The MediaLab contains research groups primarily from the Electrical & Electronic Engineering department, with smaller groups from the industrial engineering and computer science departments. The main focus of the MediaLab is on signals processing and machine learning.

Research Groups

LSL: Language, Speech and Learning group

The LSL group focuses on speech and language processing, with a particular focus on deep learning approaches applied to speech processing tasks.

Computer Vision group

The vision group focuses on applying machine learning techniques to images and video processing tasks.

People

Students

• Neil Bekker:

  Research areas: Renewable Energy, Data Science
  Thesis title: Utility-scale Photovoltaic Power Plant Degradation and Failure Rates
  

• Emma Sharratt:

  Research areas: Machine Learning, Automatic Speech Recognition, Child Speech
  Thesis title: Developing and fine-tuning spoken language models to effectively process child speech in low-resource languages in South Africa
  

• Christopher Erasmus:

  Research areas: IoT Agritech
  Thesis title: Research and development of a wireless sensor system for eucalyptus trees
  

• Conrad Kloppers:

  Research areas: Renewable Energy, Photovoltaics
  Thesis title: Optimization of degraded/mismatched PV modules
  

• Judhi Rens:

  Research areas: Power Systems, Micro-Grids, Grid Synchronisation, Distribution System Simulation
  Thesis title: Optimal Design and Control of islanding and synchronisation of a grid-connected Mini-grid.
  

• Simon Malan:

  Research areas: Automatic Speech Recognition, Machine learning
  Thesis title: Unsupervised word segmentation using a large spoken language model
  

• Tené de Wet:

  Research areas: Signal Processing, Biomedical Engineering, Machine Learning
  Thesis title: Investigating the impact of mental fatigue on athletes through EEG
  

• Chad Sims-Handcock:

  Research areas: Machine Learning, Data Engineering
  Thesis title: Design of Futureproof data pipelines using machine learning and AI
  

• Johan Giliomee:

  Research areas: Electric Vehicles, African Paratransit, Energy, Mobility Simulation, Sustainability
  Thesis title: The Energy Demand And Fulfilment Thereof For Electric Minibus Taxis In Sub-Saharan Africa
  

• Jin ree Lee:

  Research areas: Artificial Intelligence, Swarm Intelligence, Foraging Models
  Thesis title: A Comparative Study of Nature Inspired Foraging Algorithms for Prioritized Foraging
  

• Alexandra van der Spuy:

  Research areas: Software engineering, program analysis, debugging
  Thesis title: Software Fault Localization Using Edge-Based Spectra
  

• Waldo Jordaan:

  Research areas: Automation, Embedded Coding
  Thesis title: Automation of vehicle programming, coding and testing on the shopfloor assembly line
  

• Retief Louw:

  Research areas: Machine Learning, Speech Recognition, Low-Resource Language Learning
  Thesis title: Spoken Interaction in Educational Games for Assessing Mathematical and Language Proficiency
  

• Gloria Paulus:

  Research areas: sustainability
  Thesis title: Developing Demand Response, as a Less Expensive Ancillary Service, to Promote the Penetration of Renewable Energy in Islanded Microgrids
  

• Matthew Baas:

  Research areas: speech synthesis, NLP, voice conversion, speech modelling, deep learning
  Thesis title: Implicit Disentanglement of Speech for Controllable Speech Synthesis
  

• Rita van der Walt:

  Research areas: indoor air quality, classrooms, schools, IoT, sensors, school environment
  Thesis title: An assessment of learning environments in South African classrooms

• Jean-Pierre van Zyl:

  Research areas: Computational Intelligence, Machine Learning
  Thesis title: TBC

• Cameron Painting:

  Research areas: Computer Vision
  Thesis title: Synthetic data in the field of Computer Vision

• Lizé Steyn:

  Research areas: Computer vision, machine learning, image processing, pose estimation
  Thesis title: 3D markerless pose estimation for the recognition and form analysis of common exercises

• Alexander Roodt:

  Research areas: Language processing, parsing, software development
  Thesis title: Researching and developing techniques for parser disambiguation for programming languages using a generalised LL parser.

• Tristan Josef Legg:

  Research areas:Reinforcement Learning
  Thesis title: Multi-agent reinforcement learning in the Roblox Environment

• Schalk van der Merwe:

  Research areas: Renewable Energy, Data Science
  Thesis title: Investigate current short term forecasting methods for wind power in South Africa and how this can be used to provide ancillary services based on the production forecast that is required in the REIPPP.

• Stephan Lacock:

  Research areas: Electric Vehicles, Retrofitting
  Thesis title: Focusing on the retrofitting of public transportation vehicles for the Sub-Saharan public transportation sector.

• Nicol Visser:

  Research areas: Speech Processing, Deep Learning
  Thesis title: Listening to Resynthesised Speech from Discovered Acoustic Units

• Petri Smit:

  Research areas: Load Balancing, Server Architecture, Virtual Environments, Scalability
  Thesis title: Spatial Publish/Subscribe for Scalable Virtual Environments

• Brendan Pretorius:

  Research areas: Electric Vehicles, Battery Systems
  Thesis title: BMS development for a retrofitted taxi

• Terhemba Michael-Ahile:

  Research areas: IoT, Sustainability, Machine Learning
  Thesis title: Data-Driven Digital Twin for Electricity Efficiency in Schools.

• Luan Roos:

  Research areas: Geometric Deep Learning, Graph Neural Networks, Generative Modelling
  Thesis title: A comparison of standardisation and data augmentation techniques to equivariant architectures

• Victory Opeolu:

  Research areas: Networking and networked applications, Distributed virtual environments, Internet of Things
  Thesis title: Decentralized Spatial Communication

• Chris-Mari Schreuder:

  Research areas: Machine learning, AI, deep learning, computer vision
  Thesis title: Developing a flexible, low-cost markerless 3D motion capture system

• Jacques Wüst:

  Research areas: Electric Vehicles, Scheduling, Optimisation, Software Development
  Thesis title: Optimised Scheduling for Electric Public Transport

Staff

See the full E&E staff here

• Herman Kamper
• Herman Engelbrecht
• Thinus Booysen
• Rensu Theart
• Arnold Rix
• Andries Engelbrecht

Alumni

List of alumni.

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Joining the MediaLab:

Positions in the MediaLab are negotiated with your supervisor. If you are in the Electrical & Electronic Engineering department studying a postgraduate degree (e.g. Masters, PhD), then you can ask your supervisor for more information.

Part of the MediaLab and would like to amend information?:

Please get in touch with the lab manager.

Last updated: 20 Feb 2024.