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Project Showcase
3D renderer used to investigate the semantics of a UAV flight path
Viewpoint planning studio
By: Kira Webb, Azaam Holdman, Adam Foflonker
Supervised By: Patrick Marais
UAVs, unmanned aerial vehicles, also known as drones, are widely used to capture thehigh quality photographs required to generate 3D models of buildings, includingstructures at sites of cultural significance. Before the UAV flies, a planning...
Adapting Large Language Models to African Languages
Replicating AfriqueLLM and testing three changes to the recipe
By: Connor Paton, Dylan Saayman, Dean Sneddon
Supervised By: Zola Mahlaza
Continued pre-training (CPT) on curated multilingual corpora is among the most effective ways to narrow the performance gap between large language models in African and high-resource languages. However, the recipe behind it, AfriqueLLM (Yu et al., 2026),...
AgroFlow: Smart Irrigation Management System
By: Leruo Matlhatsi, Philisile Tyobeka, Lubaelihle Msuku, Olwethu Nkabinde
Supervised By: Jodie Thorburn, Nazreen Ryklief
Agroflow: A smart irrigation system A critical challenge that is currently faced in agriculture is balancing efficient water use with crop productivity, especially in water-stressed countries like South Africa. Farmers need accessible tools to monitor...
AI Share Trader
By: Mehdi Jaffri, Ruairi Kearns
Supervised By: Deshen Moodley
Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) agents can learn to trade shares, but most see the market as a set of independent stocks and ignore the links between them. Spatial-temporal graph neural networks (STGNNs) are designed to model these links and forecast...
AlphaSwarm
The Financial Transparency Platform
By: Luke Ruiters, Sachint Singh, Ally Day, Zayahn Abrahams
Investing information has never been easier to find. Prices, news, social sentiment and company filings are all public. What a first-time investor lacks is what institutions have: analysts who explain what the evidence means. Without that, beginners...
AutoCheat
A tool that helps reviewers detect potential cases of academic dishonesty in programming assessments.
By: Zeenal Santhilal, Joshua Lawrence, Leah Moodley
Supervised By: Johan Bontes
Automatic programming assignment assessment systems, or autograders, are used in educational institutions to ease the work-workload of human markers by automatically grading large batches of submissions using unit testing suites. However, they have...
AutoNorm
Automatic Annotation of Child Speech for Language Norming
By: Amaan Nadvi, Somendra Appadoo, Ameen Dawood
Supervised By: Francois Meyer
Child language norming is essential for identifying speech and language delays. For South African languages such as Sesotho and Afrikaans, this process is severely bottlenecked by the slow pace of manual linguistic annotation. This project proposes to...
Beyond PID
Benchmarking Reinforcement-Learning Controllers for Quadcopter Stabilisation
By: Mathew Maartens, Wietske Van Der Westhuizen
Supervised By: Krupa Prag
How can a quadcopter remain stable when unpredictable wind pushes it away from its target? Our project investigates whether modern deep reinforcement-learning controllers can outperform a traditional PID controller in this challenging control task. We...
BIONN: Complementary Turnover Training in Continual Reinforcement Learning
By: Nathan Del Fava, Ziyaad Shaboodien
Supervised By: Geoff Nitschke, Bilal Aslan
A significant challenge in neural network design is continual learning: the ability to learn new tasks without catastrophically forgetting previously learned ones. Complementary Turnover Training (CTT) introduces a biologically-inspired architecture over...
Cape Fencing Academy Platform
By: Leo Muziva, Ameer Abrahams, Reabetswe Morolo, Jack Saunders
Supervised By: Popyeni Kautondokwa
Cape Fencing Academy (CFA) is a fencing club in Cape Town whose director runs most of its administration by hand. Memberships, lesson bookings, invoices and equipment orders are managed across spreadsheets, email and WhatsApp, and the club’s Wix website...
CarbNMR
A Web-Based Carbohydrate NMR Spectra Prediction Tool
By: Tanweer Chiktay, Fayyaaz Harnekar
Supervised By: Michelle Kuttel, Nicole Richardson, Neil Ravenscroft
Carbohydrates are structurally complex molecules key to the development of anti-bacterial vaccines. Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is a primary experimental technique used to determine carbohydrate structure, but NMR spectra remain...
Code Red - Red Tape Tracker System
By: Saajida Joosub, Shreeya Rama, Obakeng Sibeko, Nandi Zuma
Team 3 – Code Red (Red Tape Tracker System) Abstract The Western Cape Government’s Red Tape Reduction Unit (RTRU) helps businesses resolve regulatory and administrative obstacles. Since 2011 its Business Helpline has handled over 9,000 cases, but the...
