Collaboration
of Stakeholders is a Basis for ICT Growth
Dr.
Eng. Mohamed Abdo, head of the Electrical and Computer Engineering
Department, is not new to our column and readers. ICT Focus has
interviewed him as a special guest. We thank him for sparing his
precious time to share us his opinion on the developments of ICT
within the Addis Ababa University Establishment.
ICT Focus: Is the demand for highly skilled ICT
professionals that graduate from institutions of higher learning
such as yours still growing?
Dr. Mohamed Abdo: Yes. In fact, the demand in
the market is so high that we couldn’t even employ our graduates
because the pay they get in the market is much higher than what
we pay them at the university
ICT
Focus: There are comments and opinions from some circles
that one Faculty could have been sufficient for ICT education
within the Addis Ababa University setting for the optimum utilization
of human, financial and material resources. Do you share such
views?
Dr. Mohamed Abdo: Before beginning to answer
the question, I must give you some background information on the
history of ICT education at Addis Ababa University. The then Department
of Electrical Engineering (now Dept. of Electrical & Computer
Eng) of the Faculty of Technology had realized the need for developing
ICT in this country way back in the beginning of 1980’s.
In the early 1980’s, the Department began introducing ICT
related courses such as FORTRAN, PASCAL, Assembly Language Programming,
Computer Architecture and Microprocessors. Even before that, there
were many computer hardware student projects which were done in
the 1970’s and early 1980’s. It is not an exaggeration
if we say that the electrical engineering department is the pioneer
of ICT curriculum in this country. We say this because the first
attempt to generate Amaharic Characters (Fonts) on the digital
computer started in our department as a student project in 1985.
In fact, this shouldn’t be surprising in anyway because
electrical engineering discipline is the pioneer of ICT education
everywhere in the world. It was when we were at this stage of
our ICT education that the university realized the need to establish
a department dedicated to ICT education in the university. This
unit was to be established with the aid obtained from the French
government. The then university administration wasn’t at
first sure to which Faculty/Department to attach this program.
The Faculty of Technology argued and proposed at that time that
it is the Department of Electrical Engineering which is appropriate
and well suited to take full responsibility to run the university’s
ICT education (since it was already doing it). Since this trend
was followed worldwide at that time, this proposal of the Faculty
was not something new or strange. Moreover, we believed and still
believe that computer science is more of an engineering discipline
and it is best given in the ambient of electrical/computer engineering
education. Unfortunately, for reasons that weren’t clear,
the university administration decided to attach the computer science
education to the Mathematics department. In our opinion, this
was a historic mistake. So, the opportunity to have the units
together was missed. Despite this, the Dept. of Electrical Engineering
continued to give and update its ICT education. Since then, the
department has been steadily trying to catch up with the latest
ICT Technologies by upgrading its curriculum from time to time.
The Department designed a computer Engineering curriculum way
back in 1990. Due to lack of sufficient staff and even lack of
attention from the university administration at that time, the
Department had to delay and postpone the launching of this program
from time to time. Eventually, the program took off in 1998. The
name of the Department was also changed to Electrical and Computer
Engineering Dept.. Since then, we have been graduating an average
of 20 computer engineers every year. In Sept. 2002, we also launched
the MSc program in computer engineering.
Having said this, to answer your question, one must first understand
the difference and similarities between different ICT disciplines.
ICT education can be classified broadly into three branches, namely:
Information Science, Computer Science and Computer Engineering.
Most non-ICT people don’t understand their differences and,
therefore, confuse these terms. Information Science basically
deals with information storage, retrieval and processing and it
is more of multidisciplinary in nature. Computer Science deals
basically with the software aspect of ICT. On the other hand,
Computer Engineering deals with both the hardware and software
aspects of ICT. Computer Engineering is very much related to Electrical
Engineering. In fact, it is the natural outgrowth of the electrical
engineering discipline. So, it is difficult to separate these
two disciplines and that is why most universities in the world
have electrical and Computer engineering under one department.
We are also following that trend.
