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.