29 Nov 2025

DSFSI 2025 Retrospective (Day 6): Celebrating Our Growing Family—Student Success Stories

Day 6 of our retrospective: Celebrating the PhDs, Masters, Honours, and undergraduate students who graduated in 2025—the next generation of African AI leaders.

Day 6 of our 7-day retrospective celebrating DSFSI’s remarkable 2025 journey.

Celebrating Our Growing Family

Papers matter. Conferences matter. Institutions matter.

But people matter most.

The true measure of a research group isn’t publications or grants—it’s the students who walk across graduation stages, dissertations in hand, ready to change the world.

In 2025, DSFSI celebrated the achievements of our extended family: students directly supervised within our group, research assistants who became collaborators, teaching assistants who grew into mentors, and the broader community of scholars we’ve supported along the way.

🎓 Autumn 2025 Graduations: A Moment to Celebrate

The Autumn 2025 graduation season at the University of Pretoria brought a moment to pause, reflect, and celebrate. While degrees are awarded individually, they’re achieved within ecosystems of mentorship, collaboration, and mutual support.

At DSFSI, we take pride not only in those directly supervised within our group, but in the broader environment we create—one where students, teaching assistants, research assistants, postgraduates, and collaborators across disciplines come together at the intersection of data science, AI, and societal impact.

🏆 PhD Graduate: Dr. Tsosheletso Chidi

Dr. Tsosheletso Chidi earned her PhD with a dissertation on:

Thesis: Representations of Homosexuality in Indigenous African Languages: An Analysis of Selected Fictional Literary Works by Black Writers

This work bridges literature, linguistics, and social justice—examining how identity, sexuality, and language intersect in African contexts.

In Her Own Words:

“I would like to give special thanks to the Mellon Foundation Scholarship and my PhD supervisor. My future plans include blending research, literature, and community engagement to build platforms for underrepresented voices. I’m excited to expand the Dirurubele-Wandering Butterflies writing mentorship programme, contribute to multilingual technologies through my postdoctoral work, and hopefully shape future policies and curricula that center indigenous knowledge and inclusivity.”

While Dr. Chidi was not supervised directly under DSFSI, we celebrate her as a valued new DSFSI Fellow and contributor to our growing transdisciplinary community spanning AI, language, and social impact.

Her work reminds us that language technology isn’t just about speech recognition and translation—it’s about whose stories get told, whose identities get represented, and whose voices get heard.

📚 Masters Graduates: Advancing African NLP

Miehleketo Mathebula

Dissertation: From Text Annotation to an Auto-Regressive Language Model for Sentiment Analysis in South African Financial Reviews

Miehleketo’s work tackled sentiment analysis in South African financial contexts—a domain where language mixing, cultural nuances, and domain-specific terminology create unique challenges.

His research demonstrates how auto-regressive language models can be adapted to local contexts, providing tools for financial institutions to better understand customer sentiment across South Africa’s multilingual landscape.

Impact: Practical applications in fintech, customer analytics, and market research

Tsholofelo Gomba

Dissertation: Assessing Interpretability in Machine Translation Models for Low-Resource Languages

Tsholofelo addressed one of AI’s biggest challenges: interpretability. When a machine translation model translates isiZulu to English, how does it decide? Can we trust it? Can we explain its decisions?

Her work developed methods to assess and improve interpretability in MT models for African languages—critical for building systems that users can trust and practitioners can debug.

Impact: More transparent, trustworthy African language technologies

Why This Work Matters

Both Miehleketo and Tsholofelo made important contributions to:

  • Advancing African language processing
  • Developing responsible, explainable NLP systems
  • Building tools for low-resource contexts

They didn’t just write dissertations—they created blueprints for others to build on.

🎖️ Honours Graduates: The Rising Generation

Isheanesu Joseph Dzingirai

“I’m grateful to the DSFSI research group and my supervisor, Prof. Vukosi Marivate, for their support and assistance during my honours degree. I’m excited to keep on working with them as I pursue my Master’s (and possibly PhD) and keep learning and growing through the research group.”

Isheanesu exemplifies the continuity that makes research communities thrive—moving from Honours to Masters to (hopefully!) PhD, each stage building on the last.

Makungumixo Ndlovu

“I would like to acknowledge my supervisor Mrs. Seani Rananga, Mr. Thapelo Sindane, Mr. Miehleketo Mathebula, Dr. Anna Bosman, and the support I had from many more members from the DSFSI community. In the near future, I plan to pursue MIT in Big Data Science at the University of Pretoria. One day, I see myself working as a Data Analyst, helping businesses and organizations make better decisions using data.”

Makungumixo’s journey shows the collaborative spirit of DSFSI—multiple mentors, multiple supporters, all invested in one student’s success.

🎓 Undergraduate Graduates: Future Leaders

Andinda Bakainaga

“DSFSI helped me want to carry on with my studies for honours. Just want to also thank my mom and friends.”

Sometimes the biggest impact is inspiring someone to keep going—to see possibilities they didn’t see before.

Unarine Netshifhefhe

Congratulations to Unarine on completing undergraduate studies and contributing to the DSFSI community!

🤝 A Collaborative Effort Beyond Supervision

Many of these graduates engaged with DSFSI in multiple ways:

  • Research Assistants on language datasets
  • Teaching Assistants for data science courses
  • Interns on NLP projects
  • Collaborators across faculties
  • Participants in workshops and seminars

We also gratefully acknowledge the diverse teams of supervisors and mentors from across departments and faculties at the University of Pretoria who work with us to build an interdisciplinary and vibrant research environment.

This collaborative spirit is core to our vision of data science for social impact.

💭 What Success Means

These graduates carry forward more than degrees. They carry:

  • Skills to build the next generation of African language technologies
  • Networks connecting South African researchers to global communities
  • Values of open research, ethical AI, and social impact
  • Confidence that their work matters and their voices belong

They’re not just joining the workforce or academia—they’re joining a movement to make AI work for Africa, on Africa’s terms.

🌍 Where They Go, We Go

As these graduates move into:

  • PhD programs (building on Honours and Masters work)
  • Industry roles (applying research to real-world problems)
  • Postdoctoral positions (advancing interdisciplinary research)
  • Community work (using data science for social change)

…they carry DSFSI’s values and vision with them.

And they’ll train the next generation. And that generation will train another.

That’s how ecosystems grow.

🙏 Gratitude and Pride

We are proud of each and every one of you. Your hard work, resilience, and contributions to the DSFSI community are inspiring.

You carry forward not only your degrees but also the ethos of using data science to serve society.

We look forward to seeing what the future holds—whether continuing with research, entering industry, or contributing to new fields of knowledge.

To our 2025 graduates: Thank you for letting us be part of your journey. Now go build the future.

Tomorrow (Day 7): We look ahead—previewing 2026, ongoing projects, and the road forward for DSFSI and AfriDSAI.

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This is Day 6 of our 7-day retrospective. Tomorrow we conclude with a look ahead to 2026 and beyond.

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