If you have a sudden yearning to go back to the future, I know where you can get some equipment to blast you into that alternate realm of time and space.
Prof Estelle Trengove has just shown me a massive electric bolt generator which when switched on has millions of volts coursing through it. It could kill you with one look.
I am on a personal tour of the Wits School of Electrical and Information Engineering, which she heads. “My kingdom,” she jokes. “Your queendom,” I retort.
She has been musing what kind of Barbie she is today. She settled on Engineering Barbie, which requires jeans, sturdy walking boots and a beautiful multicoloured embroidered jacket. She tells me she is the same vintage as both Barbie and Madonna — they were all born in the same year.
The prof is very hands on and as we walk from lab to lab she introduces me to all sorts of supremely clever beings working on a series of ever more mind-boggling projects.
We mouth hello to a guy on a call. This team is busy working out how to shoot data in beams of light from the Sandton CBD to Alexandra.
This is crazy stuff. I am already in awe after being shown the gigantic electrical dark matter generators. In another lab, I am shown drones they are working on to replace the canaries in the mines (I jest). I hear about the high-speed lightning photography project, and Estelle tells me about artificial intelligence (AI) research.
It’s fun to come to work here. It’s nice to work with people who have ideas and are inspired
“One of the projects is in voice analysis. During Covid, the researcher built an AI system that could tell from your voice if you had Covid.”
She has also done some AI work that can measure the charisma of people’s voices.
“And we have a postgraduate student who is building an app for your phone to test water with just a basic pool strip. Because everyone in South Africa has a cellphone — there is almost 100% smartphone penetration even in rural areas — and people don’t know if they can drink the water coming down the river. This will tell you if you can drink it, or should boil it, or not drink it at all, and that should avoid outbreaks of things like cholera.
“And you can distribute the strips widely and cheaply and everyone can just dip the strip and scan it with a phone.”
Mind blown.
I wonder if it is a daily delight to go to work.
“It’s fun to come to work here. It’s nice to work with people who have ideas and are inspired.”
I’ll bet.
I feel slightly reassured when she tells me that AI is not taking over just yet.
“I’m not as smart as those guys, but I do think we are very far from general artificial intelligence which can operate on its own. The large language models (such as ChatGPT) are just very good at predicting the next word and statistically working out the answer to your question. But they are like stochastic parrots and have the same insight as a parrot that learns to say a phrase and then everyone laughs. The thing that I find more terrifying is the intrusion into our lives of data collection.”
We have moved our discussion from the department to the courtyard of the Wits Club, whose gabled buildings would look more at home in Cape Town.
Estelle is still in tour mode and walks me around the cake table, which is awe-inspiring on its own. She picks her favourite, a wheat-free lemon poppy seed extravaganza. I stick to my Greek inheritance with a delicious piece of deconstructed baklava with my tea.
The daughter of a teacher and a diplomat father had a childhood that cultivated her inquisitive and curious nature. At the time, engineering was not considered an option for girls. It was an idea planted by her university careers counsellor after she took an aptitude test in the third year of her BA. He told her she was really good at maths and should do electrical engineering.
She remembered thinking: “Wow, he thinks I could do a man’s job.”
But she parked the idea because she needed to work and she became a journalist, but left after being asked to interview the parents and families of the children who died in the Westdene Dam bus disaster in 1985. Aged 28 and married with children, she applied to study electrical engineering at Wits.
“There has been a slow increase in women in electrical engineering. Mining engineering has just had its first two female PhD graduates. Biomedical engineering is in my school and that attracts a lot of female students and that three-year degree also enables them to move into the third year of professional electrical engineering. In my year, we were about 130 students and we were five women and that was considered to be an exceptionally large group.”
Outside the labs the students — many of them women — do not look like the engineering students I went to university with. Not a flip-flop in winter or a can of Castle in sight.
Estelle says they are the largest cohort of undergraduates of all the university's engineering departments and also the largest group compared to the other universities in the country. But this is not necessarily a good thing, she says, placing pressure on resources and the ability to give enough laboratory time to all.
This highlights some endemic issues plaguing higher education with the loss of technical colleges. Also, the matric results do not necessarily reflect a student's capacity to cope with the degree, so there is a high failure rate.
“Only about 25% of the students complete the degree in minimum time, about 40% of the class graduates eventually at five or six years. But it means that a large number of students are admitted who are not suited to engineering, or maybe to university.
“I think the admission requirements need to be stricter and Wits has been resisting it but we need a better screening measure because matric is not a good measure anymore.”
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