Hi! In this part of my website I'll 'blog' a bit more about myself. I suppose one of my main interests, and why I choose to be an academic, is being involved with creative technology and computer engineering activities. But I'm not all about work; indeed I like the great outdoors (being in nature) and doing some fun hobbies. Ideally, I'm keen on opportunities that could combine work and fun, for example testing out electronic inventions in the outdoors or trialing a new experimental fitness device and helping provide some data on its operational and utility.
My areas of expertise include (somewhat in order of interest and experience) the following: Smart Sensor technologies, Computer Engineering; Embedded Systems; FPGA design; Software and Firmware Development; High Performance Computing systems and application development; programming and parallel/distributed processing; and also knowledge management.
Certainly one of my favorite things is seeing students' developing interesting prototypes and systems, together with developing their own expertise and developing profession practices in the profession. In terms of supervising postgraduate work I certainly find it an honour to guide and collaborate with these students, whether young or old, to help them become good researchers and accomplish their experiments and research effectively.
Research and teaching are, unsurprisingly, where I spend much of my time. I do admit that standing up and lecturing is not my favourite type of activity. But I understand that if you're teaching a course then you'll need to do some of this traditionally lecturing activity. I do prefer following project-based learning (PrBL) strategies where possible, as I think this is a more interactive and interesting approach for students to use and to gain deeper insight and understanding of the subject concerned.
Outside of the classroom, I do tend to take advantage of some of the benefits of being an academic, such as attending conferences to do some show and tell in terms of the research and teaching that I've been involved with. Of course, it's difficult to resist a bit of touring while one is out of town - if just to prove to oneself how much better it can be back in one's own home town - lovely Cape Town in my case :-)
