The French Ambassador to South Africa, His Excellency Aurélien Lechevallier said: “We are proud to be surrounded by incisive philosophers in Ambient Intelligence and we thank the University for organising an international event of such calibre. This SARChi chair is already a success. Through this seminar, many communities will benefit from the knowledge shared and collaborations that will come fourth. We also take note of the great milestones the Chair has achieved thus far, such as having more than 40 post-graduate students involved in the Chair, the 100 papers published in index journals, 6 Patents and 10 Prototypes already attained,” he said.
His Excellency further committed his support to the SARChi Chair and the University. “We are all here to celebrate the great work emanating from this chair,” he said.
The two days’ event was attended by astute local and international researchers, government officials, including the Head of Policy and Research at the Presidency, scientists, research agencies and industry partners who shared their research, knowledge and experiences in the field of Enabled Environments and Assistive living. Scientists also made presentations in the field of Artificial Intelligence: New trends in Machine learning and Data Science, Robotics: Modelling and control with human in the loop, Internet of Things and Cloud computing: New Trends in Massive IoT and Critical Communications for Assistive Living.
Speakers who made presentation at the event included Dr Freddie Kgongwana, Acting DDG: Hospital Services from the Department of Health;; Dr. Gansen Pillay, Deputy Chief Executive, RISA, NRF, Prof Bernard Yannou, Director of Valorisation and Innovation: Graduate School of Engineering, University Paris Saclay; Dr Nick Bradshaw, CEO AI Media Africa; Dr Holger Schwenk, Research Scientist, Facebook AI Research Laboratory, Stefan Steffen, Executive of Data Science, Telkom Group; Tim Nicholas, Customer CTO, Customer Experience Strategy and Technology; Nokia Nokia SA; Dr. Emmanuel Kalunga, Head of Datascience & Business Intelligence: Orderln; Dr. Kaoutar Sghiouer, Head of Datascience Atos, France; Dr HKM Abdelkawy, Toyota Motors Europe, Armand du Plessis, Presales Solution Consultant at Siemens; Prof. Julien Calderaro, Henri Mondor Hospital; Dr Roxana Ojeda, CTO COMSIS SAS France to name a few.
Please click here to watch the recording of the SARChI Chair Seminar in Enabled Environment and Assistive Living.