Thesis topic: Application of Long Short-Term Memory artificial neural networks to forecast water supply and demand in the Lake Chad Basin.
With the drive to develop two frameworks for water supply and estimate agricultural water demand in the Lake Chad Basin, Dr. Noé Carème FOUOTSA MANFOUO, AIMS-Cameroon alumnus of the 2014-2015 batch, embacked on an Operations Research journey to provide a methodology to determine and forecast total water supply and water demand in the context of scarce data for water resources management.
His study was successfully carried out under the co-supervision of Dr. Linke Potgieter and Prof Johanna Nel at the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa, earning him a PhD in Operations Research, specifically in the field of Data Science for Social Good.
During his defense on June 26th 2020, Noé explained that the implementation of effective water resources management in developing countries in general and in the Lake Chad Basin in particular, is hindered by the absence of reliable information on both the net water supply, as well as on the agricultural water demand.
In his work, he investigated four population dynamics models including the Malthusian growth model; the logistic growth models with both constant and dynamic rates; as well as the logistic growth model with dynamic rate and species interaction, to estimate the size of land used for both crop and livestock, and to finally predict the total agricultural water demand in the Lake Chad Basin. This investigation of the four population dynamics models on both the crop land-use and livestock population dynamics, the characterization of the competition type between species in the Lake Chad Basin case study, as well as the estimation of water demand at water users’ level is a new contribution to literature.
Dr. Noé Carème FOUOTSA MANFOUO saluted the generous support of the Graduate School of Economics and Management of Stellenbosch University; the National Research Foundation of South Africa; and the Department of Logistics of Stellenbosch University, all of whom were a driving force behind the successful completion of his PhD studies.
“I would also like to express my gratitude to the Center President of AIMS-Cameroon, Prof. Dr. Mama Foupouagnigni, and AIMS-Cameroon, for providing an opportunity for me to have International exposure”, he said.
Dr. Noé Carème Fouotsa has been awarded an opportunity to indulge in a one-year postdoc at Stellenbosch University and has equally joined the prestigious list of AIMS-Cameroon alumni to have defended a PhD.
His research interests include application of remote sensing and machine learning to map land-use dynamics; time series forecasting with Machine Learning tools; and application of Machine learning tools for energy optimization in Data Centres.