Professor Benji Rosman
- Wits University
Professor Benji Rosman, Director of the Wits MIND Institute, has come full circle.
Benji Rosman, Professor in the School of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at the University of the Witwatersrand, is not only the Director of the new Wits Machine Intelligence and Neural Discovery (MIND) Institute, but also simultaneously runs the Robotics Autonomous Intelligence and Learning (RAIL) Laboratory while serving as the Director of the National E-Science Postgraduate Teaching and Training Platform, has in effect come full circle.
His journey that began at Wits as an undergraduate studying for BSc (Hons) in both Computer Science and Applied Mathematics has led him, via an M.Sc. in Artificial Intelligence and a Ph.D. in Informatics at Edinburgh University, back to a place he loves, working with students in an exponentially growing field.
When he returned to South Africa, he worked for the CSIR that had partially funded his PhD. “At that time, I was one of the only people in Africa doing reinforcement learning. Now if we have a visitor who is an expert in this field, there will easily be a room full of people who can engage deeply. It is amazing that there are people on this continent that can now hold their own.”
Rosman is also one of the founders of the Deep Learning Indaba, a week-long summer school, first launched with 330 attendees in 2017, which focuses on strengthening African machine learning. This year it takes place in September in Senegal. Last year 800 people attended with between 60 and 70 different speakers on topics that ‘deep dive’ technical issues. The Deep Learning Indaba also supports satellite events in 47 different African countries which run on the same lines except on a local scale, with attendees ranging from 30 to 500 each.
People often ask Rosman why he did not go for some top job “at some fancy foreign university somewhere`’. But he says he is excited doing what he is doing because he `’basically has the pick of the top students from an entire continent”.
“It is such a vibrant environment. So many of the smartest young people across the continent are excited and happy to be able to get lost in the excitement, geekiness, and coolness of this field and really want to come together, build things, and solve hard problems to make the world a better place”, he says.
Rosman also says he gets very excited about this kind of community building. “With the launch of the Wits MIND Institute this will be taken to the next level. We are going to bring together people that have been studying human behavioural psychology, those who have been looking at the evolution of brains, and those studying philosophy and what it means to be conscious. We will also involve those in the field of neuroscience and neuroanatomy. We are all interested in studying intelligence whether it is in humans, animals or machines”.
“This academic focused initiative will bring together the kind of deep thinkers into room, shake it up, challenging the science to ask the big questions, and see what magic comes out of it”, Rosman says.
It irks Rosman that there is a prevailing and condescending perspective from foreigners when talking about AI that assumes that Africans must just solve their problems with tools developed elsewhere”.
“It’s important that we should be solving these problems but there’s very few places in Africa where AI innovations are being done at scale. This what the RAIL lab focuses on. We really take the stance of saying there is no reason that something like the theoretical breakthrough of the transformer neural network that drives ChatGPT cannot be developed locally. We push for those kinds of things and the people we train focus on new methods, new algorithms, and new models”.