Featured Quote:

We believe AI and 4IR are the literacies of our times, and no student should graduate from TUT without being immersed in some aspects of AI and 4IR. If we don’t do that, we’re not preparing them for a future in which they will have to collaborate with human beings, machines, and nature, which is where sustainable development also comes into play.”

AfricaLive: Could you briefly summarize what you consider the identity of the Tshwane University of Technology to be, essentially what makes up your DNA when it comes to teaching and research?

Prof. Tinyiko Maluleke: The hallmark of TUT’s strategic distinguisher, is that of producing “future-ready graduates” who will shape the future of work by being;  

1. Entrepreneurial in orientation, 
2. In command of the basics and the significance of artificial intelligence (AI), 
3. Intentional about their role in the elimination of gender-based violence 
4. Able to contribute to the advancement of the National Development Plan of South Africa
5. Able to contribute to economic development in Africa in line with the AU’s Agenda 2063.
6. Able to contribute to the advancement of the UN sustainable development goals

AfricaLive: TUT has embraced AI and made it central to its teaching and focus on innovation. What inspired this strategic focus, and how has it transformed the university’s approach to higher education in the 4IR era?

Prof. Tinyiko Maluleke: The inspirations are multiple. One can start with the local context of the high unemployment rate in South Africa, a problem across the African continent. Many young people cannot find employment because they lack the skills needed for available jobs. It’s especially painful when young people have been to tertiary institutions but still come out unable to be absorbed by the job market because of the mismatch between their skills and the market’s needs.

We decided as an institution that we are not going to continue participating in the production of graduates who are unemployable or cannot create employment for themselves. That’s the focus on 4IR and AI – only in this way can we produce graduates who will quickly find a job, and if not, invent one for themselves. Graduates who will be ready for jobs that were unimaginable only a short while ago, and new ones that are coming up. The only way to do this is to create a closer relationship between technology and pedagogy, and the connecting glue there is AI for 4IR.

We chose this path deliberately to respond to the jobs crisis, but also to participate meaningfully in a world that is creating powerful or stronger economies, but economies that do not undermine sustainable development. That’s the other important caveat to our focus on AI and 4IR and the future of work.

We’ve also been inspired by watching other countries in the world and not wanting to be left behind, wanting to participate in the writing of our digital future, to become co-authors of the digital future of our country and not merely spectators. We look at countries like Japan and Singapore who have leveraged their technology in ways that we would like to, but we also realize that we can’t do this by ourselves. Hence, partnership is very important for us – partnership between ourselves and industry around Pretoria and beyond, as we happen to be located where much of the motor manufacturing industry is based.

We partner with industry, but also with many other types of industries, because curriculum can no longer be designed by professors alone. It now has to be designed by professors in collaboration with industry leaders, so-called “captains of industry,” across our disciplines. We have nearly a thousand advisory committees made up of professors and industry leaders who together sit down and construct curricula, and more importantly, place our students in what we call “work-integrated learning” so that a part of their education, before they complete their diploma or degree, is spent in industry for some time.

Partnership with government is also crucial, such as with the Artificial Intelligence Institute of South Africa (AISA) where we partner with the government and our sister institutions like the University of Johannesburg. Partnership becomes key in the model of pedagogy that we have, but also in terms of the kind of graduate we want to produce.

AfricaLive: How do you approach building partnerships with industry, particularly when you are working in areas of technology and embracing AI, where it is unclear what the job market will look like in 5 or 10 years? What do you believe are the building blocks of a successful and impactful partnership for both parties?

Prof. Tinyiko Maluleke: We have an annual 4IR dialogue where we gather captains of industry, representatives of industry, as well as sister universities to have a dialogue around 4IR and AI, and to consider how best we can embrace these realities and also manage them, because they are not always only positive. AI is a great help, but there is also bad AI.

