UCT School of IT Celebrates PhD Success and the Spirit of Lifelong Learning

The University of Cape Town’s (UCT) School of Information Technology (SIT) saw two academic staff members and six students receive PhDs for a diverse range of research topics during the 2025 spring graduation season. This milestone speaks to the School’s deep-rooted commitment to lifelong learning and its culture of continuous intellectual growth.

Launched in 2018, the University of Cape Town’s SIT was established to meet the growing demand for skilled professionals in South Africa’s rapidly evolving tech landscape. 

As developments in artificial intelligence, big data, and cloud computing continue to reshape daily life, the School draws on the combined expertise of the Departments of Computer Science and Information Systems to prepare future-ready graduates. 

By bridging the Faculties of Science, Commerce, and Humanities, it fosters an environment where continuous learning, curiosity, and innovation remain central to both teaching and research.

“Lifelong learning sits at the heart of our mission. In a field that evolves as rapidly as information technology, the ability to keep learning, questioning, and adapting is what drives real innovation,” said Director of the School, Professor Lisa Seymour.

“Our PhD graduates embody that spirit, showing that advancing knowledge isn’t only about discovery, but about continually deepening our understanding of a world shaped by technology.”

Rethinking digital disruption

One of the PhD graduates who has fully embraced the idea of lifelong learning is Dr Ayanda Pekane, who teaches systems analysis, design, and project management in the Department of Information Systems.

Her research looked into how small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in South Africa adopt and use cloud technology, with her main focus being on the dynamics of this experience for these businesses.

“I focused on the dynamics of the processes that come with tapping into new technologies. My goal was to highlight the fact that the adoption and use of technology is not linear. Very rarely do organisations just adopt a technology and start using it with everything going well from the outset,” she explained.

“There are aspects of every technology that are unknown when technologies start to emerge and things naturally change over time, which adds a dynamic layer. Because of that, I wanted to focus on the dynamism of the changes that SMEs are experiencing in the process of adopting and using cloud technologies.”

Signals of change

Dr Pekane’s interest in how changing information systems can impact organisations – for better or worse – grew when she was working in the Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa’s (Prasa) signaling department. 

Having come from the South African Navy, the young electrical engineering technician was fascinated to see how the cutting-edge communications technologies she had worked with during her time at the naval branch of the South African Defence Force were now being leveraged for commercial purposes.

“Once I realised that technologies originally designed for Naval applications were later being leveraged commercially, even in modified forms, I grew curious about how this transition happens and what mechanisms facilitate it,” she said.

“That's where the whole idea of changing and information systems impacting organisations came up in my mind. I became quite interested in it and decided that I would pursue my studies within the field of information systems.”

The learning journey

For Pekane, lifelong learning isn’t just an academic principle, it’s a way of life. “I don’t know whether continuous learning chose me or I chose it,” she laughed.

“With the career choices that I’ve embarked on, moving from the navy to Prasa and having to train in a specialisation of electrical engineering that I hadn’t studied and then coming into academia, there has always been an expectation of continuous learning,” she added. 

That drive to learn seeps over into Pekane’s personal life, too. Here, she says, learning new things not only has the benefit of helping her to gain new skills, but also to gain a deeper understanding of herself.

“My friends and I embarked on a journey where, every month, we would learn a new skill. It was interesting, because when you move away from what you know and where you’re comfortable, it’s interesting to see the different sides of you that come out. Learning allows you to explore yourself and who you are.”

Model communication

Another member of staff in the School of IT to receive a PhD during the 2025 spring graduation season was Dr Francois Meyer. He is a lecturer teaching programming, machine learning and research methods in the Department of Computer Science and was awarded a doctorate for his work around modelling morphologically complex languages.

Meyer’s focus was developing language models for low-resource Nguni languages, namely isiXhosa, isiZulu, siSwati, and Ndebele. The goal was to figure out the best way for a language model to effectively translate words built from morphemes, or smaller word units, by understanding those building blocks of meaning.

“For example, the isiXhosa word ndiyabulela, which literally translates to “I am grateful”, is made up of three morphemes: ndi-, meaning “I”; -ya-, which signifies the present tense; and -bulela, meaning “show gratitude”. These units each have their own denotation and work together to create the bigger word’s meaning,” explained Meyer.

This complexity makes them efficient for human communication, but difficult for machine learning algorithms to master. As one root word can generate hundreds of inflected forms, many word forms appear only occasionally in the training data it receives. 

Compounding this issue is the lack of digital text available to train these models. Something that UCT’s Multilingual Glossaries Project is working to overcome with its development of isiXhosa glossaries across a range of subjects.

At the intersection of logic and language

Having always been interested in both mathematics and linguistics, this project sat at a happy intersection for Meyer. 

“If I hadn’t studied statistics and computer science, I probably would have enrolled for a Bachelor of Arts (BA) in philosophy. “The great thing about my field, natural language processing (NLP), is that it’s very interdisciplinary. It allows me to combine ideas from linguistics and artificial intelligence,” he said.

It was, however, more than just a fortuitous convergence of the computer scientist’s technical background and fascination with linguistics. Meyer’s curiosity and commitment to lifelong learning made the overlap almost inevitable.

In addition to his thirst for knowledge, the computer scientist noted that it took a great deal of grit and determination to reach this milestone.

"It was incredibly rewarding and satisfying to be able to complete my PhD. One of the biggest lessons for me was that there's really no replacement for hard work. Seeing such a big project through has given me the confidence to work independently on challenging problems, which is very valuable as I start my career in academia,” he explained.