<a href="https://m.engineeringnews.co.za/article/gauteng-covid-19-visualisation-platform-enables-monitoring-prediction-2020-07-07" target="_blank">Gauteng Covid-19 visualisation platform enables monitoring, prediction</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;<font color="#6f6f6f">Creamer Media's Engineering News</font>

Gauteng Covid-19 visualisation platform enables monitoring, prediction - Creamer Media's Engineering News

<a href="https://www.itweb.co.za/content/wbrpOMgYEJrvDLZn" target="_blank">IBM machine learning tech helps Gauteng track COVID-19 infections</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;<font color="#6f6f6f">ITWeb</font>

IBM machine learning tech helps Gauteng track COVID-19 infections - ITWeb

University of the Witwatersrand

CTO at Qondo AI

WTax (VAT IT Group)

Chief Technology Officer

Vizia is an importer and distributor of consumer electronics in South Africa focusing on backup power and smart home products.

Vizia Tech

Co-Founder

Co-founded Tesserae an AI startup backup by Founders Factory Africa and Standard Bank. The goal was to build a large-scale data labelling platform that catered for the security and privacy needs the financial services industry.

Highlights as CTO

• 🌟 Attracting Talent - Recruited team of five A-player engineers including top-of-the-class graduates and full-stack devs with 10+ year of experience (on a startup’s budget).

• 🎽 Team Management - Lead day-to-day activities of engineering team including daily standups, retros, 1-on-1s, feature design, incident response.

•💡 Product Strategy - Responsible for product strategy and managing stakeholders client/business/tech.

• 🌴 DevOps - Increased frequency of software releases from weekly to daily by adopting trunk-based dev workflow.

• 🛠 Tech Stack - Python, Django, JavaScript, React, AWS, ECS, SageMaker, HuggingFace.

Tesserae

Co-Founder & CTO

Technical lead for the Applied AI Team where responsibilities included defining the research agenda and managing a team of software developers and ML engineers.

Technical Lead of Applied AI Team

Started out at IBM as an AI Research Scientist doing a combination of theoretical and applied research. The theoretical research focused mainly on algorithms for computer vision whereas the applied AI topics ranged from automated design of household solar systems to Covid-19 forecasting. 

• 👀 Computer Vision Research on Capsule Networks 

Conducted fundamental research into a new deep learning architecture called “Capsule Networks”, which was published at a top AI conference called IJCAI. The code comprised roughly 3000 lines written in Python and TensorFlow, and has been open-sourced on GitHub.

• 🌦 Climate Prediction using LSTMs

Applied recent deep learning techniques including CNNs and LSTMs to a new domain of seasonal climate prediction. The objective was to test whether these techniques can beat the long-established statistical methods. The results were published at a climate change workshop hosted at the premier AI conference called NeurIPS.

• 🩺 NLP for Medical Records

Built an NLP system for the NHLS to classify free-text pathology reports into ICD-10 categories. The pipeline included TF-IDF, and the final classifier was an ensemble of gradient boosted trees from LightGBM and XGBoost.

• 🏠 Web App for Designing Solar PV Systems 

Developed the backend algorithms and APIs for the EmpowerSolar web app (available here), which is a free online tool to automatically design solar PV systems. The APIs were built using Python Flask, with Swagger for the documentation.

• 🦠 Covid-19 Web App for Gauteng Province

Project lead for the IBM COVIZ Dashboard, which was the official Covid-19 dashboard used by Gauteng Province to monitor and respond to the pandemic. The dashboard includes algorithms to detect hotspots of outbreak, and predict the number of cases, hospitalisation and deaths in the province.

AI Research Scientist

Co-founded GreenMatters Engineering, a renewable energy consultancy focused on heating, lighting and solar PV. The main project was the design and implementation of pole-mounted solar PV systems to power CCTV cameras.

GREENMATTERS ENGINEERING

• 🔮 Customer Churn Model for Standard Bank

Designed and implemented a churn model to predict which customers are likely to leave the bank within the next 6 months. The model used logistic regression, neural networks, and feature reduction algorithms.

• 🩺 Hospital Utilisation for Netcare

Developed a platform to assess the utilisation of theatres and wards across the Netcare hospital network, and recommend ways to improve. The platform included data preprocessing in SQL and SAS, and an optimisation model built using QlikView.

• 🏦 Integrity Testing for Investec

Developed a system to validate the integrity of Investec’s interest calculations on personal accounts.

Deloitte South Africa

Data Scientist

• Lead software engineer tasked with design and implementation of bespoke software applications for the REDCap platform. REDCap is an open source data capture system which allows the user to build and manage online surveys and databases for medical research. 

• Responsibilities included managing a team of four engineers; allocating and monitoring the budget; and liaising between the client and the developers.

Ashley Gritzman