Keynote Speakers

Keynote Title:

Navigating the AI Renaissance: Strategies for Thriving as an Academic in the Age of Technological Titans

Bio:

Dr Turgay Celik received his second PhD degree from the University of Warwick, Coventry, U.K., in 2011. He is currently a Professor of Digital Transformation and the Director of the Wits Institute of Data Science at the School of Electrical and Information Engineering. He also leads the Digital Fabrication Lab at Wits, sponsored by a Turkish State Agency. He was the founding director of the DSI’s National E-science Postgraduate Teaching and Training Platform. He developed several Honours and Masters’s programmes in big data, data science, artificial intelligence, and computer science in the Faculty of Science at Wits. He is the national coordinator of BRICS NU ITG on Computer Science and Information Security. He is involved in the Autonomous Vehicle Project of the Department of Transport. His research interests include theoretical and applied signal and image processing, computer vision, (explainable) artificial intelligence, data-driven optimal control, robotics, (health) data science, cybersecurity and remote sensing. He is involved with several national and international projects, from health to mining to climate change. His publications have received more than 7000 citations on Google Scholar Index with an h-index of 40 and an i-10 index of 76. He has been listed in the “Top 2% Scientists Worldwide Identified by Stanford University.” He is ranked 6th among the top 8 computer scientists in South Africa by Research.com. He is an Associate Editor of IEEE Access, IET Electronics Letters, IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing, Springer Signal, Image and Video Processing, and BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making. He was recently appointed as the Subject Editor-in-Chief of the “Information and Communication” stream of IET Electronics Letters.