The Durban University of Technology has the honour of hosting Dr Thagadur N. Nagabhushan, Indian academic, who will be sharing his knowledge on neural computing through a series of lectures with academics from the various departments of the institution.

Dr Nagabhushan, the Principal of JSS Academy of Technical Education in Noida, India, arrived in Durban on Tuesday this week (7 May 2013) for a four-day visit in South Africa. He has 29 years of experience in teaching, research, industry and administration. A prolific researcher, Dr Nagabhushan has published 50 publications in international journals. His areas of specialisation include neural computing, multimedia computing and computer networks. He has been invited to numerous institutions worldwide, where he has held lectures, had keynote addresses and chaired sessions.

Apart from interacting with DUT academics and imparting his knowledge on neural computing, the main purpose of Dr Nagabhushan’s visit is to forge a relationship with DUT and to look at possible areas of collaborative research.

Dr Nagabhushan held his first lecture at the Executive Dean of the Faculty of Accounting and Informatics’ office, Ritson Campus, yesterday (Wednesday, May 8, 2013).This was attended by Information Technology and Chemical Engineering academics as well as post graduate students.

In his lecture, Dr Nagabhushan discussed the topic of his current research: “Advanced Neural Computing Algorithms for supervised classification”. He elaborated that “the idea is to tell that neural networks are useful in solving many problems in Science and Engineering. More specifically, all classification problems can be considered as points in space. In real life, the data is multidimensional and thousands of such data exist, which can be such as points in vector space. Neural computing algorithms help in finding proper representations to huge data. The lecture addresses some of the new findings in the area of neural computing. (It) also addresses important neural architectures such as MLP (multilayer perceptron) and RBF (radial basis function).”

Furthermore, Dr Nagabhushan said neural networks are simulated using software; these can be then used as tools to solve problems such as cancer classification, facial image classification, weather prediction, meteorological data classification, signal prediction, speech recognition (in the case of voice calling in cellphones) and many others.

Seeing as DUT does not offer this area of study in its Information Technology curriculum, Dr Nagabhushan thus said he would love to see the establishment of this.

His talk was well-received by DUT academics. One of the attendees, Information Technology academic Professor Olu Olugbara said, “The lecture was very interesting. I was satisfied with the quality of Dr Nagabhushan’s presentation. We need more of these kinds of lectures at DUT.”

Although, due to his tight schedule, Dr Nagabhushan will not be able to fully explore South Africa, he said he is delighted to be in this “extremely good” country.

– Naledi Hlefane

Pictured: Dr Thagadur N. Nagabhushan, Indian academic, who will be sharing his knowledge on neural computing through a series of lectures with academics from the various departments of the institution this week.