Vizia is an importer and distributor of consumer electronics in South Africa focusing on backup power and smart home products.

Co-founded Tesserae an AI startup backup by Founders Factory Africa and Standard Bank. The goal was to build a large-scale data labelling platform that catered for the security and privacy needs the financial services industry.Highlights as CTO• 🌟 Attracting Talent - Recruited team of five A-player engineers including top-of-the-class graduates and full-stack devs with 10+ year of experience (on a startup’s budget).• 🎽 Team Management - Lead day-to-day activities of engineering team including daily standups, retros, 1-on-1s, feature design, incident response.•💡 Product Strategy - Responsible for product strategy and managing stakeholders client/business/tech.• 🌴 DevOps - Increased frequency of software releases from weekly to daily by adopting trunk-based dev workflow.• 🛠 Tech Stack - Python, Django, JavaScript, React, AWS, ECS, SageMaker, HuggingFace.

Technical lead for the Applied AI Team where responsibilities included defining the research agenda and managing a team of software developers and ML engineers.

Started out at IBM as an AI Research Scientist doing a combination of theoretical and applied research. The theoretical research focused mainly on algorithms for computer vision whereas the applied AI topics ranged from automated design of household solar systems to Covid-19 forecasting. • 👀 Computer Vision Research on Capsule Networks Conducted fundamental research into a new deep learning architecture called “Capsule Networks”, which was published at a top AI conference called IJCAI. The code comprised roughly 3000 lines written in Python and TensorFlow, and has been open-sourced on GitHub.• 🌦 Climate Prediction using LSTMsApplied recent deep learning techniques including CNNs and LSTMs to a new domain of seasonal climate prediction. The objective was to test whether these techniques can beat the long-established statistical methods. The results were published at a climate change workshop hosted at the premier AI conference called NeurIPS.• 🩺 NLP for Medical RecordsBuilt an NLP system for the NHLS to classify free-text pathology reports into ICD-10 categories. The pipeline included TF-IDF, and the final classifier was an ensemble of gradient boosted trees from LightGBM and XGBoost.• 🏠 Web App for Designing Solar PV Systems Developed the backend algorithms and APIs for the EmpowerSolar web app (available here), which is a free online tool to automatically design solar PV systems. The APIs were built using Python Flask, with Swagger for the documentation.• 🦠 Covid-19 Web App for Gauteng ProvinceProject lead for the IBM COVIZ Dashboard, which was the official Covid-19 dashboard used by Gauteng Province to monitor and respond to the pandemic. The dashboard includes algorithms to detect hotspots of outbreak, and predict the number of cases, hospitalisation and deaths in the province.

Co-founded GreenMatters Engineering, a renewable energy consultancy focused on heating, lighting and solar PV. The main project was the design and implementation of pole-mounted solar PV systems to power CCTV cameras.

• 🔮 Customer Churn Model for Standard BankDesigned and implemented a churn model to predict which customers are likely to leave the bank within the next 6 months. The model used logistic regression, neural networks, and feature reduction algorithms.• 🩺 Hospital Utilisation for NetcareDeveloped a platform to assess the utilisation of theatres and wards across the Netcare hospital network, and recommend ways to improve. The platform included data preprocessing in SQL and SAS, and an optimisation model built using QlikView.• 🏦 Integrity Testing for InvestecDeveloped a system to validate the integrity of Investec’s interest calculations on personal accounts.

• Lead software engineer tasked with design and implementation of bespoke software applications for the REDCap platform. REDCap is an open source data capture system which allows the user to build and manage online surveys and databases for medical research. • Responsibilities included managing a team of four engineers; allocating and monitoring the budget; and liaising between the client and the developers.