SA Forum for Artificial Intelligence Research
FAIR2019
3 - 6 December 2019, Cape Town
Adnan Darwiche
Adnan Darwiche is a professor and former chairman of the computer science department at UCLA. He directs the Automated Reasoning Group, which focuses on symbolic and probabilistic reasoning and their applications, including machine learning. Professor Darwiche is a AAAI and ACM Fellow. He is a former editor-in-chief of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR) and author of "Modeling and Reasoning with Bayesian Networks,” by Cambridge University Press.
His group’s YouTube Channel can be found at: http://www.youtube.com/c/UCLAAutomatedReasoningGroup
Andries Engelbrecht
Prof Engelbrecht received the Masters and PhD degrees in Computer Science from Stellenbosch University, South Africa, in 1994 and 1999 respectively. He is currently appointed as the Voigt Chair in Data Science in the Department of Industrial Engineering, with a joint appointment as Professor in the Computer Science Division, Stellenbosch University. Prior to his appointment at Stellenbosch University, he has been at the University of Pretoria, Department of Computer Science (1998-2018), where he was appointed as South Africa Research Chair in Artificial Intelligence (2007-2018), the head of the Department of Computer Science (2008-2017), and Director of the Institute for Big Data and Data Science (2017-2018). His research interests include swarm intelligence, evolutionary computation, artificial neural networks, machine learning, data analytics, and optimization. He is the author of two books, "Computational Intelligence: An Introduction" and "Fundamentals of Computational Swarm Intelligence", in addition to a number of articles in journals and the proceedings of international conferences. He is actively involved as a member of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society, and serves as an associate-editor for a number of journals. He holds an NRF A rating.
Industry speakers
Cobus Bernard
Cobus is a Senior Technical Evangelist at AWS empowering developers to know and understand how best to use AWS. His primary interests are in security, containers and devops. Prior to joining AWS, he was a customer for 8 years building in the FinTech, HealthCare and Online Gaming space. During his 14 years of development, he has worked on C#/Java backends, done a bit of Android / iOS app development and some game development, one which is available on Steam. In the last few years he has focussed on spreading DevOps best practices and helping companies adopt them. Founder of the Cape Town DevOps Meetup group and co-organiser of DevOpsDays Cape Town.
Quentin Williams
Dr Williams completed his Phd in 2005 from the University of Oxford in the UK focussing on Pattern recognition and classification in the medical imaging domain. He worked at the CSIR researching technologies for Persons with Disabilities using Artificial Intelligence (AI). He soon became the Manager for Emerging Research and Human Capital Development, a post he held for 5 years, before being appointed as the Strategic Research Manager for the CSIR’s Meraka Institute focusing on Digitilisation and Analytics strategies. During this time he established and led the W3C Southern African Office; the Intelligent Environments for Independent Living research group; and the Data Science for Impact and Decision Enablement programme and was the technical lead for the Cabinet approved ICT RDI Roadmap. He joined Deloitte in February 2019 looking at Analytics and AI-driven business.