We have these very robust conversations called the 4IR Dialogue, where we invite scholars from all over the world, people from industry, and people from government, and we talk about how best to participate in this ongoing revolution meaningfully and constructively. That is one way of strengthening partnership. Partnership has to have a strong element of dialogue because the sands on which we stand are shifting all the time. You can’t have a final model and form of partnership at any point in time. You have to constantly engage, jointly reflect on the issues that you are facing together, hence the annual 4IR Dialogue.

The other instrument that we use, which I have already referred to, is the whole curriculum building between ourselves and industry partners. It doesn’t help when industry stands on one mountain and universities on the other, and industry says, “We want perfect graduates, completely skilled and ready to do what we need done,” whereas they have not participated in the creation of the curriculum that we ought to be teaching in order to produce that graduate.

We have joint ownership of the problem of the mismatch with industry by creating these advisory councils where industry partners sit around the table with professors and say, “What should AI 101 for the motor industry look like? What should AI 101 for the agricultural sector look like? What are the new trends? What skills should be assumed?” and so on. We build curriculum with them. Every time we talk about the mismatch between the skills of graduates and the needs of the market, we are talking about a curriculum that has not adapted to the times. We are recognizing the importance of co-writing the curriculum and also co-supervising the students, especially in their final years.

That’s the third leg of the building blocks that you asked me about – what we call “work-integrated learning.” No student at TUT, ideally, should complete their qualification without having spent at least six months in the industry related to their qualification, to learn not just from the professor at the university but also from the practitioner in the field.

We spend a lot of time negotiating with industry partners to open up spaces for our students to come in. Of course, there are funding issues there, but we find ways to open up spaces for our students to go and spend time there, whether it is at Denel, the company that produces military equipment and aircraft, or at the Sunday Times for students who are studying journalism to spend some time shadowing tried and tested journalists, or in the police force, or at the SA Rail agency at Rosslyn where BMW and Ford are making cars.

These opportunities and spaces for us to send our students become very important in terms of our model. We have, for example, a BMW car that has been given to us by BMW, and they give it to our students to do with it as they please – to take it apart and put it back together, and take it apart again and put it back together, with BMW also working with the students, and our mechanical engineering and electrical engineering professors also in attendance.

It’s those hands-on ways that we ensure industry partnerships are not merely matters of MOUs. We basically bring industry onto campus and take campus into industry via the placement of students, where you have a supervisor out there and a supervisor in here, and together they assess the work of the student.

AfricaLive: Why do you believe the establishment of AISA is significant for South Africa, and what is your vision or hope for AI’s impact on South Africa’s development?

Prof. Tinyiko Maluleke: A few years ago, the government established a Presidential Commission on 4IR, which for me was one of the best moves this government has made, because it’s one thing for a country to be conscious of AI and 4IR and constantly talk about that, but it’s quite another when a government takes a structured and measured approach, seeking to find its own path in the forest of issues around AI and 4IR in the world, and not waiting merely to latch onto what is being done by another country or what is being suggested by a body here and there, but defining its own priorities, what I have often called its own “digital destiny.”

That for me was the importance of the Presidential Commission on 4IR. What that commission produced, among other things, was a National 4IR Strategy. South Africa has a deliberate 4IR strategy. Of course, you could argue that every country in Africa has a 4IR strategy, but I don’t think every country has a conscious, deliberate 4IR strategy, and we deliberately produced one.

From the Presidential Commission’s recommendation in that strategy is the proposal to establish AISA. There are many other recommendations, maybe 9 or 10 others, but certainly the lead and key recommendation is the establishment of AISA.

AISA is important because with it, AI and 4IR issues are not left to individual institutions to tackle on their own, to pick and choose what they want to do, and to allow for all manner of vanity projects to emerge from every corner of the country. With the establishment of AISA, we link our approach to AI to critical developmental issues on the continent and in the world, so that there is synchrony in these things.

AISA is not only a Tshwane University of Technology or University of Johannesburg matter – the government is a partner all the time, and so is industry. That is the plan. In the end, it will become a network of institutions of higher learning, government, and industry together tackling or exploiting AI for the benefit of the country, but also for the enhancement of higher education, innovation, and skilling. That’s the ideal that we are trying to pursue.

