Michelle Terblanche

I am a qualified Chemical Engineer with 20 years of industry experience. I furthered my qualifications to include a Masters in Philosophy in Futures Studies of which the main focus was to develop strategic thinking when it comes to mapping out future scenarios relevant to an ever-changing global landscape.

With the advent of Big Data, and the redefinition of data science, I seized the opportunity and completed a Masters in Big Data Science in December 2020 at the University of Pretoria. My research focused on NLP approaches to financial sentiment analysis.

I am passionate about using advancing NLP technologies to serve low-resourced, multilingual communities and to ensure equitable representation of such technologies. My PhD field of research is anchored in code-switching in South African languages and how we can develop technologies that are representative of the way we speak. My goal is moving the needle towards supporting the education system which is also one of the current Sustainable Development Goals.