2023 November-December will be the South African premiere of this program a NAO 6 humanoid robot will be hosted for two months. During this time, the Goethe-Institut offers 4 participants an opportunity to work closely with the NAO.
18 000 ZAR stipend for each of the 4 team members (this covers all their costs, stay etc during project)
Access to a residency/working space at TMG Makerspace and partners.
Shared community event space
Local creative community/network
Technical support
Workshops and skill development opportunities
Connections to academic and creative networks through the project partners
Advisory Institutes for the selection of applicants:
IIS
RAIL Lab
TMG Makerspace
AOI
Commitment to Diversity
Robots-in-Residence is committed to embracing and enhancing equity, diversity, and inclusion, and encourages applications from individuals across racial, ethnic, geographic, socio-economic, cultural, age, gender, and sexual orientation spectrums.
About the Goethe-Institut
The Goethe-Institut is the cultural institute of the Federal Republic of Germany with a global reach. With 158 institutes in 98 countries, it promotes knowledge of German abroad, encourages international cultural exchange and conveys an image of contemporary Germany. Our cultural and educational programs encourage inter-cultural dialogue and enable cultural involvement. With our network of Goethe-Instituts, Goethe Centers and cultural societies, we are partners for all who actively engage with Germany and its culture, working independently and without political ties.
ABOUT AOI
Africa Open Institute for Music, Research and Innovation is an independent and autonomous interdisciplinary institute in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Stellenbosch University.
We work amidst the collapse of promise that pervades the exhausted state of music as a colonial academic discipline, pushing beyond its catechisms, its taboos, its hermetically sealed conversations, its silo thinking, its fear of change. We celebrate and curate the music archive as central to our desire for a future music studies, and cultivate a free space for interdisciplinary scholarship, experimentation and creative and intellectual risk-taking.
About IIS
One of the strategic thrusts of the University of Johannesburg (UJ) is to lead Africa into the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The Institute for Intelligent Systems (IIS) was established in 2016 within the University to act as a catalyst towards the UJ Strategy for Global Excellence and Stature (GES). IIS is one of UJ's flagship institutes for Global Excellence and Stature (GES 4.0).
Academic Development - The Institute deals with the development of multidisciplinary taught and online programs for postgraduate qualification and continuing professional development, for capacity building in the areas of machine learning, artificial intelligence, data science, Internet of Things (IoT), to name but a few areas.
Strategic Research - Research is currently being done to implement various 4IR technologies in fields such as Cyber-Physical Systems, Optimization, Predictive Maintenance, Controls and Communication.
Enterprise Development - IIS's enterprise facet works with industry and government entities in solving their problems using state of- the-art innovations.
About TMG Makerspace
TMG Makerspace seeks to promote and enable access to innovation through collaborative making, training, upskilling, and experimentation. Some of the practical engagements housed in the space include 4IR technologies such as 3D Printing, IoT (Internet of Things), Robotics, and Design for Digital Fabrication. TMG offers product development services to those looking to build products using or in the Internet of Things, Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, and Data Analytics. TMG is also committed to providing skills development opportunities to underrepresented communities, especially previously disadvantaged youth, in emerging technologies like 3D Printing, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, and the Internet of Things.
Partners
One of the strategic thrusts of the University of Johannesburg (UJ) is to lead Africa into the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The Institute for Intelligent Systems (IIS) was established in 2016 within the University to act as a catalyst towards the UJ Strategy for Global Excellence and Stature (GES). IIS is one of UJ's flagship institutes for Global Excellence and Stature (GES 4.0).
Academic Development - The Institute deals with the development of multidisciplinary taught and online programs for postgraduate qualification and continuing professional development, for capacity building in the areas of machine learning, artificial intelligence, data science, Internet of Things (IoT), to name but a few areas.
Strategic Research - Research is currently being done to implement various 4IR technologies in fields such as Cyber-Physical Systems, Optimization, Predictive Maintenance, Controls and Communication.
Enterprise Development - IIS's enterprise facet works with industry and government entities in solving their problems using state of- the-art innovations.
The RAIL Lab was founded in March 2014. It is based in Gauteng, South Africa, and is situated between the School of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, and the Mobile Intelligent Autonomous Systems (MIAS) group at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) in Pretoria. Work in the RAIL lab focuses primarily on learning in autonomous systems. In particular, we are interested in the acquisition of behaviours, as well as knowledge about the environment around a learning system. Our work draws on tools from multiple fields including decision theory, machine learning, and computer vision, using techniques including reinforcement learning, Bayesian models, deep neural networks, and Monte Carlo tree search. Our work is generously aided by collaboration and partnership with a number of international research groups and institutions.
The aims of the lab are three-fold:
To further the state-of-the-art in research into artificially intelligent systems,
To act as a centre of excellence and nexus of activities around AI in Africa,
To benefit society through the application of our work.
TMG Makerspace seeks to promote and enable access to innovation through collaborative making, training, upskilling and experimentation. Some of the practical engagements housed in the space include 4IR technologies such as 3D Printing, IoT (Internet of Things), Robotics, and Design for Digital Fabrication. TMG offers product development services to those looking to build products using or in the Internet of Things, Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, and Data Analytics. TMG is also committed to providing skills development opportunities to underrepresented communities, especially previously disadvantaged youth, in emerging technologies like 3D Printing, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, and the Internet of Things.
Africa Open Institute for Music, Research and Innovation is an independent and autonomous interdisciplinary institute in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Stellenbosch University.
We work amidst the collapse of promise that pervades the exhausted state of music as a colonial academic discipline, pushing beyond its catechisms, its taboos, its hermetically sealed conversations, its silo thinking, its fear of change. We celebrate and curate the music archive as central to our desire for a future music studies, and cultivate a free space for interdisciplinary scholarship, experimentation and creative and intellectual risk-taking.
