I hold a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering, a master’s degree in information science, and completing a PhD from the Institute of Intelligence System, University of Johannesburg. My data scientist engagement started more than a decade ago. Most notable projects involve the Microsoft Local Language Program, 2009 -2011, Mesakhane NLP translation task (2019-2021), Lacuna Funds IgboSynCorp: Dataset for Igbo Natural Language Processing Tasks (2020 – 2022), Data Science Expert: BRICS Future Skills Challenge 2023, and Academic Coordinator for Accenture-UJ Work Readiness Program, 2023. I've also taught courses in human language technology and artificial intelligence (A.I.), supervised student projects, and published in seasoned journals.

Affiliation(s): University of Johannesburg 

Area(s) of Expertise:  Natural Language Processing (Language Technologies), Machine Learning/Artificial Intelligence

Andiswa Bukula has been a Digital Humanities researcher at SADiLaR, with a special focus on isiXhosa for the past 5 years. Her special interest is in the development of under resourced  South African languages to be languages of teaching and learning.  

Affiliation(s): SADiLaR

Area(s) of Expertise:  Linguistics, Natural Language Processing (Language Technologies)

Dr Connie Makgabo is a lecturer at the University of Pretoria. She is a Sepedi Home Language speaker with many years of teaching experience at both school and university levels. Dr. Makgabo is passionate about promoting, developing, and revitalising the status of African Languages while at the same time raising awareness of the importance of their cultural relevance. She believes that teaching a language does not only end in the classroom, it is also teaching one’s culture and identity. Therefore, the three cannot be separated as they are all interdependent on each other. She has been engaged in various reading strategy development engagements in collaboration with DBE and NECT. She is also working in collaboration with colleagues from outside the borders of South Africa, whereby the aim is to evaluate and review the status quo of the teaching of the African language in teacher education programs to align the theoretical basis with an African lens. She believes in transforming African societies from being knowledge consumers to being knowledge producers, and the curriculum should be aligned with the objectives/knowledge producers. Besides successfully promoting several self-directed undergraduates and postgraduate students in their area of studies and research, especially in African Languages, Dr Makgabo has shown a lot of passion and interest in integrating technology into the teaching and learning of African languages, especially Sepedi. Her desire is to equip the pre-service and in-service teachers with skills that will enhance their professional conduct within and outside the university by promoting and encouraging the 21st-century market drives forces.

Affiliation(s): University of Pretoria

Area(s) of Expertise:  Language Education

Mr. Hlaudi Daniel Masethe currently works at Tshwane University of Technology (TUT) in the Department of Computer Science as an academic lecturer and a section head for Data Science. He obtained his MTECH IT in Software Development at TUT, and Post-Graduate Diploma Teacher Education from Haaga-Helia University of Science -Finland. Prior to this, he received his BSc Honors degree at Vista University (Which is now merged/incorporated into University of Pretoria). He is currently pursuing his PHD studies with Tshwane University of Technology. His current research study proposes a Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) computational solution, addressing theoretical and practical issues of the problem, using corpus-based ensemble methods. His research interests’ areas are Data Science, Big Data Analytics, Recommendation systems, Natural Language Processing, and AI in Cybersecurity. His other research interests include resolving lexical ambiguity in Sesotho sa Leboa/Sepedi language caused by words with multiple meanings (homonyms) or polysemous words which cause computational challenges in NLP to identify lexicon of a language. He is currently coordinating a DataScientia project for LiveLanguage Collaboration between TUT and the University of Trento in Italy.

Affiliation(s): Tshwane University of Technology

Area(s) of Expertise:  Natural Language Processing (Language Technologies), Machine Learning/Artificial Intelligence

I am a lecturer at the Department of Computer Science, Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, and currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Data Science for Social Impact Research Group at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. I obtained my PhD from Bayero University, Kano in 2023, having conducted doctoral research on machine translation for low-resource languages. I have led impactful projects, including MasaKhane's submission to WMT22 and managing the Lacuna 2022 grant for "AfriHate," a hate speech dataset for African languages. With roles in organising AfriSenti-SemEval 2023 and SemRel-SemEval 2024, curating datasets like Hausa Visual Genome, Hausa Visual Question Answering, LAFAND-MT and MasaKhaNER 2.0, and leading initiatives like HauWE, I am dedicated to advancing NLP for African languages. My contributions extend to LREC publications and driving language technology's progress within African contexts.

