Rate My Professor Vukosi Marivate

Prof Vukosi Marivate is a Professor of Computer Science and holds the ABSA UP Chair of Data Science at the University of Pretoria. He specialises in developing Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence methods to extract insights from data, with a particular focus on the intersection of ML/AI and Natural Language Processing. His research is dedicated to improving the methods, tools and availability of data for local or low-resource languages. As the leader of the Data Science for Social Impact research group in the Computer Science department, he is interested in using data science to solve social challenges, with projects related to science, energy, public safety, and utilities. Prof Marivate is a co-founder of Lelapa AI, an African startup focused on AI for Africans by Africans. He is a chief investigator on the Masakhane Research Foundation, which aims to develop NLP technologies for African languages, and a co-founder of the Deep Learning Indaba, the leading grassroots Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence conference on the African continent.

Prof Marivate earned a PhD in Computer Science from Rutgers University, an MSc in Electrical Engineering and a BSc in Electrical Engineering from the University of the Witwatersrand. Prior to his current role, he served as a Senior Data Scientist at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research. He is a Senior Member of IEEE and Director of the African Institute for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence at the University of Pretoria. His work includes numerous publications on topics such as multilingual machine translation, sentiment analysis, and language models for African languages.