Becoming an academic wasn’t Dr Anna Bosman’s initial plan.

“As a kid, I always thought I’d be an artist when I grew up,” says the senior lecturer in the Department of Computer Science in the School of Information Technology at the University of Pretoria (UP). “I went to an art school. But then we moved to South Africa, and everything was uncertain.”

Bosman, whose maiden name is Rakitianskaia, lived in Dubna, about two hours outside of Moscow in Russia, before her family emigrated to South Africa in 1997. She was 11. Home-schooled in Pretoria until she came to UP to study computer science, she led quite an isolated existence. “I was only really exposed to South African society and made friends with local speakers when I went to university,” she says.

Due to her artistic bent and love of drawing, she often jokes that it was probably the novel visualisation techniques she had used in her thesis that clinched her PhD.

“It’s if, at the end of the day, what I contributed was not formulas, but pretty pictures.” These days, Dr Bosman has settled for photography instead. “I am a hobbyist photographer, but it is fulfilling,” she says. The only drawing she does now is reserved for interactions with her two-year-old daughter, Emily Zinaida, who symbolises part of the promise Dr Bosman made to her late grandmother – that she would name her daughter after her. 

“I’m still trying to hold up to my promise to be a professor,” says Dr Bosman about the second part of her pledge. While academia was not her overriding passion, she breezed through her courses, graduating with distinction throughout her studies, from her undergraduate to her master’s degrees. “I’ve always had a knack for logical thinking and mathematical puzzles,” she says, adding that she cannot remember a time she didn’t love puzzles, from Sudoku to playing with a Rubik’s Cube.

“I specifically like the algorithmic side of things and I think computer science fits well with my natural talents and tendencies. I wouldn't say I wanted to be an academic or scientist or professor. I just wanted to understand how things work and I wanted to solve puzzles. It turns out that's what scientists do.” And as a scientist who works in artificial intelligence (AI), one of the technologies at the cutting edge of global innovation, everyone wants her attention, to the point where she is presently supervising 36 students. 

Isn’t that a bit of an overload? “It is a little bit,” she concedes. “I'm struggling to manage my time. I work in a very popular field, I guess. Also, I really enjoy working with students, and I think they enjoy working with me. I try to take only the best students – they have to send me their academic records – but there are so many good ones, and they have so many fresh ideas. 

“As a scientist, you can pursue perhaps one or two avenues on your own, but with the help of students, you can explore a wider range of ideas. So I really enjoy supervising. About half are honours students, so they have smaller projects and don’t have to publish. With just master’s and PhD students, it comes to 10 to 15.”

Dr Bosman’s research is about the fundamental properties of artificial neural networks. 

“Everybody has heard of ChatGPT,“ she says, “which is basically a neural network that learns the patterns in human language.” This ability to describe things in an easy-to-understand way, of presenting complex mathematical thinking in down-to-earth language, probably also adds to her appeal as a supervisor.

She says neural networks are about inputs and outputs, and finding the algorithm for mapping where the connection between the two has the lowest error. “It’s like a little guy hiking through the wilderness, hoping to find the deepest ravine, because that’s where the error is going to be the lowest,” she explains. 

Dr Bosman is comfortable in this world of mathematical models, but what really drives her is seeing them solve real-life problems. “For that, l collaborate with various other researchers at UP as well as with other institutions internationally that try to apply AI to practical problems. I believe that real-life applications give meaning and value to fundamental research. Therefore, both should be pursued in parallel in order to enrich each other.” Her collaborations include projects with the Forestry and Agricultural Biotechnology Institute (FABI) at UP. “Here, we are applying these neural network models to detect disease on eucalyptus trees before they spread to the leaves, when it’s too late to do anything about it.” 

Dr Bosman is the co-supervisor for a master’s student who is doing this study. He is taking hyperspectral images of the roots of the tree – which analyse a wide spectrum of light in each pixel in the image – in frequencies where it is possible to detect the very first signs of the disease and so ensure that the tree is eliminated from the plantation before the disease can spread.

“That’s a practical application of AI,” Dr Bosman says. “It doesn't offer any insight into how neural networks work, but just by applying AI, we are helping South Africa to grow better eucalyptus trees. To me, that’s very rewarding.”UP is her academic home. Even when she went back to her hometown in Russia after her master’s, “to reconnect with my Russian people”, she had registered for her doctorate at UP. 

In Dubna, she worked as a junior researcher in the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research’s information technology lab. It’s where her father had worked before the family emigrated; he is now re-employed as a research scientist. He is Professor Sergei Rakitianski (his surname is spelt differently to her maiden name because of the Russian custom of some names changing according to gender). Until his retirement from UP in May 2021, he worked in its Department of Physics and was part of the University’s delegation that went to Dubna in February 2020 to sign a memorandum of understanding between the two institutions. Although she had set off for Russia to potentially start a new life, she returned and reunited with her boyfriend, now her husband, whom she had met at UP. 

“The year of soul-searching was all I needed,” she says. “I realised that despite all of my ideas, I'm more of a South African than a Russian, so I came back.”She is still close to her Russian roots. One way this manifests is by chatting to her daughter in Russian. 

“She is a South African baby, but I speak Russian to her because I think it's nice to learn the language for free without putting any effort into it.”

She also writes a blog in Russian that “helps maintain the Russian side of my personality” and which has built up a network of close friends, bonded by the language and, initially, her love of JRR Tolkien’s novel Lord of the Rings.