Jacobie Mouton, an alumnus of Stellenbosch University (SU) with an MSc in Computer Science, was the runner-up for the Grace Alele-Williams Masters Award for the best MSc thesis in computational and statistical sciences at an African university in 2023.
The Alele-Williams Masters Award was one of several awards made during the 2024 Deep Learning Indaba held at Amadou Mahtar Mbow University (UAM) in Dakar, Senegal. recently. The Deep Learning Indaba is regarded as Africa's premier machine learning and artificial intelligence event. This year the event drew a community of more than 600 participants from across Africa and beyond.
Mouton, who completed her MSc-degree cum laude at the end of 2022, says her academic journey has been a mixture of working hard and reaching for each opportunity that crossed her path.
Her research integrates Bayesian networks with variational autoencoders (VAEs) to enhance their interpretability and performance, particularly in scenarios with limited data. She developed a novel graphical normalizing flow, improving VAEs by incorporating conditional independence into their architecture. This approach resulted in a more interpretable model that performs better in data-sparse environments and offers competitive density estimation and inference capabilities, along with more reliable inversion.
“I feel honoured to have been considered as the runner-up for the Alele-Williams Masters award. To me it underscores the importance of dedication and passion in academic pursuits. This recognition inspires me to continue pushing the boundaries in my current role driving high-performing, robust and fair machine learning solutions in industry," Mouton said.
She currently works as a machine learning engineer at Capitec Back.
Her supervisor was Prof Steve Kroon, associate professor in the Computer Science Division in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at SU.
