SARChI chair awarded to Prof Tommie Meyer

The Department of Computer Science's Professor Tommie Meyer has been awarded a SARChI chair in Symbolic Artificial Intelligence. Symbolic approaches to AI take the view that it is necessary to provide high-level, human-readable, representations of problems in order to reason about them.

"The award will bolster the work of the AI Research Unit at UCT which already hosts a DSTI/NRF-UCT Co-funded Research Chair in AI Systems," says Prof Meyer. This other chair is held by A/Prof Deshen Moodley. 

Prof Meyer's primary research interests and expertise are in the area of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR), a subarea of Artificial Intelligence (AI), focusing on Belief Revision and Non-Monotonic Reasoning (NMR), as well as their application to Description Logics (DL).  As well as being a professor of Computer Science at UCT, he is the CAIR-UCT Research Chair in Artificial Intelligence and the Co-Director of the Centre for Artificial Intelligence Research (CAIR).

Designed to attract and retain excellence in research and innovation at South African public universities through the establishment of Research Chairs at public universities in South Africa with a long-term investment trajectory of up to fifteen years, the South African Research Chairs Initiative (SARChI) was established in 2006 by the Department of Science and Technology (DST) and the National Research Foundation (NRF). Since inception, 275 Research Chairs have been awarded to 23 public universities and nine science councils across the country.