Speakers
Arnold Pretorius
Arnold Pretorius is a ML Engineer who’s been working with Saigen for the past 4 years to deliver custom ASR models to their clients. Arnold joined Saigen in 2020 after completing his Masters degree in Computer Engineering with the Multilingual Speech Technologies (MuST) lab at the NWU. The focus of MuST was to investigate and better understand the generalisation capabilities of deep neural networks (DNNs).
Francois Meyer
Francois Meyer is a PhD student at the University of Cape Town, working under Jan Buys in the Computer Science Department and the HPI Research School. Previously he completed his masters in AI at the University of Amsterdam and his undergraduate studies in Computer Science at Stellenbosch University.
Gina Moape
Gina Moape is a Ph.D. candidate in the field of Computational Linguistics, with a research focus on addressing the under-resourced status of African languages, leading to their digital exclusion. The title of her research is Knowledge-Based Word Sense Disambiguation in the Context of Setswana-English Machine Translation. Beyond her academic pursuits, she is actively engaged in diverse projects, including the Sign Language Translation Project, aimed at creating translation tools for South African Sign language, the Common Voice project, which aims to build open-source voice datasets for voice technology developments and the Teaching Pepper project, focused on training robots to communicate in indigenous languages. Through her endeavors, Gina Moape strives to amplify language representation, accessibility, and technological innovation in linguistically marginalized contexts.
Febe de Wet
Febe de Wet is a member of the Conversational AI team at BMW South Africa's IT Hub. She is also an extraordinary associate professor at Stellenbosch University's Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering. Her research interests include statistical pattern recognition, speech resource development and automatic speech recognition. She is especially interested in developing language technology for South Africa's indigenous languages and in educational applications of speech technology.