Humanities

Optentia research starts with the community

The 1990s concept of “giving psychology away” has come to life at Optentia in 2017 where research is being done with the purpose of “giving science away”. For the Optentia research focus area, the community is the starting point for any research project.  “At Optentia, we do research together with the community,” says its director, Prof Ian Rothmann.  
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Radiyah’s brave road to success

Radiyah Saloojee is living proof that an attitude of gratitude and thanksgiving not only serves as a road marker on the journey to success, but also a stepping stone to accomplishment. For this 24-year old alumna of the North-West University’s (NWU’s) campus in Vanderbijlpark, each day represents a new opportunity to excel and in doing so, making the world a better place.
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Radiyah’s brave road to success

Radiyah Saloojee is living proof that an attitude of gratitude and thanksgiving not only serves as a road marker on the journey to success, but also a stepping stone to accomplishment. For this 24-year old alumna of the North-West University’s (NWU’s) campus in Vanderbijlpark, each day represents a new opportunity to excel and in doing so, making the world a better place.
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Dothraki and other sub-cultural languages – the focus of a unique PhD study

“Me zisosh disse”. It is just a flesh wound. This would certainly be good news if you were wounded and one of the native speakers of the language used in this sentence. It is Dothraki and it is the fantasy language that was created for the television series Game of Thrones. Today, the language is spoken by a significant number of people who belong to a sub-cultural group in society.
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A South African web-based platform for speech transcription

With 11 official languages in South Africa, finding an effective yet affordable way to transcribe speech to text was never going to be easy, but that is set to change with some innovative thinking from researchers who are creating an open source web-based platform for speech transcription.

Researchers from North-West University’s Multilingual Speech Technologies (MuST) and a young South African company called INTSYST have developed a prototype speech transcription platform that will have applications for both the public and private sectors.

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