Human Language Technologies (HLT) - Current group members

Aditi Sharma is a Researcher in the HLT Research Group. She obtained her B Eng: Computer Engineering degree in 2005 from the University of Pretoria (UP) and is currently enrolled for the Masters in Technology Management programme at UP. In the HLT Research Group her work involves research in the field of User Interface Design (specifically voice interfaces) and Human Factors thereof, for the developing world, as well as relevant HLT-based applications and Human Computer Interaction aspects for this part of the world.

Research interests: Human Computer Interaction, User Interface Design, Usability Testing and Human Factors.

Publications

Carmen Moors is the research group’s Office Manager. She manages the group's administrative systems and co-ordinates specific projects. She holds a BTech in Office Management and Technology (TUT) and is currently busy with a BA in Human and Social Science with specialisation in Development Studies. She has a keen interest in all spheres of development, supported by her previous working experience and current field of study.

Christiaan Kuun is a Project Engineer in the HLT research group. He obtained his B.Eng degree in Computer Engineering at the University of Pretoria in 2005. His current work revolves around managing projects within the HLT research group and the SANReN Project. Apart from his work, he takes a keen interest in surfing, politics, business and public speaking.

Elsie Mosenye is a Group Assistant in the HLT Unit. She obtained her National Diploma in Commercial Administration from Technikon SA (TSA) in 2002, and completed her B-tech in Management in 2007 from the University of South Africa (UNISA). Elsie has been HLT since September 2008.

Febe de Wet is a researcher at the Stellenbosch University Centre for Language and Speech Technology. She joined the HLT research group in January 2009 by means of a secondment agreement between Stellenbosch University and the Meraka Institute. Febe devotes her Meraka time to: supervision of PhD students, research on the use of ASR for pronunciation training in CALL and the development of a large vocabulary ASR system for Afrikaans. Febe holds a PhD from the Radboud University in Nijmegen (The Netherlands).

Research Interests: Statistical pattern recognition, automatic speech recognition, South African English and the application of automatic speech recognition in oral proficiency assessment and computer assisted language learning.

Georg Schlunz was appointed in the HLT research group on a Masters studentship from 5 January 2009. He completed a BEngSc in Computer Systems at the University of Stellenbosch. His areas of work are in Text-to-speech (TTS), since his Masters research topic is in Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques for TTS.

Research Interests: Speech and Language Processing as a whole – from an engineering perspective (the development of systems around ASR, TTS and Machine Translation).

Jama Ndwe is a PhD student in HLT. He obtained a B.S. (computer engineering) at Wentworth Institute of Technology in 1995 and MSc (computer science) at Rhodes University in 2002. He has worked as an engineer at Telkom and a faculty member at the Walter Sisulu University. His research is on usability engineering of speech interfaces.

Research interests: Usability engineering, ergonomics, and cognitive science.

Publications

Karen Calteaux has been appointed as operations manager of the HLT research group from June 2009. She received her DLitt et Phil in Sociolinguistics from the Rand Afrikaans University for research relating to language variation in Black urban communities. Her earlier degrees, also from RAU, were obtained in the African Languages Department. Karen has been involved in language-related research and development projects since 1988, having managed a countrywide research project on standard and non-standard African languages for the HSRC from 1989 to 1996. After travelling extensively abroad, Karen managed the projects of the status language planning focus area of the Pan South African Language Board from 2000 to 2001. For the past eight years, Karen has been responsible for establishing and managing the language unit of the South African Police Service, with the aim of improving service delivery through the rendering of a professional multilingual language service.

Professional interests: personal excellence, team excellence, management excellence, service excellence.

Marelie Davel is a principal researcher in the HLT research group. She received her PhD in Electronic Engineering from the University of Pretoria for research related to pronunciation modelling during the localisation of HLT systems. Her earlier degrees (in Computer Science and Mathematics) were obtained from the University of Stellenbosch and the University of London. Marelie has been involved in research and development projects at the CSIR since 1995. In 2002, Marelie spent a year as a visiting scientist with the speech group at Carnegie Mellon University, before returning to South Africa to assist with the establishment of the HLT Research Group. She was the group’s research group leader from 2003 to 2008.

