Maurice Tchuenté (born 1951) is a Cameroonian computer scientist and university administrator. He is an emeritus professor of computer science at the University of Yaoundé I, and works on parallel algorithms, the theory of cellular automata, and social network mining. He served as Cameroon's Minister of Higher Education from 2002 to 2004 and has been rector or pro-chancellor of four Cameroonian universities. As of May 2024, he was chairman of the board of directors of the University of Yaoundé II in Soa. Tchuenté was elected a Fellow of TWAS, The World Academy of Sciences, in 1999, and a Fellow of the African Academy of Sciences in 2013. In 2008 he received the TWAS C.N.R. Rao Prize for Scientific Research, and he is a Knight of the French Legion of Honour.
Early life and education Tchuenté was born in 1951 in Njissamtouen, near Foumban in the West Region of Cameroon. He completed a doctoral thesis on computational methods for cooperative systems at the University of Grenoble in 1982. He is married and has four children.
Research Tchuenté's early work concerned the dynamics of threshold and neuronal automata networks and the design of systolic array algorithms. With Eric Goles he published results on the periodic behaviour of automata networks in Discrete Applied Mathematics in 1984, and in 1985 he co-edited the volume Dynamical Systems and Cellular Automata with Jacques Demongeot and Goles for Academic Press. That volume, which collected papers from a meeting of the Société mathématique de France, included contributions from Stephen Wolfram and Norman Packard and is widely cited in the cellular automata literature. His subsequent work with Basile Louka on systolic algorithms for triangular matrix inversion and dynamic programming appeared in Parallel Computing and Information Processing Letters. In 1991 Manchester University Press published his monograph Parallel Computation on Regular Arrays in its Algorithms and Architectures for Advanced Scientific Computing series. The book is listed among the standard reference works on parallel computing in subsequent textbook literature. His later research turned to graph and social network analysis, including community detection in social networks and the use of complex-network structure to improve cache locality in graph algorithms. He has published more than 100 indexed papers. Tchuenté contributed to the creation of two international laboratories linking French and African universities, LIRIMA and UMMISCO, and chairs the LIRIMA scientific board.
Career The University of Yaoundé II was created by Presidential Decree No. 93/026 of 19 January 1993 and reorganized by Decree No. 93/037 of 29 January 1993. Tchuenté was appointed vice-rector of the university, a position he held from 1993 to 1996. He subsequently served as rector of several public universities in Cameroon: the University of Dschang from 1996 to 1998, the University of Ngaoundéré from 1998 to 2000, and the University of Douala from 2000 to 2002. He was rector of Dschang at the time of his election to TWAS. In 2002, he was appointed Minister of Higher Education, succeeding Jean-Marie Atangana Mebara. He held the post until 2004. On 24 January 2006, President Paul Biya appointed Tchuenté chairman of the board of directors of the National Agency for Information and Communication Technologies (ANTIC) by Decree No. 2006/025. He held the position until July 2009. He then served as pro-chancellor of the University of Buea from 2009 to 2017. In June 2017, he was appointed chairman of the board of directors of the University of Yaoundé II. He was a member of the High Level Panel appointed by the African Union Commission to establish the Pan African University, and served as its acting rector. He has also held positions as an invited professor or research fellow at the CNRS, the École normale supérieure de Lyon, and the universities of Orsay, Rennes 1 and Metz in France. Tchuenté has been a member of several international boards and scientific councils, including the scientific council of the Institut de recherche pour le développement in France, the board of directors of the Pan-African University Council, the board of directors of the UNU/IIST in Macau, and the scientific council of the Agence universitaire de la Francophonie.
Honours and awards Tchuenté was elected a Fellow of TWAS, The World Academy of Sciences, in 1999, in the academy's engineering section. In 2008 he received the TWAS C.N.R. Rao Prize for Scientific Research, presented at the academy's 25th anniversary meeting in Mexico City; the prize honours TWAS Fellows from least developed countries who have made significant contributions to global science. He was elected a Fellow of the African Academy of Sciences in 2013, and is a Fellow of the Cameroon Academy of Sciences. Other honours include:
Boutros Boutros-Ghali Award, United Nations University, 1995 Knight of the Legion of Honour, France, October 2000 Knight of the National Order of Valour, Cameroon, March 2000 Commander of the International Order of Academic Palms of the African and Malagasy Council for Higher Education (CAMES), April 2002 Winner of the 100 Innovations for Development competition, Agence Française de Développement, 2014
Selected works Demongeot, Jacques; Goles, Eric; Tchuenté, Maurice, eds. (1985). Dynamical Systems and Cellular Automata. London: Academic Press. p. 399. ISBN 978-0-12-209060-8. OCLC 12341620. Goles, Eric; Tchuenté, Maurice (1984). "Iterative behaviour of generalized majority functions". Discrete Applied Mathematics. 8 (3): 319–322. doi:10.1016/0166-218X(84)90130-2. Tchuenté, Maurice (1988). "Cycles generated by sequential iterations". Discrete Applied Mathematics. 20 (2): 165–172. doi:10.1016/0166-218X(88)90062-8. Tchuenté, Maurice (1991). Parallel Computation on Regular Arrays. Manchester University Press. ISBN 978-0-7190-2708-6. Iloga, Sylvain; Romain, Olivier; Tchuenté, Maurice (2018). "A sequential pattern mining approach to design taxonomies for hierarchical music genre recognition". Pattern Analysis and Applications. 21 (2): 363–380. doi:10.1007/s10044-017-0656-1. Tchuenté, Maurice; Kouokam, Etienne; Auger, Pierre (2011). Effet de la spatialisation sur la dynamique de modèles compartimentaux: Application en Épidémiologie aux modèles de type SI, SIR et SIRS [Effect of spatialization on the dynamics of compartmental models: application in epidemiology to SI, SIR and SIRS models] (in French). France: Univ Européenne. p. 136. ISBN 978-6131583964.
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