Prof. William D. Tucker (aka Bill)

Position:Extraordinary Professor
Department:Computer Science
Faculty:Natural Science
Qualifications:BA Sociology and Business Administration majors & Computer Science minor (Trinity University, San Antonio, Texas)
MS Computer Science (Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona)
PhD Computer Science (University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa)
Tel:+27 oh82 494 8884
Email:btucker@uwc.ac.za
  

Biography

Prof. Tucker is a senior member of BANG, a research group that investigates Information and Communication Technology (ICT) solutions for marginalised and poverty-stricken communities; together with those communities. Notable BANG projects include Zenzeleni which was South Africa’s first community-owned and run rural ISP; and SignSupport, an app suite co-designed with and for Deaf communities to empower them to communicate with any type of people in their own language, signed language. We call this work ICT for Development (ICT4D) and we are interested in the social, technical, economic, legal and managerial aspects of such efforts. Prof. Tucker has lectured ICT4D, Operating Systems and Computer Networks at Honours, and HCI (human computer interface), Operating Systems, Computer Networks and Databases at 3rd year; and also gave our 1st year programming (in Java) course for a number of years. He is an Associate Editor for ITID; has won a number of awards at UWC (long service; teaching, research, innovation and community engagement excellence); has graduated 99 postgrads whilst full-time at UWC 1998-2021, including 10 PhDs and 26 MScs by thesis; and has over 130 publications. He sits on the Board of Zenzeleni Networks and continues to work with BANG on ICT4D efforts. Prof. Tucker moved to Stellenbosch University as of June 2021.

Undergraduate
Honours