The Fourth Industrial Revolution and Society

byProf Tshilidzi Marwala

SAIMechE hosts the prestigious John Orr Memorial Lecture each year to commemorate the achievements of Professor John Orr (1870 - 1954) in engineering education in South Africa. The lecture is traditionally hosted in conjunction with Wits University. The history of the prestigious lecture dates back to 1961 when the first lecture was initiated to honour Professor Orr.

We are pleased to announce that the 2019 John Orr Memorial Lecture will be presented by Prof Tshilidzi Marwala, on the topic:

"The Fourth Industrial Revolution and Society"

Brief synopsis

The Fourth Industrial Revolution is characterized by making systems and machines both intelligent and connected. The underlying technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution include artificial intelligence (AI) as well as blockchain. Artificial intelligence is a paradigm where physical and social phenomena are programmed to solve complex problems. AI enables machines to learn, adapt, evolve and optimize and has had a profound impact in diverse fields such as engineering, medical sciences and social sciences. In this lecture, Prof Marwala explores applications of the Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies to mechanical engineering problems.

About Prof Marwala

Tshilidzi Marwala is Vice-Chancellor and Principal of the University of Johannesburg. Previously, he was Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Research and Executive Dean of the Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment at the same university. He progressively held the positions of Associate Professor, Full Professor, the Carl and Emily Fuchs Chair of Systems and Control Engineering, as well as the SARChl Chair of Systems Engineering at the University of the Witwatersrand. Before then, he was Executive Assistant to the Technical Director at South African Breweries and a post-doctoral research associate at the Imperial College (London).

Prof Marwala holds a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering (magna cum laude, 1995) from the Case Western Reserve University (USA), a Master of Mechanical Engineering from the University of Pretoria (1997), and a PhD specializing in Artificial Intelligence and Engineering from the University of Cambridge (2000).

He is a registered Professional Engineer, a Fellow of TWAS (The World Academy of Sciences), the Academy of Science of South Africa, the African Academy of Sciences and the South African Academy of Engineering. He is also a distinguished member of the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery).

His research interests are multi-disciplinary and include the theory and application of artificial intelligence to engineering, computer science, finance, social science and medicine. He has supervised 47 Masters and 28 Doctoral students to completion. He has published 14 books on artificial intelligence (one of which has been translated into Chinese), more than 300 papers in journals, proceedings, book chapters and magazines, and holds four patents. He is an associate editor of the International Journal of Systems Science. His writings and opinions have appeared in the magazines New Scientist, The Economist and Time Magazine.

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