Kizito Nkurikiyeyezu is a researcher at the University of Rwanda’s Centre of Excellence in Biomedical Engineering and e-Health and a lecturer at the Africa Center of Excellence in Internet of Things.He is currently an associate professor at the College of Science and Technology, University of Rwanda, Rwanda.

He completed his Ph.D. (Engineering, Intelligence & information) in 2020 at Aoyama Gakuin University, Tokyo, Japan with a thesis on affect-aware intelligent thermal comfort. He received a master’s degree in Electrical & Computer Engineering and a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from Oklahoma Christian University, OK, the USA in 2012 and 2011 respectively.

His research interests lie in the area of Humanized Computing, Intelligent Environments, Affective Computing, Physiological Computing, and Healthcare informatics.

In particular, his Ph.D. thesis proposed a novel thermal comfort provision system that estimates people’s thermal comfort level from the variation in their physiological signals (e.g., heart rate variability) due to their bodies’ response to the surrounding environment and uses appropriate constrained optimization algorithms to provide an efficient and personalized thermal comfort at the lowest energy. This approach not only provides higher quality thermal comfort but also significantly reduces the amount of energy required for thermal comfort provision. Nevertheless, because human affects (e.g., stress and thermal comfort) are expressed differently from one person to another, the proposed approach would only work if person-specific machine learning models were developed for each user of the system. Such limitations would be confining and costly for large-scale deployment. Consequently, I developed an efficient algorithm that mitigates these limitations and I laid the groundwork of an “affect-aware thermal comfort” system complementary to the existing thermal comfort provision methods. An affect-aware system would estimate in real-time the affects (e.g., thermal comfort, stress, and emotion) of its users and automatically adjust itself to satisfy the user’s implicit and explicit needs (in terms of, e.g., thermal comfort, ventilation, well-being, and productivity) sustainably (in terms of e.g., heating, ventilation and cooling efficiency, and lighting).

He was an invited researcher at Aoyama Gakuin University in Japan and an invited scholar at the Université Jean Monnet in France.

He currently holds international research collaboration with researchers in Japan, France, Germany and the United Kingdom.

For additional information see his website at http://qiriro.com/