CommHub
The whole neighbourhood, in your pocket
By: Luke Fisher, Connor Morrison
Supervised By: Jack Wiltshire, Melissa Densmore
A job opening, a burst pipe down the road, a beach clean-up on Saturday: the news that matters most in a community is local, and it is easiest to miss when it is scattered across too many places. CommHub is our answer – a mobile-first community hub built...
DETECTING AND INTERPRETING TEXT GENERATED BY LARGE LANGUAGE MODELS
By: Murema Manganyi, Umar Parker, Deogracias Mufula
Supervised By: Jan Buys
Large language models (LLMs) can produce fluent text that is increasingly difficult to distinguish from human writing. This raises concerns about the reliability of information online and creates a need for methods that can identify machine-generated...
Disentangling Land Value from Total Property Value
Tree ensembles and graph neural networks for land valuation in New York and Cape Town
By: Gideon Weiss, Adam Marcow
Supervised By: Jan Buys
The value of a property is the land it sits on plus what is built on it, however most cities only have data for total property value. We investigated whether machine learning models can disentangle the land value from the total property value. We used...
Educational MIPS Assembly IDE
By: Matthew Perkett, Robert Butler
Supervised By: Sonia Berman
Assembly programming presents significant challenges for novice programmers, who must understand unfamiliar syntax while reasoning about low-level machine behaviour, including registers, memory, and control flow. Although existing MIPS simulators such as...
Educational Program Reporting System (EPRS)
ERPS: because every mark matters!
By: Nicole Scott-Emuakpor, Tsholo Mnguni, Bianca Ngobeni, Lethiwe Buthelezi
Supervised By: Dirk Snyman, Ramo Makama
Educational Program Reporting System (EPRS), a secure web-based system proposed by Wink (Team 8) that centralises educational data, automates calculations, generates report cards, predict and traces learner performance through analytics dashboard....
EduGrows: Plant your notes. Watch them grow.
By: Raihan Mohamed, Faiq Ebrahim, Kaamil Saib, Makgabo Mapoulo
Supervised By: Maureen Tanner, Ridewaan Hanslo
University students rarely lack study material. Lecture slides, textbook chapters and long PDFs pile up quickly, but they don’t come with a clear place to start, a way to practise, or any sense of how much progress has been made. Students end up...
eResponse
Dispatch for Volunteer Sea Rescue
By: Jamie-Lee Schalkwyk, Henco Schutte, Jeffrey Ampoful, Skye Murray
Supervised By: Elsje Scott, Maureen Tanner, Ridewaan Hanslo
Volunteer sea rescue crews at NSRI Bakoven coordinate emergencies through phone calls and WhatsApp groups. As a result, incident information is scattered and the response has no central record. Duty officers, the station’s Coxswains and Station...
Evaluating the System Usability Scale in South Africa
Comparing Written isiXhosa, Afrikaans, and Oral English Administration
By: Inhle Cele, Yazeed Adams, Dhiren Chetty
Supervised By: Melissa Densmore
The System Usability Scale (SUS) is one of the most widely used questionnaires for measuring perceived usability, but it was originally developed in English. This project investigates how SUS administration can be adapted to the South African context,...
Evolutionary Theories in an Artificial Life Simulation
By: Joshua Diegaardt, Tarique Mackay, Jenna Rigby
Supervised By: Geoff Nitschke, Reece Van Der Bank
Evolutionary theory makes claims that play out over thousands of generations, so many of them cannot be tested directly in the natural world. We use an agent-based artificial life simulator that enables us to isolate different variables, so evolutionary...
ExamScan
Semi-Automated Exam Digitisation & Page-Turning Pipeline
By: Devak Mistry, Chidiebere Umah
Supervised By: Johan Bontes
Digitising examination booklets is repetitive, labourintensive, and vulnerable to skew, blur, and misfiled records. ExamScan replaces manual scanning with a semi-automated pipeline. This pipeline is built using a RaspberryPi as the hardware brain to use...
Explaining Defeasible Reasoning
A step-through pedagogical tool for defeasible entailment
By: Liam De Saldanha, Samukelisiwe Zwane, Nikita Martin
Supervised By: Tommie Meyer
Defeasible reasoning is a form of non-monotonic reasoning that allows conclusions to be revised when new or more specific information is introduced, making it possible to represent exceptional information. Although it has become increasingly important in...
