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UCT RESEARCHERS REPRESENT
AFRICA IN GOOGLE’S RESEARCH
SCHOLAR PROGRAMME
Associate Professor Amir Patel and Dr Mohohlo Tsoeu from
the Faculty of Engineering & the Built Environment are the
only African recipients in the 2021 cohort.
Patel and Tsoeu are UCT’s first-ever
recipients of Google’s Research Scholar
Programme. Aimed at assisting early-career
researchers working on Google-related
projects, it offers unrestricted gifts to
institutions to fund cutting-edge research
in computer science or a related field.
“I believe this award will help me further
my goal of moving biomechanics beyond
the confines of the laboratory,” said Patel.
Patel was awarded in the Machine
Perception category for his work on
“WildPose: 3D animal biomechanics in the
field using multi-sensor data fusion.” The
project provides greater understanding of
the abilities of the world’s greatest animal
athletes – such as the African cheetah – and
offers invaluable insights for the future of
legged robots.
Dr. Tsoeu was awarded in the Natural
Language Processing category for his
project, ‘Corpora collection and complete
natural language processing of isiXhosa,
Sesotho, and South African Sign Language’.
His hope is to use the award’s considerable
resources to develop comprehensive
corpora for indigenous South African
languages. It will also help inform machinelearning algorithms aimed at automatic
speech recognition, translation and text-to
speech/sign technology.
“The world is getting extremely
connected, both through travel and the
web, and the language divide remains
a bottleneck to enjoying full global
connectedness,” Tsoeu said.
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