Khoury professor earns award for broadening participation in computing education

Jonathan Mwaura is very conscious of the disparities in computing education, both within the United States and between the US and the Global South. He earned his undergraduate degree in computer science in Kenya, and ever since he joined Northeastern’s faculty in 2021, he has worked to expand education for computer science students from marginalized backgrounds.  

As an associate professor of computer science at the Roux Institute in Portland, Maine, Mwaura has spearheaded an exchange program with Université Gaston Berger (UGB) in Saint-Louis, Senegal; partnered with Black-owned organization The Third Place to provide STEM networking opportunities for Black Portlanders; and established partnerships with multiple universities in Kenya. Recently, all this outreach culminated in his receiving the 2025 SIGCSE Award for Broadening Participation in Computing Education.  

Although much of Mwaura’s work fits the bill for this honor, the UGB exchange is particularly noteworthy. Using grant money from the US State Department and their embassy in Dakar, Senegal, he developed a unique course, “Artificial Intelligence for Agriculture,” which allowed Khoury and UGB students alike to develop projects related to Senegal’s farming system.  

“Here in the United States, we have a lot of resources in our universities,” Mwaura explained. “A lot of the universities I have been working with in Africa don’t have the same resources. Bringing those students into the United States, having their voices heard, and showcasing their work is an important step towards broadening and extending their reach.”  

Mwaura came up with the idea for an AI agriculture course when he visited Senegal for the first time last year. He marveled at the idea that anything at all could grow in the country’s hot, dry, unforgiving climate, and when he learned that UGB had a demonstration farm for gathering data on crop growth, he saw a chance to integrate computing education with experiential learning.  

“I thought, ‘Why don’t we do a course in machine learning for smart agriculture?’” he recalled. “Students would be encouraged to work with data from UGB to understand how new techniques, for example machine learning and artificial intelligence, could be applied to economically advance the work of the farmers.”  

The program only had enough money to fly five students from UGB to Portland, but Mwaura wanted a larger reach. He asked UGB to choose 10 students for the course, five of whom would learn remotely from Saint-Louis. For the second half of the course, the in-person students traveled to Senegal to conduct research for their final projects, meeting with farmers and tailoring their work to local circumstances.  

After the course, Mwaura was invited to submit an article to the 2024 Pan-African Artificial Intelligence and Smart Systems Conference. Realizing that some of his students had never had the opportunity to publish an academic article, he asked them if they would be interested in extending the projects they began during his course. In December, Mwaura and the five students who had been unable to visit the US traveled to the conference, which was held at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa.  

Mwaura’s students published and presented four papers at the conference, all of which used AI to tackle Senegal’s agricultural problems. One group took data from the US Department of Agriculture on predicted agricultural yields for Senegal, combined it with national environmental and climate data, and created a predictive model for agricultural yield that outperformed the USDA model. If implemented into national farming and decision-making processes, this model could become a powerful tool for combating food insecurity and improving agricultural policy.  

Other groups created machine learning models for classifying soil drainage capacity, which would help farmers with crop selection and soil conservation; for assessing crop damage using photos taken by farmers, which would speed up the crop insurance claims process; and for identifying sub-Saharan maize leaf diseases, which would enhance the accuracy of agricultural disease control. 

Mwaura was extremely proud of the work he helped his students produce, and he’s currently trying to establish an African center for computing excellence at Northeastern. 

“This center would help me to continue creating these partnerships,” he said. “And it would help me to invite these folks from Africa to come here during a summer course to enable them to excel in computer science.”  

Mwaura stressed that the value of international collaborations with African universities goes far beyond providing learning opportunities for students in an underserved region. Exchange programs like his “AI for Agriculture” course also bring diverse perspectives to the table, allowing for unique and creative projects like the ones his students worked on. 

“This work has tried to bring voices from Africa that people will not otherwise hear from and create partnerships with them,” he said. “By broadening participation and inclusion in the computer science ecosystem, we can tackle global challenges and expand the university’s research impact.”