Explanations Using Defeasible Rule Sets
Checking a rule based classifier's predictions and explanations with formal defeasible reasoners
By: Augustine Mochoeneneng, Antony Baker, Daniel Schlesinger
Supervised By: Tommie Meyer
Symbolic classifiers that reason by default, retracting a conclusion only when a more specific exception applies, offer predictions that are interpretable by construction rather than through post-hoc justification. Exception Closed Conjunctive Rule Sets...
FreightProof
Tamper-Proof Custody Records for South African Road Freight
By: Tim Gultig, Ciaran Formby, Chiko Kasongo, Thomas Davis
Supervised By: Elsje Scott, Maureen Tanner, Ridewaan Hanslo
When a truckload of goods goes missing in South Africa, nobody can say for certain where it happened. In 2024 alone there were around 2,000 truck hijackings, costing the industry roughly R3 billion. On top of theft, companies lose time and money every...
GAIN: GENERATIVE AI NARRATIVE-BASED STUDENT GUIDE
By: Tadiwanashe Nyakonda, Zhentao Ye, Bohlale Masemola
Supervised By: Gary Stewart
First-year students face new academic, social and personal challenges, but may not engage fully with the written guides designed to support them. GAIN explores how generative AI can make the advice in UCT’s Science Is Tough: But So Are You! guide more...
Gravid-AMEN
By: Ella THORBURN, Sarah-Jane Marais
Supervised By: Melissa Densmore
An offline-first, bilingual (Sepedi and English) Android app for maternal nutrition education, built and tested with the AMEN team at the University of Limpopo.
HealthChain: Practitioner Verification System
A self-sovereign identity platform for issuing, holding and verifying healthcare practitioners credentials
By: Anelisa Hlalukana, Obakeng Difeto, Luyanda Nkuna, Matovya Molala
Supervised By: Elsje Scott, Ridewaan Hanslo, Maureen Tanner
Verifying that a healthcare practitioner is registered, qualified and in good standing is still slow and manual. Credentials are often paper or PDF documents that are easy to forge, checks depend on phone calls and emails, and a suspended or lapsed...
Hidayatul Islam College Webapp
A Web-Based Platform for School Information, Parent Access and Administrative Service
By: Taslimah Emjedi, Tasha Maclay-Mayers, Lindani Xaba, Khensani Baloyi
Supervised By: Natsai Ganyani
Hidayatul Islam College has inefficiencies in stakeholder communication and they are challenged by administrative productivity, partly due to parents unexpectedly visiting the school during work hours. The project identifies four main stakeholder groups,...
Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning for Few-Shot Adaptation
By: Conor Mckeag, Gideon Sweijd, Brad Scott
Supervised By: Geoff Nitschke
Competitive games are non-stationary: when an opponent changes strategy, a policy that was working can stop working. Hierarchical reinforcement learning, which splits an agent into a Manager that sets sub-goals and a Worker that carries them out, is...
HiveMind
Smart Monitoring for Urban Beekeepers
By: Cassidy Langford, Shaakirah Bawa, Phathu Sigama, Langa Nkhoma
Supervised By: Walter Uys
Urban beekeepers currently have no reliable way to monitor hive health remotely. Assessing a colony’s condition requires physically opening the hive; a process that is time-consuming, disruptive to the bees, and offers only a momentary snapshot rather...
InstaRoad
Extracting Roads from Medium Resolution Satellite Imagery
By: Kelvin Wei, Catherine Li, Jing Yeh
Supervised By: Patrick Marais, Jonathan Shock
We develop AI tools to monitor how road networks change over time, based on satellite imagery. This supports urban planning and assessing the environmental impact of road networks. While satellite imagery makes this possible at scale, high-resolution...
Intelligent Task Prioritisation System
CSC3003S - Capstone
By: Shreeya Rama, Emily Wood, Casey Hunter
The Intelligent Task Prioritisation System (IMTPS) is a web-based application developed by Team ESC Key to help users manage their tasks, organise schedules, and improve productivity through intelligent task prioritisation. The system incorporates four...
Knock.
Helping real opportunity find you.
By: Caris Barnes, Anelisa Mzimela, Lilitha Kunene, Dylan Sherry
Supervised By: Ridewaan Hanslo, Maureen Tanner, Elsje Scott
The graduate hiring landscape in South Africa is fragmented. Students search across multiple platforms and still miss opportunities, while employers receive large volumes of unsuitable applications. Knock is a two-sided intelligent matchmaking platform...
Ladles of Love Volunteer Management System
By: Ameer Alfos, Furqaan Moses, Tristan Africa, Amien Pedro
Supervised By: Qiraan Christians, Walter Uys
Ladles of Love relies heavily on community and corporate volunteers to support food preparation, warehouse packing, and relief campaigns. Previously, volunteer shifts were managed through a repurposed e-commerce store where users had to "purchase" R0...
