Strategies, Challenges, and Best Practices for Artificial Intelligence Integration in Higher Education in Uganda
Solving Society Problems with AI
Learning and research initiatives at DAIMARILAB focused on addressing societal challenges through artificial intelligence solutions.
AI for Population Growth Prediction
Research project on using AI for proper planning and predicting Uganda's population growth patterns to support policy decisions.
Climate-Smart Technologies Training
Training session at DAIMARILAB focused on supporting and developing climate-smart technologies for sustainable development.
Congratulations Najiib: Kizito Najib presented research that compared multiple regression models for optimising Rainfall Predicton in Uganda at The International Conference on "Impact of disruptive technologies on business: challenges and opportunties in Africa"
March 30, 2025
Location: ISBAT, Uganda
Congratulations Specioza: Chelangat Specioza presented research on coffee leaf disease detection and classification in Uganda at The International Conference on "Impact of disruptive technologies on business: challenges and opportuinties in Africa"
March 30, 2025
Location: ISBAT, Uganda
Dr. Abubakhari Sserwadda Recognized for Scientific Contribution at ISBAT University Conference
Date: 14th–15th November 2024
Dr. Abubakhari Sserwadda was awarded a Certificate of Participation for his valuable contribution to the International Conference on “Impact of Disruptive Technologies on Business World: Challenges and Opportunities in Africa”, at ISBAT University, Kampala, Uganda. He presented during a plenary/scientific session, sharing insights on: "Multivariate Multiple Regression for Optimizing and Leveraging AI for Timely Detection and Clarification" The recognition reflects his continued dedication to advancing knowledge at the intersection of data science, artificial intelligence, and business innovation in Africa.
Congratulations Najiib, Specioza, Racheal and Dr. Abubakhari, Mr Najiib receive the certificate award for the best poster presentation on behalf of the team at the 2nd Busitema University Science & Innovation Symposium
October 15th to 17th, 2024
Location: Busitema University, Uganda
Congs Najiib: DAIMARILAB member Mr. Mayanja Kizito Najiib presented research on AI for climate change at the 2nd Busitema University Science & Innovation Symposium
October 15th to 17th, 2024
Location: Busitema University, Uganda
Congs Racheal: Racheal Anirworth a daimari member participates in the 2nd Busitema University Science & Innovation Symposium
October 15th to 17th, 2024
Location: Busitema University, Uganda
Recognition at International Symposium
Date: 28-30 June, 2017
Location: Northern Cyprus
DAIMARILAB founder Dr. Abubakhari Sserwadda was awarded a certificate of appreciation after his presentation at the 10th International Symposium on Health Informatics and Bioinformatics.
Research Topic: Investigating the effect of different feature selection strategies for classification of gene expression signatures of tumor cells.