Designing Realistic Defeasible Ontologies

By: Victoria Chama

Supervised By: Tommie Meyer, Giovanni Casini

Ontologies play a crucial role in knowledge representation and automated reasoning on the web, defining concepts and relationships within domains. However, the ontology community lacks effective tools for expressing defeasibility, while the reasoning...

CS PhD

Intrusion Detection reliability in Software-Defined Community Wireless Networks

Network Security: Employing ML/DL Techniques to Design Efficient IDS for CWNs

By: Emmanuel Ackerson

Supervised By: Josiah Chavula

Community Wireless Networks (CWNs) offer cost-effective internet access to remote and underserved regions where traditional Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are unwilling or unable to operate. These networks, typically built with low-grade hardware and...

CS PhD

Molecular Modelling of STREPTOCOCCUS PNEUMONIAE Carbohydrate Antigens for Optimizing Vaccine Design

By: Carla Coetzee

Supervised By: Michelle Kuttel, Neil Ravenscroft

Streptococcus pneumoniae is a Gram-positive pathogen that commonly colonizes the human nasopharynx and is a leading cause of invasive pneumococcal disease (IPD), including pneumonia, otitis media, bacteraemia, and meningitis. Globally, lower respiratory...

CS PhD

Computational modeling of bacterial capsular polysaccharide

How high performance computing informs vaccine design

By: Nicholas Yerolemou

Supervised By: Michelle Kuttel, Neil Ravenscroft, Nicole Richardson

Streptococcus pneumoniae (S. pneumoniae) is a bacterial pathogen and a frequent cause of disease in humans. Developing vaccines against S. pneumoniae requires a deep understanding of the bacterial capsular polysaccharide, a sugar that surrounds the...

CS PhD

Emotion Elicitation in VR

How sensory and narrative design shape curiosity and anger.

By: Liza Siurina

Supervised By: James Gain, Gosia Lipinska

Most Virtual Reality (VR) research on emotion elicitation focuses on high-arousal states like fear or joy, often overlooking emotions such as curiosity, anger, which are essential for exploration, motivation, and social connection. This study introduces...

CS PhD

Modelling Students’ Source Code Evolutions To Provide Personalised Guidance In Introductory Programming Courses

Personalised learning, MDP, RL, Education Technology

By: Herman KANDJIMI

Supervised By: Hussein Suleman

Programming skills are fundamental in cultivating critical thinking, problem-solving, and creativity, which are integral to computational thinking competencies. These competencies are increasingly recognised as prerequisites for success in the future...

CS PhD

Adapter-based Debiasing of Pre-trained Speech Recognition Models for Low Resource languages

By: Claytone Sikasote

Supervised By: Hussein Suleman, Jan Buys

Fine-tuning multilingual pre-trained speech models for automatic speech recognition (ASR) has led to improved recognition accuracy for many languages, including low-resourced languages (LRLs). However, studies have shown that these models exhibit...

CS PhD

AI Literacy for Learners from Underserved Communities: Co-designing with Educators and Learners in Youth Organisation within South Africa

By: Rachel Oluwatuyi

Supervised By: Melissa Densmore

As the integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) continues to advance at an unprecedented pace, shaping individuals and societies, young learners are growing up in environments increasingly influenced by intelligent systems. This has prompted the...

CS PhD

Evaluating Large Language Models for Multilevel Biomedical Text Simplification

By: Nomonde Khalo

Supervised By: Jan Buys

Biomedical articles are often characterized by structural and technical complexity, making them inaccessible to non-expert readers. Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in the task of biomedical text simplification, but existing techniques...

CS PhD