Inaugural Lecture: Professor Hussein Suleman

Dear colleagues and students

The Vice-Chancellor’s Inaugural Lecture series, a central part of the university’s academic life, is among some of the events we have had to reimagine as we navigate a new environment. These lectures are held to commemorate inaugural lecturers’ appointment to full professorship. They serve as a platform for the academic delivering the lecture to share their body of research with members of the wider university community and the general public in an accessible way.

I am pleased to invite you to the next Vice-Chancellor’s Inaugural Lecture, which will be presented online by Professor Hussein Suleman. The lecture, titled “Computer Science at times of crisis: reflecting on societal drivers for software and algorithm design”, is both relevant and timely.

Suleman is head of department and professor in Computer Science in the School of Information Technology. His research is situated within the Digital Libraries Laboratory and the Information Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D).

The lecture will present some key problems and recent research in the context of computer science in general, and digital archiving tools in particular. Professor Suleman’s main research interests are in digital libraries, ICT4D, African language information retrieval, cultural heritage preservation, internet technology and educational technology. He has in the past worked extensively on architecture, scalability and interoperability issues related to digital library systems.

Professor Suleman’s recent research has a growing emphasis on the relationship between low resource environments and architectures. This has evolved into a focus on societal development and its alignment with digital libraries and information retrieval. He is currently collaborating with colleagues in archiving and curation to develop a proof-of-concept low-resource software toolkit for robust long-term archiving.

He has worked closely with international and national partnerships for metadata archiving, including the Open Archives Initiative and the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations.

Please join us online for this lecture.

When: Wednesday, 30 September 2020

Time: 18:00 SAST

Platform: Microsoft Teams

Please register online to attend the lecture.

Sincerely

Professor Mamokgethi Phakeng
Vice-Chancellor

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