Tshilidzi Marwala


Tshilidzi Marwala is a South African mechanical engineer and computer scientist. He became Professor at the University of the Witwatersrand in 2003 and also chairperson of System and Control Engineering in South Africa. He has previously worked at the CSIR and for South African Breweries.
He is currently Vice-Chancellor and Principal of the University of Johannesburg with effect from 1 January 2018. He was previously the Deputy Vice Chancellor for Research and Internationalization as well as the Dean of Engineering at the University of Johannesburg, a Professor of Electrical Engineering, the Carl and Emily Fuchs Chair of Systems and Control Engineering as well as the sarchi Chair of Systems Engineering at the University of the Witwatersrand.

Early life and education

Tshilidzi Marwala was born at Duthuni Village in the Tshivhase region of the Limpopo Province on 28 July 1971. He attended the Dimani Agricultural High School and matriculated from the Mbilwi Secondary School in 1989. In his matriculation year, Marwala entered and won the National Youth Science Olympiad and was sent to the United Kingdom to attend the London International Youth Science Fortnight.
The youthful Marwala used the opportunity to visit the University College of London and Oxford University where he gained an appreciation of the importance of engineering and science for the development of modern society.
Determined to make a difference in his own country, he made up his mind to follow a career in engineering, but having missed the deadline for university study, he wasted no time in enrolling in a post-matric programme at St.John's College in Johannesburg. The following year, Marwala was awarded a scholarship by the Educational Opportunities Council to study Mechanical Engineering at Case Western Reserve University in the USA where he graduated Magna Cum Laude.
In 1995 he was employed at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research as a project engineer. Marwala studied at the University of Pretoria and obtained his Masters in Mechanical Engineering in 1996. Between 1997 and 2000, Marwala went to the University of Cambridge to do a PhD in Artificial Intelligence, after which he became a post-doctoral research associate at the University of London's Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine where he worked on intelligence software

Career

Marwala was previously the Deputy Vice Chancellor for Research and Internationalisation as well as the Dean of Engineering at the University of Johannesburg, a Professor of Electrical Engineering, the Carl and Emily Fuchs Chair of Systems and Control Engineering as well as the SARChI Chair of Systems Engineering at the University of the Witwatersrand. He was the Chair of the Local Loop Unbundling Committee as well as the non-executive director of the State Information Technology Agency Ltd.
He has served as a trustee of the Nelson Mandela Foundation and on boards of Nedbank, International University Sports Federation, EOH Ltd, Denel and City Power Johannesburg. He was a councillor of Statistics South Africa as well as the National Advisory Council on Innovation. He has served as a trustee of the Bradlow Foundation and the Carl and Emily Fuchs Foundation. He is the recipient of the Order of Mapungubwe and his doctoral student Fulufhelo Nelwamondo also received this order. He was the first African Engineer to be awarded the President Award by the National Research Foundation of South Africa.
One of the books he co-authored on modelling interstate conflict has been translated into Chinese by the National Defense Industry Press. He is a fellow of TWAS, The World Academy of Sciences, Academy of Science of South Africa and African Academy of Sciences as well as a senior member of the IEEE and a distinguished member of the Association for Computing Machinery. His work and opinion have appeared in media such as New Scientist, Time Magazine, The Economist, CNN, BBC, Rhodes House and Oxford Union. In 2016 Tshilidzi Marwala delivered the Bernard Price Memorial Lecture in South Africa. With Stephen Hawking and Guy Laliberté he was a judge of the YouTube Space Lab competition.

Academic contributions and research

Marwala's research interests include the theory and application of artificial intelligence to engineering, computer science, finance, economics, social science and medicine. Marwala has made fundamental contributions to engineering science including the development of the concept of pseudo-modal energies, proposing the theory of rational counterfactual thinking, rational opportunity cost and the theory of flexibly bounded rationality. Marwala was a co-inventor of the innovative methods of radiation imaging and with Megan Jill Russell as well as David Rubin the artificial larynx. Marwala also observed that the applicability of prospect theory depends on how much artificial intelligence is used to make a decision. He also observed that the more artificial intelligence is used for decision making the more efficient the markets become. For example, if all decisions are made by artificially intelligent machines then the markets will be fully rational. Marwala together with an Israeli researcher Daniel Muller mathematically solved the St. Peterburg paradox through the use of the concept of the relative net utility.
Marwala together with Evan Hurwitz proposed that there is less level of information asymmetry between two artificial intelligent agents than between two human agents and that the more artificial intelligence there is in the market the less is the volume of trades in the market. With Evan Hurwitz, Marwala was the first researcher to build software agents that are able to bluff on playing a game of poker. Tshilidzi Marwala and Evan Hurwitz in their book applied Lewis turning point theory to study the transition of the economy into automated production and identified an equilibrium point where it does not make economic sense to move human labor to automated machines.
Tshilidzi Marwala and Evan Hurwitz in their book observed that the advent of intelligent online buying platforms such as Amazon and technologies such as flexible manufacturing offers the opportunity for individualized supply and demand curves to be produced. They observed that these reduce the degree of arbitrage in the market, permit for individualized pricing for the same product and brings fairness and efficiency into the market. Furthermore, with Evan Hurwitz in their book they observed that decision making and predicting machines that are executed using artificial intelligence and other machine learning techniques reduce the biases and variances of the errors on decision making and thus make decisions in a closer manner to the conclusions of rational expectations theory than human decision makers. Marwala and Bo Xing have also studied the relationship between blockchain and artificial intelligence. Marwala in his response to Bill Gates has also brought to the attention of the difficulty of taxing robots given the fact that a great deal of the devices that we use have robotics features.

Visiting Appointments

In year 2006 to 2007 he was a visiting fellow at Harvard University and in the year 2007 to 2008, he was a visiting fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge. In year 2009 he was a Visiting Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley Center for Studies in Higher Education. He is an honorary professor at the Nanjing Tech University as well as the Central South University in The People's Republic of China.

Awards and honors

Marwala has received numerous awards and honors including winning the National Youth Science Olympiad and because of this he attended the 1989 London International Youth Science Forum, the Order of Mapungubwe, Case Western Reserve University Professional Achievement Award, The Champion of Research Capacity Development and Transformation at SA Higher Education Institutions, NSTF Award, Harvard-South Africa Fellowship, TWAS-AAS-Microsoft Award, and ACM Distinguished Member Award.

Publications

Patents

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