ACADEMIC POSITIONS - DATA SCIENCE AND ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

INSTITUTE FOR DATA SCIENCE AND ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

SIX PERMANENT ACADEMIC POSITIONS

INTERNAL AND EXTERNAL ADVERTISEMENT

ACADEMIC POSITIONS

DUT INSTITUTE FOR DATA SCIENCE AND ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

(2 × Professors / 2 × Associate Professors / 2 × Senior Lecturers)

With more than 34 400 students and approximately 1 700 members of staff, the Durban University of Technology (DUT) is a leading university of technology located in Durban and Pietermaritzburg on the east coast of South Africa. Founded in April 2002 through the merger of the former ML Sultan Technikon and Technikon Natal, DUT is a modern, metropolitan, multi-campus university with roots extending to 1907.

DUT is recognised nationally and internationally for teaching and learning, research, innovation, entrepreneurship and engagement. Its Philosophy of Education—‘Our creativity and innovation shapes adaptive graduates who transform society’—reflects a commitment to meaningful societal transformation. Guided by ENVISION2030, DUT’s DNA is ‘people-centred and engaged’ and ‘innovative and entrepreneurial’, with an institutional purpose centred on improving lives and livelihoods.

The Institute for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence is being established as a horizontal research capability across DUT. It will advance rigorous, locally grounded and trustworthy data science and AI; develop scarce postgraduate capability; build African datasets and methods; and work with faculties, research institutes, government, communities and industry to generate scientific, societal and economic value. It is a research institute—not DUT’s general software-development or ICT operations office.

The Institute research agenda

The three foundational priority themes for the institute are:

• African Data, Language and Knowledge Intelligence
• Trustworthy, Responsible and Human-Centred AI
• AI for Sustainable Systems and Public Value

Appointment note. Applicants should apply for the position whose stated specialisation most closely matches their research record. Cross-theme collaboration is expected, but shortlisting will assess the specific expertise required for the advertised position.

Position 1

Professor: African-Language AI, Natural-Language Processing and Speech Technologies

Theme 1: African Data, Language and Knowledge Intelligence

Reference Number: 30002782

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 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