Affiliation(s): University of Pretoria

Area(s) of Expertise: Natural Language Processing (Language Technologies)

Johannes is a lecturer at Nelson Mandela University. His research focuses on text readability, linguistic complexity and creative writing assessment. He is currently completing his PhD studies at North-West University.

Affiliation(s): Nelson Mandela University

Area(s) of Expertise: Linguistics

I am currently an MPhil Business Management student at the University of Pretoria. In addition to my MPhil, I have worked on a project Funded by Google which focused primarily  on NLP with applications  in climate change. The outputs of this project includes a conference paper (in Deep Learning Indaba). My MPhil research focus area primarily explores climate change, climate finance, and agriculture, particularly smallholder agriculture in South Africa. I plan to pursue a PhD which would have components which include NLP to assist smallholder farmers in South Africa.  Aquiring additional and refined knowledge and experience  on NLP to contribute to improving smallholder farmers in South Africa,  and the rest of the world.

Affiliation(s): University of Pretoria

Area(s) of Expertise:  Climate Finance & Low resourced languages

I hold a BA in Language Technologies as well as a Masters in Applied Linguistics from the NWU but have mostly worked as project manager for the African Wordnet resource development team for the past years. My current focus is on leveraging existing resources to improve the quality and accessibility of HLT tools for the South African languages.

Affiliation(s): UNISA, SADILAR

Area(s) of Expertise: Linguistics, Natural Language Processing (Language Technologies), Project management for HLT resource development

I specialize in the syntactic structure of the isiZulu language. My current research studies the phenomenon of conjunct agreement. The first part of my research is to identify the strategies that are available to native speakers of isiZulu sencences with conjoined subjects. The second part is on my hypothesis that the complexity of the conjoined subject may play a crucial role in limiting possible strategies in the preverbal position. In the postverbal position, the complexity of the conjoined nouns does not show any effect in determining the strategies of agreement.

Affiliation(s): UKZN

Area(s) of Expertise: Linguistics

Prof. Mpho Primus is an NRF-rated researcher specialising in computational linguistics. She is the co-director at the Institute for Intelligent Systems, University of Johannesburg. Amongst numerous awards she has received, she is a L’Oréal-UNESCO Women in Science sub-Saharan Regional fellow as well as the Department of Science and Technology (South Africa) Women in Science alumni, and most recently the National Research Foundation (South Africa) Research Excellence Award for Early Career/Emerging Researcher. Prof Primus has worked in numerous projects (multidisciplinary) with project partners across three continents. She currently serves on the IDEMIA Black Women’s Ownership Trust board of trustees as well as on the advisory board for the Pan African Information Communication Technology Association.

Affiliation(s): UJ Institute for Intelligent Systems

Area(s) of Expertise: Linguistics, Natural Language Processing (Language Technologies)

A resourceful patriot passionate about harnessing technology to drive tangible business impact and societal change in Africa

Affiliation(s): University of Pretoria, DSFSI

Area(s) of Expertise:Natural Language Processing (Language Technologies), Machine Learning

Research Scientist and Manager at IBM Research - Africa, South Africa. Leading a team of AI and NLP scientists integrating knowledge and reasoning into Large Language Models (LLMs) for content-grounded conversational systems and model alignment in a business setting.

Affiliation(s): IBM Research - Africa

Area(s) of Expertise: Natural Language Processing (Language Technologies), Machine Learning/Artificial Intelligence

Neo Putini is a Project Coordinator at Language Inc and a Linguistics Masters candidate at the University of KwaZulu Natal. Her research interests include Corpus Linguistics, Digital Humanities, and developing under-resourced South African Languages.

Affiliation(s): University of KwaZulu Natal

Area(s) of Expertise: Linguistics

Nomonde Khalo is a PhD student at the University of Cape Town and a research Scientist intern at IBM with a variety of skills and experience in Machine learning and Natural Language processing. Her research work and areas of interest are in Natural language processing and Clinical Natural Language Processing. She holds a masters and undergraduate degrees in Computer Science from the University of the Witwatersrand. She has worked as a researcher in a consultancy bases and a game development lecturer at Vega Institute. Prior to her research career, she also held Data Analyst roles at Nedbank and Momentum Limited. She is involved in the community engagement program of tutoring STEM subjects and serves on the board of Help-a-Matriculant; an organization that provides career guidance to underprivileged matric learners.

