Themba Masombuka

Work place: Centre for Augmented Intelligence and Data Science (CAIDS), Department of Computer Science, University of South Africa, Florida Campus, Roodepoort, South Africa

E-mail: masomkt@unisa.ac.za

Website:

Research Interests:

Biography

Themba Masombuka is a Senior Researcher at the Centre for Augmented Intelligence and Data Science (CAIDS) at the University of South Africa (UNISA). He holds a PhD in Computer Science from UNISA, an MSc in Computer Science from the University of Pretoria, and a BSc in Software Engineering from UNISA. With over 15 years of academic experience, he has served as Chair of the Department of Computer Science and Acting Director of the School of Computing. His research focuses on applying machine learning, DevOps, and educational technologies to develop intelligent, sustainable systems for digital transformation in higher education. He has supervised numerous honours, master‟s, and doctoral students on topics including predictive analytics in education, learning analytics frameworks, MLOps, responsible AI, and cloud-based learning systems. Dr. Masombuka‟s work aims to advance equitable, AI-driven solutions that bridge innovation and societal impact.

Author Articles
Citizens as Sensors: Fusing Multilingual Feedback with System Logs for Predictive Deployment Monitoring in Resource-Constrained Public Services

By Johnson Nuviadenu Themba Masombuka Ernest Mnkandla Malusi Sibiya

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5815/ijmecs.2026.05.11, Pub. Date: 8 Oct. 2026

Public digital services in developing economies have become central to citizens’ access to government functions, yet frequent deployment failures undermine trust and service delivery. This study investigated whether multilingual citizen feedback could serve as an early-warning signal for deployment failures in resource-constrained public sector digital services. A bimodal failure detection framework was developed combining English system logs with citizen feedback in Akan, Ewe and Ga languages from a national citizen service portal in Ghana handling over 50,000 monthly users. Rather than building language-specific classifiers requiring annotated training data, the study leveraged instruction-tuned large language models as general-purpose interpreters using few-shot prompting. Analysis of 18 months of deployment logs and 1,217 citizen feedback messages revealed that a fusion model combining XGBoost for log analysis and prompt-engineered Qwen 2.5-3B-Instruct for feedback interpretation achieved 82 per cent recall and 76 per cent precision, representing a 21 percentage point improvement over log-only approaches. Citizen feedback preceded technical alerts in 32 per cent of failure cases, with an average detection advantage of 2.3 hours, which increased to 3.8 hours during peak usage periods. This study provides empirical evidence that instruction-tuned large language models can extract operationally useful failure signals from low-resource languages and improve post-deployment early warning when fused with conventional log-based monitoring. The findings imply that public institutions in multilingual developing contexts can adopt LLM-based monitoring without requiring annotated datasets or language-specific processing pipelines.

[...] Read more.
Other Articles