Kondwani Munthali
Kondwani Godwin Munthali is a Senior Lecturer in Computer Science and Head in the Department of Computer Science, Chancellor College - University of Malawi. He has also previously served as Deputy Head and programme coordinator for the MSc in Informatics. Kondwani holds a PhD in Geo-Environmental Science from University of Tsukuba, Japan; Master of Science in GIS degree from the University of Leeds, England and Bachelor of Science degree majoring in Computer Science and minor Electronics from University of Malawi – Chancellor College.
Kondwani has over ten years’ teaching experience in institutions of higher learning for both undergraduate and postgraduate computer science and geoinformation science students. He is also involved in the supervision of both postgraduate and undergraduate students. He has demonstrated skills in curriculum development and review through involvement in the development of undergraduate programmes for University of Malawi (BSc Computer Science, Information Systems and Computer Network Engineering), Malawi University of Science and Technology (BSc in Geoinformation Science) and postgraduate programmes for University of Malawi (MSc in informatics and Bioinformatics and PhD in Computer Science and Information Systems).
Kondwani has over ten years’ experience in software development (database and system architectural design) through a number of projects where he served as lead software developer, database designer and GIS expert for the Ministry of Agriculture, Irrigation and Water Development through World Bank, Department of Energy Affairs through UNDP, Malawi Institute of Tourism through GIZ, MHealth4Africa, Ministry of Education through FEDOMA, Department of E-Government, ASI and National Aids Commission. His research interests are geospatial computing especially geospatial database designing and modelling. Through this assignment, he is keen to develop geospatial capacity in Malawi using open-source software through his accumulated experience in software like Ubuntu, MySQL, PostgreSQL, PostGIS, QGIS Desktop, QGIS Server, Qt, GeoServer, GeoNode
Kondwani is also vastly experienced in training needs assessment, curriculum development and IT capacity development. He has previously served as a lead facilitator in trainings for the projects: NAMIS, MHealth4Africa, Ministry of Education through FEDOMA, Department of E-Government, ESCOM staff ICT capacity building
Sessions
Leave-one-field-out tests on Malawian smallholder plots compare multiband/index linear regression, XGBoost, CNN-LSTM, a frozen ViT and a ViT-LSTM on Sentinel-2 VT–R1 stacks. ViT-LSTM delivers the best accuracy (RMSE 0.022 t ha⁻¹) but runs 2.5 × slower than CNN-LSTM.