UJ Alumni Impumelelo Magazine Edition 10

UJ, TUT and the Department of

Communications and Digital Technologies launch The AI Institute of South Africa The Artificial Intelligence Institute of South Africa (AIISA) was launched successfully at the Johannesburg Business School on Wednesday, 30 November 2022. The Institute, which aims to help the country become a digital technology powerhouse on the continent and worldwide, is one of the outcomes of the Presidential Commission on the Fourth Industrial Revolution (PC4IR), and was launched in a partnership between the University of Johannesburg (UJ), the Tshwane University of Technology (TUT) and the Department of Communications and Digital Technologies. Speaking at the launch, UJ Vice-Chancellor and Principal, Professor Tshilidzi Marwala (who served as the deputy chairperson of the PC4IR), said the Institute’s launch, in record time, is a realisation of the strategy and specific goals of the PC4IR: In 2019, as my colleagues and I in the PC4IR began to establish the recommendations to assist the government in taking advantage of the opportunities presented by the digital industrial revolution and catapult South Africa into the 4IR, it was apparent that the establishment of an artificial intelligence (AI) institute sat at the heart of our strategy. The recommendation to develop the institute was centred around a need to establish a common base to focus on the application of AI to health, agriculture, finance, mining, manufacturing, and government alongside regulations.

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ALUMNI IMPUMELELO

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