2022 in Review: Major Accomplishments

The year 2022 was an extremely difficult period as we were transitioning from a two-year-long period marred by COVID-19 restrictions. That being said, we have some success stories.

Research Students

A significant amount of work in the lab is performed by students---both research assistants and postgraduate research students---and as such, we constantly recruit talented students. Correspondingly, we have senior students graduate every year.

  • Kadeyo Kuyela [1] successfully defended his dissertation and graduated in April 2022. In addition, all the 20 final-year undergraduate students [2] managed to graduate.
  • We had one (1) postgraduate MLIS student---Henry Mwanza---join the lab in 2022 [3]

Research Funding, Consultancy, and Collaboration

In order to help fund core activities in the lab, we routinely apply for grants and, additionally, conduct commissioned research.

  • The DataLab Research Group, in collaboration with The University Teaching Hospitals' Adult Hospital, has been awarded a grant by Google Research, as part of their Award for Inclusion Research (AIR) Program [4]. The grant is for the 2023 academic year. We are in fact in the process of recruiting postgraduate students using this funding.
  • The lab, in collaboration with other consultants, embarked on a project to implement a Research Data Management framework for The Jesuit Centre for Theological Reflection [5]. The planned completion date for the project is February 2023.

Academic Events

As a lab, we managed to participate in the following academic events [6] (details on the DataLab Website): * Zambia Digital Health Conference 2022, Lusaka, Zambia * 25th International Symposium on Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETD 2022), Novi Sad, Serbia * 2nd BETTEReHEALTH Regional Workshop, Salima, Malawi * IST-Africa Conference 2022, Virtual

Scholarly Publications 

The lab managed to publish the following scholarly publications [7]:

  • [Conference Paper] Kasonde, C., Chisale, A., and Phiri, L. 2022, September. Empirical Evaluation of ETD-ms Compliance in Institutional Repositories. 25th International Symposium on Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETD 2022), Novi Sad, Serbia. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7084848:
  • [Conference Paper] Zulu, E.O. and Phiri, L., 2022, May. Enterprise Medical Imaging in the Global South: Challenges and Opportunities. In 2022 IST-Africa Conference (IST-Africa) (pp. 1-9). IEEE.
  • [Conference Paper] Zulu, E.O. and Phiri, L., Enterprise Medical Imaging for Improved Radiological Workflows: Towards an Interoperable and Standards-Based Medical Imaging Platform in Public Health Facilities in Zambia.
  • [Conference Paper] Chanda, M., Chirwa, E., Kamanga, M., Kayula, M. and Phiri, L., 2022, April. Factors Influencing Co-creation of Open Education Resources using Learning Object Repositories. In CSEDU (1) (pp. 405-412).
  • [Journal Article] Chewe, P., Chitumbo, E.M.M., Chulu, F., Makondo, F.N., Kanyengo, C.W., Monde, M.W., Kabilwa, S., Moyo, F.N., Phiri, L., Sitali, W. and Akakandelwa, A., 2022. The 2018 Research Productivity of the University of Zambia. Zambia Journal of Library & Information Science (ZAJLIS), ISSN: 2708-2695, 6(1), pp.37-45.

Bibliography

[1] http://datalab.unza.zm/people/kadeyokuyela
[2] http://datalab.unza.zm/articles/new-final-year-undergraduate-students-joining-datalab-lab-2021
[3] http://datalab.unza.zm/people/henrymwanza
[4] https://research.google/outreach/air-program/recipients/?category=2022
[5] https://www.jctr.org.zm [6] http://datalab.unza.zm/services
[7] http://datalab.unza.zm/publications