Ladles of Love Warehouse Management System
A highly accessible, commercial-grade, custom warehouse management system for the NGO, Ladles of Love, a food-relief nonprofit changing lives in South Africa.
By: Alessio Munkes, Abukwe Lamati, Hussain Geldenhuys, Serena Achieng
Supervised By: Walter Uys
Ladles of Love is a South African non-profit organisation that distributes food and essential supplies to vulnerable communities through its warehouse and network of beneficiaries, including Early Childhood Development (ECD) centres, dignity kitchens and...
Large Language Models for Qualitative Analysis
By: Sibonelelo Dlamini, Sithokomele Nxumalo, Theo Mashaba
LLMs for Qualitative Analysis (L4QA) explores how large language models can support qualitative research while keeping researchers involved in the analytical process. The project brings together multi-agent workflows for Grounded Theory and Sentiment...
LeadFlow: One Platform. Smarter Sales.
Capture. Manage. Automate.
By: Masechaba Jele, Zuhayr Mollagee, Sokhna Wade, Emmanuel Afodofe
Supervised By: Papama Mtambeka, Walter Uys, Asanda Xaba
Small, medium and micro-sized enterprises (SMMEs) often face challenges in managing leads across multiple platforms, tracking potential customers, prioritising promising opportunities, and coordinating follow-up activities. When lead information and team...
LearnPost
Continued Pretraining Learning Dynamics for South African Languages
By: Siyabonga Madondo, Rakeen Ramdeen
Supervised By: Francois Meyer
Continued Pretraining (CPT) is widely used to adapt language models to new languages. The technique involves further training pretrained language models (PLMs) on target-language text to improve their language modelling abilities in those languages. CPT...
LEO Vocabulary App
Teaching made simple
By: Timothy Reynders, Sibahle Malinga, Siyasanga Ramavhunga, Tokelo Mamabolo
L.E.O. Vocab App - A Web-Based Vocabulary Learning Platform for All Learners Traditional approaches to building vocabulary may be too passive for many learners; many of these methods do not provide an easy way to assess learner progress or provide...
LiberPixels
Smart Free Image Search For Creatives
By: Naseegh Abrahams, Lusani Nevari, Joshua Adams, Zwivhuya Mudau
Supervised By: Popyeni Kautondokwa, Ebraheem Dien, Walter Uys
Flow Communications, a South African integrated communications firm, needs its designers, developers and content creators to find licence-compliant free images quickly. Platforms such as Unsplash, Pexels and Pixabay work in isolation, give no help to...
LiQuid
Early Payment Platform
By: Muneer Ismail, Ine Van Aswegen, Camryn Pillay, Fayzaan Mohamed
Supervised By: Tichaona Chinyerere, Walter Uys, Nazreen Ryklief
The LiQuid Dashboard is a digital platform designed to make invoice submission, review, approval and tracking easier and more efficient. The main goal for LiQuid is to help SMEs gain access to early payment opportunities. Many SMEs experience financial...
MatchPoint
Tennis Player Statistics Tracker
By: Thomas Kabalin, Luke Bryant, Danny Gebhard
Supervised By: Michelle Kuttel
Professional players get detailed match statistics from specialist tracking systems and post-match video analysis. Amateur coaches and players have neither, so spotting patterns and planning training from evidence is hard. MatchPoint is a progressive web...
MenoScreen By Mandi
helping clinicians recognised what women have carried silently
By: Tharwa Petersen
MenoScreen by Mandi is a clinical decision-support tool that helps nurses and GPs recognise menopause symptoms during short South African primary care consultations. Many women go without timely diagnosis because symptoms such as brain fog, low mood and...
MORL: Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning
Informing optimal selection of MORL algorithms for real-world problem solving.
By: Paige Maritz, Benjamin Cilliers, Richard Blewett
Supervised By: Asad Jeewa
MORL is a subfield of traditional Reinforcement Learning that solves problems with multiple, often conflicting objectives. MORL algorithms are run in environments that pose certain objectives and produce a set of optimal solutions for the problem that...
MzansiBench
Benchmarking LLMs for South African Languages
By: Mustafaa von Doorze, Umr Karriem
Supervised By: Francois Meyer
Large language model (LLM) performance on low-resource languages, including most South African languages, remains under-evaluated due to the absence of standardised benchmarks and centralised datasets. Existing African-language benchmarks provide...