In terms of my own vision and view, AI is no longer ignorable. It’s not possible in any sector, especially higher education, but think of any sector – public health, agriculture, infrastructure development – to imagine any of these sectors without the involvement of AI. In fact, AI is already involved in these sectors. What remains to be done is the development of appropriate policies, not only to regulate but also to derive maximum benefit from AI developments.

I’m not convinced that we have the policies, the governance, or even the regulatory environment to make sure that we harness AI for good and for national development. Think about the ethical aspects of AI, for example. There are as of yet very few rules in this whole emerging and exciting world.

That will be part of the role that we as universities must play – to help in the construction of policies, regulations, and ethical protocols for the collaboration between AI and human eyes, as it were.

AfricaLive: Are there any particular flagship projects from the past or things underway now at TUT that you would like to tell a larger audience about?

Prof. Tinyiko Maluleke: There are several. In fact, this is where I think it will be crucial for your team to liaise with our AI director, because we have several props, videos, and illustrations of the kinds of uses we put AI to in our pedagogy and in our interventions in society. It’s not possible to describe them all in words.

In general, let me say that there are at least 7 to 8 AI areas in which we are operating as a university and showing tremendous strength. We work in the motor industry, as I referred to already. We have several AI collaborations with industry in that regard.

We are also engaged in AI in farming and food production, AI in manufacturing, AI in tourism, AI in transport, in health, and in telecommunications, and more.

For example, we have what we call “assistive intelligent technologies,” which are really about intelligent wheelchairs for people with limited mobility, but not your ordinary wheelchair as you have known it. One that will do a number of amazing things to help the person sitting on it. We’ve got something called “quadruped robots,” which are characterized by having four legs and advanced sensors.

Our robotics around the area of assistive intelligent technologies is a very important area because we hope to, and we are already, producing wheelchairs for people with diminished mobility, for older people to have a level of life that until now has not always been available to them.

We also have “emotion computing,” which is an advanced form of facial recognition technology. We have a group of researchers who are working on facial recognition technology that will pick up the emotion of the person using sophisticated deep learning algorithms. So if you are angry or upset, the machines are apparently able not merely to recognize who you are, but also to tell your emotion, which could be very useful in some situations, including in situations of student protests, for example, but you can imagine it also being useful in the tourism industry as you walk into an airport where you are arriving in the country.

We also have many energy efficiency-related projects. I will not go into the details of all of them, but all of them are linked to sustainable development goals in one way or another. These are AI-enabled energy efficiency technologies that we are working on, including the predictive side of it around carbon emission and so on.

We also have a number of spin-off companies created by our own students through innovation. We have something called Shivunda Consulting, for example, which was created by our students. It’s a cell phone-based intelligent plant diagnosis system. So, using pictures and drones, we are able to tell if plants in a field are in trouble or about to die from a particular form of disease without necessarily being there in person. That’s something our researchers are working on.

We have a vision-based fertile egg classification system for chickens, very similar to the one I referred to now. They can tell which eggs are likely to produce a healthy chicken and which ones are not, and that can be a game-changer for small farmers.

We also have drones for spraying fertilizers in the fields, and in languages, we have lots of exciting things around AI and language acquisition, especially the use of African language AI.

So I think if your team will link up with ours, you’ll find that we actually have a lot of props for you to use and even take pictures of.

Although it’s not exclusively or necessarily AI, we have a solar car at the Tshwane University of Technology, and we call it the “Sun Chaser.” That’s the name that has been given to the car. It’s a winning solar car. It has driven all the way to Namibia and back, and to Cape Town and back, using solar. It was built by our students and their lecturers. In fact, we have built several models of this since 2014, and we have won several competitions through it. It links to the energy efficiency interventions that we are involved in.

It’s probably one of the more famous things that we have done. We have participated in global competitions. I think globally we have come second twice, and locally we are the winners in this. They’re busy with the next version of the solar car as we speak.