Events

Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools have been developing for many years, but the release of ChatGPT, a powerful natural language chatbot, in November 2022 has created a global stir. Responses from educators are varied, some excited, some curious, others fearful. At Wits we recognise the need to stay informed about new technologies that could affect us as an institution and be imaginative about how we capitalise on them. This is the first of a series of webinars on AI and how we engage with it productively to enhance teaching, learning and research.

Benjamin Rosman is a Professor in the School of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at the University of the Witwatersrand, where he runs the Robotics, Autonomous Intelligence and Learning (RAIL) Laboratory and is the Director of the National E-Science Postgraduate Teaching and Training Platform (NEPTTP). He received his Ph.D. in Informatics from the University of Edinburgh in the UK in 2014, and previously obtained his M.Sc. in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Edinburgh. He also has a B.Sc. (Hons) in Computer Science and a B.Sc. (Hons) in Applied Mathematics, both from the University of the Witwatersrand.

His research interests focus primarily on reinforcement learning and decision making in autonomous systems, specifically on how learning can be accelerated through abstracting and generalising knowledge gained from solving related problems. He is a founder and organiser of the Deep Learning Indaba machine learning summer school, with a focus on strengthening African machine learning. He was made a 2022 CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholar by the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, was a 2017 recipient of a Google Faculty Research Award in machine learning, and a 2021 recipient of a Google Africa Research Award. In 2020, he was made a Senior Member of the IEEE.