Research interests: language localisation; acoustic and language model adaptation; bootstrapping; grapheme-to-phoneme prediction.

Mpho Kgampe is an intern linguist in the HLT research group. She is a BTech Students at Tshwane University of Technology in language practice.

Publications

Mpho Raborife is currently pursuing her honours degree in computational linguistics at the University of the Witwatersrand, with her final script focusing on tone modeling for TTS. She was a bursar in the HLT group, and joined the group full-time in January 2010 as a Master's student.

Neil Kleynhans obtained his B.Eng in Electronic Engineering at the University of Pretoria in 2003. He is working in the HLT research group where he is busy with his honours degree, with an aim to achieve his masters degree. He is planning to focus his research on speaker verification for e-Gov services.

Research interest: Pattern recognition

Nic de Vries obtained a National Diploma from the Cape Technikon in 1993 after which he worked as a technician until 1999 in various roles. He obtained a BEng in Electrical and Electronic Engineering (with Computer Science) from the University of Stellenbosch in 2004. Between 2004 and 2009 he served in the roles of Junior Engineer (Process Control and Instrumentation) and later Production Superintendent for Anglo Platinum.

Nic joined the Meraka HLT group in January 2010 as part of a Masters Studentship to pursue studies in this field. He is currently busy with his MEng research as well as projects conducted by the Meraka HLT group; including Android Software development. His research interests are: Automatic speech recognition, Language resource development, Pattern recognition, Mobile software development and Teaching

Olwethu Qwabe was appointed in the HLT research group as a social sciences intern from 5 January 2009. She completed a BTech in Information Technology at the Walter Sisulu University. Prior to Meraka, Olwethu worked as an intern at SITA where she trained a systems developer, she also worked as a Junior Business Analyst in the finance sector. Since joining Meraka, she has been working with the LWAZI application selection team on identifying and implementing the projects’ pilot.

Research Interests: Research on Human Computer Interaction and Bridging the Information Gap.

Richard Carlson is a research associate of the HLT Research Group. He obtained a degree in Computer Science from the University of Texas in 1996. He went on to work on games and multimedia applications until joining Gracenote in 2000 where he worked on high transaction music information servers until 2004. Since then he has been working on low-cost open source software solutions that help increase access to information for users in developing regions. Currently based in the USA, Richard is a senior developer working with the group on a full-time basis.

Tebogo Gumede is a Social Scientist with a background in Health systems and health policy research. Her previous work include the evaluation of the Prevention of Mother to Child Transmission of HIV/AIDS (PMTCT), investigation of backstreet abortions post the passing of CTOP act, investigation of health cost coping strategies of rural households, investigating the surviving strategies of health care workers in the wake of increased work loads and teaching qualitative research methods. She is currently the team leader for application selection teams at the MERAKA institute.

Publications

Thipe Modipa was appointed in the HLT research group on a PhD studentship from 5 January 2009. He completed an MSc in Computer Science at the University of Limpopo. He is currently searching for a relevant topic for his PhD.

Research Interests: Automatic Speech Recognition, Pronunciation of Proper names.

Tshepo Moganedi was appointed in the HLT research group as an intern in both Software Development and Testing. He obtained a BSc degree in computer science in 2008 from the University of Limpopo.

Research Interests: Human language technology, Speech recognition into the open source telephony system and Interactive voice response application.

Willem van der Walt is a researcher in ICT for disabilities. He completed a programming course through Armscor and worked for Datanet Microland to assist with the reselling of speech synthesisers. Thereafter, he also provided valuable input to the government's open-source workgroup responsible for determining the strategy for South Africa.

He was also responsible for developing eSpeak for Afrikaans and Sepedi -it uses a different synthesis method from other open-source TTS engines and produces clear articulation. More recently, Van der Walt ported eSpeak on Symbian, the operating system used by certain mobile phones, which has made the localisation of voices possible in the mobile domain.

Willem's current research on notetaker is part of the National Accessibility Programme (NAP), a five-year initiative led by the CSIR Meraka Institute, working together with the representative group of disability persons organisations in South Africa to develop information and communications technology (ICT) resources for persons with disabilities, regardless of the nature of the disability or the language used by the individual.