Academic Positions - Data Science And Artificial Intelligence

Position purpose

• The Professor will establish and lead a focused research programme in African-language AI, natural-language processing and speech technologies. The appointee will work within Theme 1: African Data, Language and Knowledge Intelligence and collaborate across the Institute's data, responsible-AI and public-value platforms. The post requires disciplinary depth, interdisciplinary judgement and an ability to produce research that is scientifically rigorous, contextually valid and responsibly translated.

Minimum requirements

• A doctoral degree NQF 10 in either Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Data Science, Computational Linguistics, Electrical/Electronic or Computer or Communication or Information Engineering, or a closely related qualification to the theme.
• A strong record of research and/or academic leadership in African-Language AI, natural-language processing and speech technologies.
• Substantial and sustained period of distinguished academic experience in research and/or professional experience in higher education or a research environment with recognised standing in the field.
• A minimum of ten 10 DHET-accredited research outputs/creative outputs over the preceding three years, relevant to the discipline, with evidence of research quality and impact.
• Evidence of substantial record of successful supervision to completion of Master's and Doctoral students.
• Demonstrated success in securing competitive research funding i.e. grants, contracts or commissioned research.
• Evidence of leading multidisciplinary teams and building national/international research collaborations.

Theme-specific expertise

• African-language NLP and speech: isiZulu and other African-language text, speech recognition and synthesis, translation, code-switching, dialect variation and culturally grounded evaluation;
• Low-resource and multilingual machine learning: transfer, self-supervised, few-shot, active and multimodal learning under limited labelled data and compute; Language and knowledge intelligence: knowledge graphs, information retrieval, foundation-model adaptation, multimodal archives and community- or institutionally grounded knowledge systems; Benchmark and corpus leadership: ethically governed datasets, transparent annotation protocols, benchmark tasks and reproducible evaluation for African languages.

Key responsibilities

• Develop and sustain an internationally visible programme of research aligned to the assigned Institute theme and the Institute's five-year research agenda.
• Produce high-quality peer-reviewed outputs, research software, datasets, methods, policy contributions and/or responsible innovation outputs, as appropriate to the field.
• Attract competitive external research funding and develop accountable partnerships with African and international universities, government, industry, civil society and communities.
• Supervise and develop Master's and Doctoral candidates and mentor postdoctoral fellows and emerging researchers.
• Contribute to interdisciplinary research methods training, postgraduate seminars and selected teaching or curriculum development in relevant DUT academic programmes, as agreed with the Institute's Director and participating faculties.
• Apply rigorous research ethics, privacy, security, data governance, reproducibility, model documentation and responsible-AI requirements throughout the research lifecycle.
• Participate in Institute planning, project stage gates, peer review, reporting, community or industry engagement, and the translation of validated research into public, policy, professional or commercial value.

Ideal / additional recommendations

• An NRF rating or equivalent recognised international research standing.
• A record of building interdisciplinary research platforms, laboratories, datasets or research software with sustainable governance.
• The candidate's qualifications, publications, supervision record and current research programme must demonstrate substantive alignment with the advertised specialisation; incidental use of data analysis or generic AI tools will not, on its own, constitute sufficient alignment.
• Provide intellectual leadership for the Institute's African-language AI portfolio and help establish the KwaZulu-Natal Data and Language Commons.
• Build sustained collaboration with language scholars, communities, public institutions and technology partners so that datasets and systems reflect linguistic meaning, consent, provenance and benefit.
• Lead internationally competitive grants and postgraduate programmes that generate both fundamental methodological advances and practical language technologies.

Position 2

• Professor: Trustworthy AI Assurance, Robustness, Privacy and Security
• Theme 2: Trustworthy, Responsible and Human-Centred AI
• Reference Number: 30002784
• Status of Position: Permanent
• Campus: Durban University of Technology; multi-campus and partner-facing responsibilities as required

Position purpose

• The Professor will establish and lead a focused research programme in Trustworthy AI assurance, robustness, privacy and security. The appointee will work within Theme 2: Trustworthy, Responsible and Human-Centred AI and collaborate across the Institute's data, responsible-AI and public-value platforms. The post requires disciplinary depth, interdisciplinary judgement and an ability to produce research that is scientifically rigorous, contextually valid and responsibly translated.

Minimum requirements

• A doctoral degree NQF 10 in either Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Data Science/Statistics, Cybersecurity, Information Systems, Applied Mathematics, Electrical/Electronic or Computer or Information Engineering or a closely related qualification to the theme.
• A strong record of research and/or academic leadership with demonstrated leadership in trustworthy AI assurance, robustness, privacy and security.
• Substantial and sustained period of distinguished academic experience in research and/or professional experience in higher education or a research environment with recognised standing in the field.
• A minimum of ten 10 DHET-accredited research outputs/creative outputs over the preceding three years, relevant to the discipline, with evidence of research quality and impact.
• Evidence of substantial record of successful supervision to completion of Master's and Doctoral students.
• Demonstrated success in securing competitive research funding i.e. grants, contracts or commissioned research.
• Evidence of leading multidisciplinary teams and building national/international research collaborations.

Theme-specific expertise

• AI assurance and evaluation: model validation, calibration, uncertainty, subgroup performance, auditability and lifecycle evidence; Robustness, safety and security: distribution shift, adversarial machine learning, red-teaming, secure MLOps, model misuse and incident learning;
• Privacy-enhancing AI: federated learning, differential privacy, synthetic data, secure computation, de-identification and disclosure-risk assessment; Responsible generative and agentic AI: methods for mitigation of hallucination, deepfakes and institutional risks, control, provenance, copyright protection and responsible AI assurance metrics.

Key responsibilities

• Develop and sustain an internationally visible programme of research aligned to the assigned Institute theme and the Institute's five-year research agenda.
• Produce high-quality peer-reviewed outputs, research software, datasets, methods, policy contributions and/or responsible innovation outputs, as appropriate to the field.
• Attract competitive external research funding and develop accountable partnerships with African and international universities, government, industry, civil society and communities.
• Supervise and develop Master's and Doctoral candidates and mentor postdoctoral fellows and emerging researchers.
• Contribute to interdisciplinary research methods