Tshilidzi Marwala
Tshilidzi Marwala (born 28 July 1971) is a South African artificial intelligence engineer, a computer scientist and a mechanical engineer. Early life and education. Marwala was born at Duthuni Village in the Limpopo Province. He obtained a PhD in artificial intelligence from the University of Cambridge and Bachelor of Science in mechanical engineering from Case Western Reserve University, graduating with a Magna Cum Laude. He attended school at Mbilwi Secondary School and St.John's College in Johannesburg. Career. Marwala is a vice-chancellor and principal of the University of Johannesburg. He was previously the deputy vice chancellor  for research and internationalization as well as the dean of engineering at the University of Johannesburg and a professor of electrical engineering at the University of the Witwatersrand. He was a post-doctoral fellow at Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine. He has served as a trustee of the Nelson Mandela Foundation and on a board of Nedbank. One of the books he co-authored on modelling interstate conflict has been translated into Chinese by the National Defense Industry Press. His work and opinion have appeared in media such as "New Scientist", "Time", "The Economist", CNN, and BBC. He  has also given talks at Rhodes House, Royal Society, Cambridge Union, Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society and Oxford Union. In 2016 Tshilidzi Marwala delivered the Bernard Price Memorial Lecture in South Africa. With Stephen Hawking and Guy Laliberté he was a judge of the YouTube Space Lab competition. Academic contributions and research. Marwala's research interests include the theory and application of artificial intelligence to engineering, computer science, finance, economics, social science and medicine. He has made fundamental contributions to engineering science including the development of the concept of pseudo-modal energies, proposing the theory of rational  counterfactual thinking, rational opportunity cost and the theory of flexibly bounded rationality. He was a co-inventor of the innovative methods of radiation imaging and with Megan Jill Russell as well as David Rubin the artificial larynx. Marwala also observed that the applicability of prospect theory depends on how much artificial intelligence is used to make a decision. He also observed that the more artificial intelligence is used for decision making the more efficient the markets become. For example, if all decisions are made by artificially intelligent machines then the markets will be fully rational. Marwala together with Israeli researcher  Daniel Muller mathematically solved the St. Peterburg paradox through the use of the concept of the relative net utility. Marwala together with Evan Hurwitz proposed that there is less level of information asymmetry between two artificial intelligent agents than between two human agents and that the more artificial intelligence there is in the market the less is the volume of trades in the market. With Evan Hurwitz, Marwala was the first researcher to build software agents that are able to bluff on playing a game of poker. Tshilidzi Marwala and Evan Hurwitz in their book applied Lewis turning point theory  to study the transition of the economy into automated production and identified an equilibrium point (Lewis turning point) where it does not make economic sense to move human labor to automated machines. Tshilidzi Marwala and Evan Hurwitz in their book observed that the advent of intelligent online buying platforms such as Amazon and technologies such as flexible manufacturing offers the opportunity for individualized supply and demand curves to be produced. They observed that these reduce the degree of arbitrage in the market, permit for individualized pricing for the same product and brings fairness and efficiency into the market. Furthermore, with  Evan Hurwitz in their book they observed that decision making and predicting machines that are executed using artificial intelligence and other machine learning techniques reduce the biases and variances of the errors on decision making and thus make decisions in a closer manner to the conclusions of rational expectations theory than human decision makers. Marwala and Bo Xing have also studied the relationship between blockchain and artificial intelligence. In his response to Bill Gates, Marwala has also brought to the attention of the difficulty of taxing robots given the fact that a great deal of the devices that we use  have robotics features. Marwala has also worked extensively with the United Nations through agencies such as UNESCO, UNIDO, WHO, ITU, UNICEF, and WIPO. Visiting appointments. Marwala has been a visiting fellow at Harvard University, Wolfson College, Cambridge, and University of California, Berkeley He is an honorary professor at the Nanjing Tech University as well as the Central South University in The People's Republic of China. Awards and honors. Marwala is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, TWAS, and the African Academy of Sciences. In high school he won the National Youth Science Olympiad and represented  South Africa in the London International Youth Science Forum. He is the recipient of the Order of Mapungubwe.