Revealing the future of AI and nurturing future leaders in innovation

At EPI-USE Labs and the University of Pretoria, South Africa, we believe in fostering innovation and nurturing future leaders in technology. Last year, we had the privilege of co-supervising a group of eleven Computer Science Honours students in their groundbreaking AI research.

This collaboration was facilitated by our own Arné Schreuder, a Senior Software Engineer (AI/ML) at EPI-USE Labs, currently busy with his PHD in AI at the University of Pretoria.

The students’ dedication and hard work culminated in an exciting AI research ‘poster day’ hosted at the EPI-USE AppHaus Pretoria at the end of 2023, providing each student with the opportunity to share their exciting findings with other students and colleagues alike.

From pest detection to potato cultivation, each project presented an insightful look into the future of AI:

1. Andreas Louw: Vision Transformers for Pest and Disease Detection.
   Supervisors: Dr. Anna Bosman, Mr. Arné Schreuder
2. Dewald van Hoven: Predicting Potato Cultivar Radiation-use Efficiency Using Machine Learning.
   Supervisors: Dr. Anna Bosman, Mr. Arné Schreuder
3. Egor Kharatyan: Further Investigation into AdamPSO and NesterovPSO.
   Supervisors: Dr. Anna Bosman, Mr. Arné Schreuder
4. Gianni Volpi: Investigating the Performance of Time Series Positional Encodings in Transformer Neural Networks.
   Supervisors: Dr. Anna Bosman, Mr. Arné Schreuder
5. James Butler: Cascade Correlation in Long Short-Term Memory Networks.
   Supervisor: Dr. Anna Bosman
6. Louw Claassens: Evaluating Graph Neural Networks for Recommendation Systems.
   Supervisors: Dr. Anna Bosman, Mr. Arné Schreuder
7. Luca Prenzler: The Landscape Of The Shortcomings And Pitfalls Of Neural Networks.
   Supervisors: Dr. Anna Bosman, Mr. Arné Schreuder
8. Rayden Burger: A Comparative Analysis of Particle Swarm Optimization Trained Neural Networks and Genetic Programming For Training Snake Playing Game Agents.
   Supervisor: Mr. Will van Heerden
9. Regan Shen: Training GNN with Particle Swarm Optimisation.
   Supervisors: Dr. Anna Bosman, Mr. Arné Schreuder, Dr. Maciej Krzywda, Prof. Szymon Łukasik
10. Theo Morkel: The Forward-Forward Algorithm: Further Investigation Into Goodness Functions.
    Supervisors: Dr. Anna Bosman, Mr. Arné Schreuder
11. Xander Coetzer: Simple Objects Curriculum for Computer Vision.
    Supervisor: Dr. Anna Bosman

A special thank you to the dedicated supervisors, Dr. Anna Bosman, Mr. Arné Schreuder, Mr. Will van Heerden, Dr. Maciej Krzywda, and Prof. Szymon Łukasik, for their guidance and support throughout 2023.

At EPI-USE Labs, we create value through innovation, and are dedicated to developing and creating solutions that meet the unique needs of individual companies. We are always looking for the brightest minds who will play a role in shaping future innovation. If this sounds like you, take a look at our careers page.