Lectures

Lecture

Harnessing molecular techniques to advance horse health

Molecular techniques have revolutionised horse management and health and have provided practical solutions to complex problems in the various horse disciplines internationally. Molecular-based parentage verification systems were standardised internationally in the 1990s and are now widely applied in most horse breeds. These systems now include tests for genetic diseases and performance traits....

Lecture

Artificial Intelligence for Artificial Intelligence: Can Artificial Intelligence Create Itself?

Artificial Intelligence has had a major impact in the fourth industrial revolution and has been instrumental in finding scalable solutions to complex problems posed by the United Nations Sustainable Development goals. However, this has not been without challenges. As the adoption of artificial intelligence has grown, we find ourselves in the situation where artificial intelligence has moved out...

Lecture

Children’s rights and the preservation of the environment for future generations

Child activists have moved themselves to the front of the environmental protection agenda, and through this they have made the right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment a children’s rights issue. The arguments advanced by them (and by adults assisting them) is that they are more impacted by environmental harms and are also closer to (or part of) future generations. This lecture...

Lecture

Unlocking the secrets of the invisible universe within and beyond us: A call to discover Africa’s microbiomes

Microbes (bacteria, archaea, fungi, and viruses) are the most diverse and numerically abundant entities on our planet. However, we know surprisingly little regarding the vast microbial universe within and beyond us. The past two decades of sequencing-enabled research have revealed remarkable insights regarding the diversity and functional attributes of microbial communities, yet we lack...

Lecture

'Riendzo ri lehile: Tackling Natural Language Processing for African languages to make better sense of our world'

Low-resourced languages pose an interesting challenge for machine learning algorithms, representation, data collection and accessibility of machine learning in general. For African languages this challenge is even more consequential as it also coincides with the challenges of shaping the current revolution in artificial intelligence with the global landscape. In this talk I present our research...

Lecture

‘From novel virus to global pandemic: Understanding the origins and evolution of emerging and re-emerging viruses’

The World Health Organisation (WHO) identified disease X as the next pandemic threat, a year before the emergence of SARS-CoV-2, which sparked the COVID-19 pandemic. The true impact of the pandemic over the past two years far exceeded our expectations, with >18 million excess deaths worldwide, as well as extensive pressure on healthcare systems and the global economy. Although the world is...