Prof Rupert Gouws is presently a full professor in the School of Electrical, Electronic and Computer Engineering at the North-West University (NWU), Potchefstroom. He holds a Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Electronic Engineering. After completion of his studies, he joined a company Energy Cybernetics where he was involved with energy audits, measurement and verification activities and energy related research activities. He received an Institutional Teaching Excellence Award from the NWU and was involved in various undergraduate modules for all year groups.

Etienne Barnard obtained his PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in 1989, writing his thesis on “Neural Networks for Scene Analysis”. He has since been active in research and development in pattern recognition and speech processing. He has held several academic positions and has also worked in industry. Barnard has co-authored more than 250 refereed scientific publications on topics including pattern recognition, neural networks, speech recognition and human-computer interaction.

Marelie H. Davel is a Research Professor in the Faculty of Engineering, North-West University (NWU), Potchefstroom, South Africa.

She is the director of the MUST Deep Learning research group and holds the national SARChI chair in Deep Learning. She is also a node representative of the Centre for Artificial Intelligence Research (CAIR), an NITheCS (National Institute for Theoretical and Computational Sciences) Associate and a National Research Foundation (NRF) rated researcher.

George van Schoor was born in Cape Town, South Africa on November 13, 1963. He received the B Eng, M.Eng and D.Eng degrees in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from the Rand Afrikaans University (RAU), South Africa in 1985, 1987 and 2001 respectively.

Albertus Stephanus Jacobus Helberg obtained his B.Eng (Elektr) cum laude in 1989, his M.Ing (Elektr) cum laude in 1991 from RAU. He completed his D.Eng at the same institute.