Affiliation(s): University of Cape Town

Area(s) of Expertise: Natural Language Processing (Language Technologies), Machine Learning/Artificial Intelligence

I am a postgraduate  student who is focusing on language learning using multilingual models. My research interests are in NLP, Educational technologies and languages. I am a full-time lecturer in the University of Limpopo, in the department of Computer Science.

Affiliation(s): University of Limpopo

Area(s) of Expertise:  Natural Language Processing (Language Technologies)

Rooweither Mabuya is a Digital Humanities researcher with a focus on isiZulu at the South African Centre for Digital Language Resources (SADiLaR). Her research interests lie in the systematic creation of relevant digital text, speech, and multi-modal resources related to the development of isiZulu and to promote the use of Digital Humanities related methods and tools within the isiZulu research community. Areas of expertise are General Linguistics, Corpus Linguistics, and Digital Humanities. She is an EXCO member of Digital Humanities Association of Southern Africa (DHASA), DH-Africa Network member and a Masakhane member. 

Affiliation(s): SADiLaR

Area(s) of Expertise:  Linguistics

Seani Rananga is a Lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Pretoria, under the Computer Science department. She is a PhD candidate in Computer Science and actively working on research that cuts across machine learning, natural language processing with speciality on misinformation and disinformation detection in large language models.  She is affiliated with the Data science for social impact (DSFI), at the University of Pretoria, led by Prof Vukosi Marivate. Besides studying and research Seani enjoys spending quality time with family and friends and sleeping.

Affiliation(s): University of Pretoria, DSFSI

Area(s) of Expertise:  Natural Language Processing (Language Technologies), Machine Learning/Artificial Intelligence

I am a dedicated AI enthusiast with a strong academic background in Artificial Intelligence (AI). My journey began during my undergraduate studies at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in BSc Data Science, where I developed a deep passion for AI, particularly in the areas of Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing. Following graduation, I pursued an honours degree in BSc Computer Science to further explore the field, integrating AI and NLP concepts into my final project, which I was able to publish a paper on. I am eager to stay at the forefront of AI advancements, and I actively participate in online seminars, bootcamps, and courses. Currently, I am affiliated with CSIR as a researcher and a Developer in NLP, while pursuing my MSc at NWU in the domain of NLP, specifically on Low-resourced languages, focusing on isiZulu.

Affiliation(s): CSIR and NWU

Area(s) of Expertise:  Natural Language Processing (Language Technologies), Machine Learning/Artificial Intelligence

I am a member of the Data Science for Social Impact research group, where we embark on data science projects for the greater good on the one hand and language modelling for African languages on the other hand.  I'm passionate about language modelling for indigenous languages.

Affiliation(s): University of Pretoria

Area(s) of Expertise:  Natural Language Processing (Language Technologies), Machine Learning/Artificial Intelligence

Thapelo Sindane is a Master student in computer science affiliated Data Science for social impact  research group at the University of Pretoria. He has a background in application heuristic algorithms, Artificial intelligence, machine learning and NLP. 

Affiliation(s): University of Pretoria, DSFSI, Deep learning IndabaX,  and Masakhane.

Area(s) of Expertise:  Natural Language Processing(Language Technologies), machine learning/Artificial intelligence

Prof Vukosi Marivate is the ABSA UP Chair of Data Science at the University of Pretoria. Marivate works on developing machine learning/artificial intelligence methods to extract insights from data. A large part of his work over the past few years has been in the intersection of machine learning and natural language processing. Prof Marivate’s work in this area focuses on techniques to improve tools for and availability of data for local languages or low-resource languages. Marivate is a co-founder of Deep Learning Indaba. He currently serves as a co-founder and chief investigator on the Masakhane NLP project (https://www.masakhane.io/) and on the steering committee of the Lacuna Fund (https://lacunafund.org/). Prof Marivate is the PI for the Data Science for Social Impact research group (https://dsfsi.github.io/).

Affiliation(s): University of Pretoria, Masakhane

Area(s) of Expertise:  Natural Language Processing (Language Technologies), Machine Learning/Artificial Intelligence