I'm the Chief Technology Officer for South Africa's flagship Digital Identity company: DIDx!
I have an M.Eng (E&E), with specialisation in telecomms and antenna design, with professional experience as a data scientist, big data engineer, AI engineer, and senior software engineer. I'm passionate about leveraging technology to solve real-world problems and make a positive impact.
For my masters I designed and built a direction finding antenna system intended for the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) precursor project, MeerKAT. The challenge was to operate over the very wide bandwidth of the telescopes, and detect electromagnetic noise that would interfere with their radioastronomy measurements. This involved a unique antenna design, made possible with 3D-printing and computer simulation, with the cherry on the cake being a novel direction finding algorithm that allowed it to work over a very wide band. That was fun!
Changing gears I then worked professionally on a variety of software and data science projects, including:
- Life Healthcare: Statistical analysis of medical items used in their operations
- Sasol: Data analysis and forecasting of petrol consumption using neural networks
- Retail Market Basket Analysis: Scalable solutions for finding frequent patterns and item associations in very large datasets for Pepkor, The Foschini Group, and Kaap Agri; included weather data correlation
- XDS Credit Scoring System: Redesigned a credit scoring system for a leading credit bureau in South Africa, migrating from a ridiculously outdated and unmaintainable SAS and SQL system, to a scalable Scala and Spark solution
- ID Scan: Full pipeline design including image normalization, OCR, barcode reading, facial recognition, and integration with the Sovrin network for SSI and Verified Credentials; developed liveness check capabilities and advanced computer vision applications using Detectron2, custom Mask-RCNN models and OpenCV
- and more!
My main programming languages are Scala and Python.
I'm a self-ascribed polymath and I value intellectual curiosity and making time for exploring new ideas. Primary interests have always been in the abstract world of mathematics, number theory, philosophy, etc. But by virtue of popular demand, I've been pulled into the real world and spent far more time learning physics, engineering, programming, and other forms of modern alchemy.
- Master's Thesis: Wideband Direction Finding of RFI for MeerKAT (link)
- Design, EM simulation, manufacturing (using 3D-printing), and field measurements of a wideband, 4-antenna system for direction finding of radiofrequency interference; to protect MeerKAT / SKA radio-astronomy telescopes from noise.
Feel free to reach out to me via:
Let's connect and collaborate! 🚀