One Click ERP Reporting Module
Team 9 - TULS
By: Thato Mafuze, Uzukhanye Matshabane, Sibani Kheswa, Lesedi Legodi
One Click ERP Reporting Module The One Click Reporting Module was developed by Team 9 (TULS) to address the need of an accessible, flexible, accurate and meaningful business reporting from transactional data generated by One Click’s existing POS + ERP...
Optimising File Formats, Storage layout and Caching strategies for next generation Astronomy applications
By: Xhanti Luke, Jack Wiltshire, Vuyo Sibanda
Supervised By: Michelle Kuttel, Adrianna Pinska
Modern radio telescopes such as MeerKAT, produce large astronomy data cubes that cannot easily be loaded into memory in their entirety. One method to interact with these data cubes is through visualisation tools such as CARTA. These interactions include...
Physio911
Physiotherapy Practice Management System
By: Khethi Hlahatsi, Lulibo Fula, Tiisetso Mmaboko, Vanessa Mokoena
Supervised By: Suyant Maharaj
Physio911 is a physiotherapy practice in Durban, run by Khetan Ramkisson since 2011, and it still depends largely on paper and manual processes. Patients book by phone and have nowhere to turn after hours. Therapists handwrite notes between sessions,...
Provincial Business Licensing
By: Alec Cabral, Luyolo Madasi, S'bonga Thwala, Abangi Mukabwe
Supervised By: Grant Oosterwyk, Asanda Xaba
This project was developed alongside the Western Cape Department of Economic Development and Tourism (DEDAT) as they identified the need for a more centralised approach when it comes to managing provincial business license applications. This came with...
PyTutor
Using a SLM to be a Python tutor for first year students.
By: Jaylyn Bhula, Azhar Salie, Aman Mannie
Supervised By: Aslam Safla
PyTutor is a system that uses a Small Language Model (Microsoft Phi 3.5) and 3 adapters to help tutor first year Python students (for CSC1015). It contains a chatbot, lessons and quiz module. The chatbot module has been specially trained using LoRA to...
Revival Automotive
By: Reshoketjoe Ralekgokgo, Jason Heynes, Levi Anastasis-Lan, Aphiwe Dube
Supervised By: Dirk Snyman, Qiraan Christians
Revival Automotive is a Cape Town-based premium car detailing business whose current operations rely entirely on manual, WhatsApp-driven communication to manage bookings, customer records, pricing, and invoicing. This informal approach has led to...
SAPIENT.Rocks Mars Yard Cloud Platform
Send Missions to a physical Mars Rover!
By: Kamogelo Tsele, Konke Cele, Yamkela Dludla, Hlalanathi Mashimbye
Supervised By: Maureen Tanner, Elsje Scott, Ridewaan Hanslo
The Mars Yard Cloud Platform is a rover simulation platform that enables learners to code, simulate, and submit missions for execution on a physical rover. Submitted missions are added to a queue at the Mars Yard, where an operator executes them on the...
SchoolBoyRugga
A Community-Driven Centralised Platform for South African School Rugby
By: Tan Ansara, Tristan Reddy, Piet Maako, Taddy Mndawe
Supervised By: Unathi September
SchoolBoyRugga addresses the fragmentation of South African school rugby information across social media, school websites, third party websites and messaging groups. Fans and parents need timely, trustworthy match information without searching multiple...
Six Metaheuristics vs One Exact Solver
By: Lawton Springbok, Miguel Lavarinhas, Zuhayr Khot
Supervised By: Krupa Prag
We compare six multi-objective metaheuristics (ALNS, GRASP, NSGA-II, SPEA2, MOPSO and MOACO) against the exact solver Gurobi on the multi-objective vehicle routing problem with time windows, using Solomon's benchmark instances at 25, 50 and 100...
SkyCrash Aviator
The Sky's The Limit
By: Anggie Sebastian, Lizzy Mello, Lebogang Seema, Muzi Mlotshwa
Online crash games reward split-second decisions, yet players cannot verify that outcomes are fair and operators lack transparent ways to prove it. SkyCrash is a real-time, multiplayer, Aviator-style crash game, played with demo credits only, built to...
SmartHire: An AI Recruitment Platform
By: Ghadijah Kippie, Zanele Ndlovu, Tyson Siwela, Mzimasi Hlabe
Supervised By: Elsje Scott, Maureen Tanner
SmartHire is a web-based recruitment platform that uses AI to help recruiters screen job applications faster and more fairly. Reviewing hundreds of CVs by hand takes a lot of time and can lead to inconsistent decisions. SmartHire reads each CV, compares...
