Students from the North-West University’s (NWU) Faculty of Engineering and Faculty of Natural and Agricultural Sciences recently showed what they are made of when they defeated their peers from other universities.
This happened during the South African Telecommunications, Networks and Applications Conference (SATNAC) held in Ballito, KwaZulu-Natal where NWU master's degree students won two of the three Best Paper awards.
Four students from the Telkom Centre of Excellence, hosted by the NWU (Telkom CoE @ NWU), presented results from their work to both industry and academia during the technical sessions of the conference. The highlight of the event was during the closing session when the three Best Paper awards were announced, and the top two positions went to the NWU.
The SATNAC conference is the flagship event of the Telkom Centres of Excellence programme and the largest peer-reviewed South African conference in telecommunications technology.
It is widely attended by leaders from government, industry and academia. In 2019, the Minister of Higher Education, Science and Technology, as well as the Minister of Communication and Digital Technologies informed attendees about government’s latest imperatives and policies regarding the role of telecommunication in training, and economic and social upliftment in South Africa.
The group chief executive officer of Telkom presented a new growth framework for telecommunications in South Africa. Various industry leaders presented their vision on the role of telecommunications technology in South Africa to the large conference audience as well as the viewers of Business Day TV.
Jacques Mouton from Engineering received the Best Paper award for his paper titled “Performance Evaluation of a Clustering-Based Automatic Modulation Classification Method”, that was supervised by Dr Melvin Ferreira and Prof Albert Helberg. Jacques' paper presented an elegant and fast way of automatically classifying digital transmissions under noisy conditions without requiring a prior machine-learning training phase.
Jaco du Toit from Natural and Agricultural Sciences presented the second-placed paper “Heuristic Data Augmentation for Improved Human Activity Recognition”, supervised by Prof Tiny du Toit and Prof Hennie Kruger. Jaco demonstrated the significant advantages of augmenting additional information from images and using this to improve the automatic recognition and differentiation between standing and sitting poses of people in images.
Other students of the Telkom CoE @ NWU that presented papers at the SATNAC 2019 conference were Nicolaas Maree and Tipharah van Dyk. Nicolaas presented a paper on the topic “Affective Computing and Deep Learning to Perform Sentiment Analysis”, compiled under supervision of Prof Lynette Drevin, Prof Tiny du Toit and Hennie Kruger.
Tipharah van Dyk, an MEng (Computer Engineering) student under supervision of Prof Albert Helberg and Dr Melvin Ferreira, presented a paper, “Invertibility Testing as an Improvement on the Decodability of Matrix Network Coding” to acclaim and was invited to comment on her research experiences during radio and television interviews.
“I would like to recognise all parties that supported these achievements. We are proud of the way you represented the NWU at SATNAC. I realize that these achievements are a result of hard work on the parts of both students and supervisors,” Prof Helberg said.
Students and academics from the NWU’s Faculty of Engineering and Faculty of Natural and Agricultural Sciences recently attended the South African Telecommunications, Networks and Applications Conference. They are from left to right Prof Albert Helberg, Herman Blackie, Jacques Mouton, Dr Melvin Ferreira, Jaco du Toit, Nicolaas Maree and Tipharah van Dyk.
