Keynote Speakers:
Honourable Michael Onyango’s works have always been and continue to be about empowering Africa’s Forgotten Bottom Millions, Kenya’s most trusted and largest network of WhatsApp Groups. Honourable Onyango is a Thought leader/Speaker – Future of Work and Emerging Technologies and an advisory board member for ALU Africa Block Chain Institute. He leads and works around initiatives for economic empowerment, serving amongst interdisciplinary sectors within governments, Non-Governmental Organisations and the private sector in Africa and globally. He is also a member of the Distributed Ledgers and Artificial Intelligence Taskforce in the Ministry of ICT (Kenya). Previously he was the pioneer minister responsible for the docket of Communication, Information and Technology in the County Government of Kisumu. In addition, Honourable Onyango worked at AfricaCDC as a Regional Coordinator for Internal Communications.
He is also a Global Fellow for Social Innovation (Rockefeller Foundation) Skoll Foundation Fellow. He also served within the wider creative industries sector and immensely contributed to developing The Road Map for Kenya’s creative industries sector in collaboration with IBM, thus positioning the sector as a catalyst to Kenya’s economic growth, outlining how to double Kenya’s current creative industries contribution to GDP.
His formal academic background is in the Sciences (BSc Andrews Michigan), while his work history has primarily been within Communications, IT and public policy since 1994.
Prof Bruce Watson is the chair of Computational Thinking at the University of Stellenbosch.
His work includes deep technical knowledge, CXO-level operations, and extensive global project management, all aimed at correct on-time delivery. The technical aspects of his work in industry, government, and academia include cyber warfare/defence/intelligence, high-performance software and hardware (network security, information retrieval, remote sensing and silicon chip design), and algorithm innovation/correctness/ethics.
His technical expertise in algorithmics and parallelism has been key to bringing interesting new products to market with realistic time frames and budgets.
Specialities: Strong algorithmicist, with a specialization in security/secure-coding, parallelism, high-performance computing, programming languages, compilers and formal methods. Strong programmer (and compiler writer), specialized in (ISO) C++, C, amongst others.