Stash Smart Locker
A Smart Locker Management System for Convenient, Secure and Flexible Parcel Collection
By: Michelle Scott-Emuakpor, Zeenat Adams, Kwethaba Dlamini, Jaeden Beukes
Supervised By: Grant Oosterwyk
With the continued growth of online shopping, parcel deliveries have become part of most of our everyday lives. This, however, has given rise to the need for secure and convenient delivery solutions. Missed deliveries as a result of limited collection...
String Conundrum
A Visual, Misconception-Targeted, and isiXhosa-Localised Tutor for Learning Python Strings
By: Hlomla Kuhlane, Luvuyo Matomela
Supervised By: Aslam Safla, Zola Mahlaza
Novice programmers often struggle to develop accurate mental models of Python strings, while existing tools provide limited support for string-specific misconceptions. String Conundrum is a web-based tutoring system developed through a...
TB Pulm: Automated Detection of Acid-Fast Bacilli in ZiehI—NeeIsen Sputum Smears for Tuberculosis
By: Tjeludo Mutsawehuni, Ashley Mawoyo
Tuberculosis diagnosis using Ziehl–Neelsen-stained sputum smear microscopy requires the identification of small and sparsely distributed acid-fast bacilli (AFB), creating a substantial visual search burden for laboratory professionals. The digitisation...
Team 14: Ctrl+Alt+Elite - SABC+ Actionable Insights Platform
By: Jaden Frey, Oluhle Gcolotela, Ebraheem Dien, Busisiwe Ndlovu
Supervised By: Maureen Tanner, Elsje Scott, Ridewaan Hanslo
South African public broadcasters face more competition from global streaming services. Although SABC+ keeps detailed records of what, when, and how long viewers watch, decision-makers rarely use this data for advertising, content choices, or retaining...
Team 6: AI Affiliate Marketing
By: Ellie Alsen, Tshegofatso Sebolai, Daniel Roberts, Eunice Umba
Supervised By: Nazreen Ryklief, Adrian Groening
Team Name: HexabyteTeam Number: Team 6 AI in Affiliate Marketing Compliance Checks Our project addresses the need for a reliable and efficient approach to monitoring compliance in affiliate marketing. The system aims to reduce the manual effort required...
TenView
Performance Management Platfrom
By: Suyant Maharaj, Ryan Badenhorst, Andiswa Shange, Zidan Patel
Organisations rely on performance data to evaluate employees, guide development and improve operational efficiency. However, fragmented reporting systems, delayed feedback and limited transparency often prevent employees and managers from turning this...
The PuzzleBox Screener
Spotting developmental needs early, one puzzle at a time.
By: Jess Spalding-Jones, Mihle Mpetukana, Keira Clarence, Kgoshigadi Matebane
Supervised By: Natsai Ganyani
PuzzleBox is an early childhood developmental screening initiative serving under resourced communities. However, traditional paper based screenings are slow to review, prone to administrative delays, and difficult to scale in areas where specialists are...
Thuso: A Community-Verified Incident Reporting Platform
By: Kelebogile Moima, Akhona Mahlaba, Attiyah Memela, Nosipho Mbatha
In South African communities, news of crime, fires and hazards spreads quickly through WhatsApp groups and social media, but it is often unverified, exaggerated or out of date. Residents struggle to tell what is really happening on their street, and help...
Training CNNs to Spot TB Cording
Automated classification of M. tuberculosis cording in ZOE microscopy images
By: Caitlin Delport, Diyal Kara, Ethan Gounder
Supervised By: Patrick Marais, Mandy Mason
Tuberculosis (TB) is one of the world’s deadliest infectious diseases. When TB bacteria grow under a microscope, virulent strains often form long, rope-like bundles called “cords”, while less virulent ones grow in loose clumps. Spotting cording is a...
Transformers for Offline Reinforcement learning
TORL
By: Joshua Lockhart, David Schmidt
Supervised By: Asad Jeewa, Patrick Marais
Offline RL learns policies from fixed datasets without environment interaction or exploration. Transformers such as the Decision Transformer (DT) reframe offline RL as a sequence modelling problem. This project investigates the computational cost to...
TrustLink
Blockchain-Enabled Digital Credential Management System
By: Leigh Jansen, Kai Trentini, Tinomudai Bopoto, Glen Okech
TrustLink is a blockchain-enabled digital credential management system designed to modernise how academic credentials are issued, managed, shared and verified. Traditional academic credential processes often rely on manual administration, physical...
UCTTM: Seeing every step of a Turing machine, and marking it automatically.
By: Nhliziyo Sibiya , Katlego Komane
Supervised By: Sonia Berman
Turing machines are hard to learn because their execution is invisible, and hard to assess because a class’s machines can’t be marked automatically. UCTTM is a two-part platform. Students draw a machine in the app and step through its computation....
