TRACE goes to KICC
STRI Week — Science, Technology, Research & Innovation 4 Society brought twenty-plus Kenyan universities and dozens of research projects under one roof at the Kenyatta International Convention Centre. TRACE made the trip on the back of a Kirinyaga University booth — the first time the system had been shown to anyone outside the department. This is the record of that day: what the stand looked like, who came by, and what we left with.
The lead-up
The lead-up was practical. Two principal authors, a supervisor, and a paper that needed to leave the university. STRI Week — Kenya's Science, Technology, Research and Innovation 4 Society Week — opened up exhibition space at the Kenyatta International Convention Centre, and the Department of Computing offered TRACE a place on the Kirinyaga University stand.
We printed materials, packed the demo, and drove to Nairobi the night before. The question we kept asking, the same one we had been asking for two years, was simple: would anyone outside the lab care?
On the floor
They cared. From the moment the doors opened, visitors stopped at the Kirinyaga University booth and asked about the project. Some understood the EU regulations already and wanted to know how IOTA solves the cost problem. Others — farmers, exporters, the curious — had never heard of a Digital Product Passport and wanted the whole thing explained from scratch. We took both questions seriously.
By midday the demo was running on loop on a laptop in the corner of the stand. By evening, four exporter contacts were in the notebook and a regulator had asked for a copy of the paper.
What it meant, what comes next
We left KICC with more than we arrived with. The clearest thing was a list of names — exporters who wanted a follow-up, a regulator who wanted the technical paper, two journalists who wanted to write about the work. The slower thing was a shift in how we talk about the project.
Before the event, TRACE was a research proposal. After the event, it was a thing people had seen, asked about, and argued with. That changes what comes next: a field pilot with a tea cooperative, conversations with KEPHIS and the Coffee Directorate, and the start of a longer discussion about who actually owns the records when a farmer puts their data on a chain.
The research behind the day
TRACE is a final-year research project from the Department of Computing, Kirinyaga University. The full paper covers the architecture, the IOTA integrity layer, the multi-agent decision logic, and the test results. The project home page has a short interactive walkthrough.
Photos · Kirinyaga University, STRI Week 2026 · iPhone, on-site