UNIFY: Digital Student Credential Platform
Verifiable credentials for students
By: Lusa Stofile, Joshua Wood, Kumbirai Chari, Caleb Voskuil
UNIFY is a digital identity platform that allows students to securely store and share their verified student credentials using blockchain technology. It aims to make student verification faster and easier, while reducing reliance on static documents and...
VarsityMarketplace- the student marketplace
Your campus marketplace, simplified
By: Zeenat Banderker, Samieyah Khan, Ashleigh Gordon, Neo Chabedi
Supervised By: Walter Uys, Raihan Mohamed
UCT students buy and sell second-hand textbooks, electronics and furniture through WhatsApp and Facebook groups. These channels were built for chat, not commerce: listings are buried within hours, there is no search or filtering, nobody is verified, and...
VeldWatch
Teaching people to care
By: Grace McKinnell, Rose Qezu, Phenyo Seleka, Amaarah Toffar
Rustlers Valley Farm is an Eastern Free State regenerative livestock farm which ordinally rotates cattle, chickens and pigs, through 75 grazing camps so that each camp can rest and the soil recover. This model depends on proof: certification bodies,...
Vibe Match
AI-Powered Emotional Alignment for Brand-Creator Partnerships
By: Kendall Sables, Karabo Motsileng, Skye Nagel, Gabriel Chetty
Supervised By: Elsje Scott, Maureen Tanner, Ridewaan Hanslo
Brands pay content creators to promote their products, but choosing the right creator is still done by hand. A brand manager watches a few videos and goes with their gut. This is slow, subjective and can’t scale. Follower counts and engagement rates also...
VRASTRO
Rendering Annotation Display in Virtual Reality for Radio Astronomy
By: Liyabona Mpapela, Tshepang Mokoto
Supervised By: James Gain, Lucia Marchetti
Researchers working with volumetric radio astronomy data annotate regions of interest to isolate sources for analysis. In iDaVIE, animmersive virtual reality tool for exploring three-dimensional astronomical data cubes, annotations are defined as...
VRParticle: Enhancing Virtual Environments for Astronomical Exploration
Navigation, Parameterisation and Level-of-Detail for particle-based iDaVIE
By: Alex Green, Yi-Xuan Wu, Daniel Sardinha
Supervised By: James Gain, Lucia Marchetti
Virtual reality lets astronomers step inside complex three-dimensional data, but its everyday usability is held back by three common problems: users become disoriented without familiar spatial cues, controlling the system often relies on menus borrowed...
VRPLAY
Eliciting PLAY in Virtual Reality
By: Devin Marais, Karla Alaro, Zenande Mdludlu
Supervised By: James Gain
VRPLAY asks whether virtual reality can activate PLAY, one of the seven primary emotion systems that Jaak Panksepp identified in the mammalian brain. PLAY is the circuit behind rough-and-tumble games and the social joy that comes with them. It matters...
WeatherFLOW
Spatio-temporal graph neural networks for 48-hour weather prediction across 32 South African weather stations
By: Praise Jaravani, Zoleka Fuyana, Génevieve Chikwanha
Supervised By: Deshen Moodley, Zola Mahlaza
Weather at one station depends on its own recent past and on what is happening at nearby stations. Spatio-temporal graph neural networks (STGNNs) capture both at once by treating each weather station as a node in a graph whose edges carry the strength of...
Zimele QMS
Zimele Quotation System by Team 20
By: Umar Abrahams, Uzair Manuel, Salahuddien Gabier, Zeetha Gain
Supervised By: Walter Uys
Zimele QMS: Quotes in minutes, not days Abstract · INF3003W Team 20 · Sponsor: Zimele Technologies Zimele Technologies, a Cape Town SAP Gold Partner, runs a training centre whose quotations were built by hand in Word and Excel. This caused calculation...
Research Groups
Artificial Intelligence Research Unit (AIRU)
By: Henok Moges, Ahana Maharaj, Jack Montgomery, Mazwi Kelvin Nyadzayo
Supervised By: Deshen Moodley
The Artificial Intelligence Research Unit (AIRU), based in the Department of Computer Science in the Faculty of Science at the University of Cape Town conducts foundational and applied research across a broad range of AI areas. These include machine...
C3SA
Cybersecurity
By: Tendani Chimboza
C3SA is part of the global constellation of regional cybersecurity capacity research centres which includes the Global Cyber Security Capacity Centre (GCSCC) and Oceania Cyber Security Centre (OCSC). C3SA is a consortium between Research ICT Africa...
CapeNLG group
Natural language generation
By: Zola Mahlaza, Daniel Holgate, Phuthang Makhupane, Nana Kwabena Opoku-Acheampong, Dennis Kiptanui Too, Atshilaho Nethathe
This is a showcase of some of the work done by members of the CapeNLG research group. We primarily work on natural language processing, with particular focus on natural language generation for low-resourced African languages. In this exhibit, we will...
Collaborative Visual Computing Laboratory
By: James Gain, Liza Siurina, James Burness, Maurice Bossekota Gbaya, Johan Bontes, Zebiao Wu, Jai Om, Dennis Kiptanui Too, Mazano Kuhudzai, Daniel Gordon, Tobias Kramer, Tumelo Matobo, Shivaskar Naidoo, Kayuri Chetty
The Collaborative Visual Computing Laboratory conducts research in Computer Graphics, Computer Vision, Machine Learning, and Virtual Reality. It is led by Prof. James Gain and A/Prof. Patrick Marais.
Computational Vaccine Research
By: Nicholas Yerolemou , Farzana Haque Toma, Carla Coetzee, Unays Bhad
Supervised By: Michelle Kuttel, Neil Ravenscroft, Nicole Richardson
Our research group combines computational modelling and software engineering to study bacterial glycobiology and advance structural bioinformatics. We focus on two primary directions: Computational Glycobiology & Vaccine Design: We perform molecular...
Digital Libraries Laboratory
By: Hussein Suleman, Claytone Sikasote, Folasade Adedeji, Nkiruka Iwundu, Wilson Kalambo, Jivashi Nagar
Supervised By: Hussein Suleman
The Digital Libraries Laboratory conducts research and provides support for information management problems with particular emphasis on the poor countries of the world with their associated unique constraints, such as cultural differences, limited...
Evolutionary Machine Learning Group
By: Geoff Nitschke, Sian Heesom-Green, Bilal Aslan, Max Van Veen, Oliver Foxcroft, Reece Van Der Bank, Phiwumusa Ngidi
Current research in the Evolutionary Machine Learning group focuses on several topics including: Swarm Robotics, Hybrid Artificial Life, Neural Complexity, Evolutionary design and Collective Behaviour Transfer.
Hasso Plattner Institute
By: Craig Balfour, Popyeni Kautondokwa, Godfrey Haonga, Nomonde Khalo
Supervised By: Melissa Densmore
The Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI) research collaboration brings together PhD researchers from Computer Science and Information Systems at UCT. This exhibit presents their work, shown on the posters from the HPI Progress Symposium.
Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) Lab
By: Rachel Oluwatuyi, Sierra Van Riel, Yazeed Adams, Sabiha Shaikh, Ella THORBURN
Supervised By: Melissa Densmore
The Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) Lab at the Department of Computer Science, University of Cape Town (UCT), promotes community-based innovation, connecting communities and advancing human-centred technology design. Our research sits at the...
Teaching Robots to ACT
Teleoperation for Robot Learning: From Demonstrations to Data
By: Sicelukwanda Zwane
Supervised By: Sicelukwanda Zwane
Data collection is a critical first step in supervised learning. For a model to generalise to new situations, its training data must adequately represent the conditions it will encounter at test time. Achieving this in robotics is challenging: collecting...
The Centre for Information Technology and National Development in Africa (CITANDA)
CITANDA is a research unit housed within the Department of Information Systems at the University of Cape Town.
By: Ronald Chiwariro
Supervised By: Salah Kabanda, Dirk Snyman
CITANDA is the vehicle through which research by the department and interdisciplinary collaborators is branded and funded. It is a conduit for drawing together researchers. CITANDA aims to bring together researchers, projects, funders, and programmes...
University of Cape Town Natural Language Processing Group
UCT NLP Group
By: Natalie Alexander, Claytone Sikasote, Anri Lombard, Ruba Osman
Supervised By: Jan Buys, Francois Meyer
We do research in natural language processing, with a focus on developing language resources and language models for low-resource South African and African languages. For models and datasets, please visit: https://huggingface.co/uctnlp.
Industry Partners
Collaborating with leading organizations to drive innovation
Deloitte
A special thank you to Deloitte for sponsoring Showcase 2026.
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Derivco
A special thank you to Derivco for sponsoring Showcase 2026.
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Entelect
A special thank you to Entelect for sponsoring Showcase 2026.
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FNB
A special thank you to FNB for sponsoring Showcase 2026.
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impact.com
A special thank you to impact.com for sponsoring Showcase 2026.
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Tsogo Sun Digital
A special thank you to Tsogo Sun Digital for sponsoring Showcase 2026.
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