Ndivhuwo MAKONDO

Dr. Ndivhuwo Makondo is a Staff Research Scientist and Manager at IBM Research - Africa, in the South Africa Lab. He manages a team of research scientists and software engineers conducting foundational and applied research on the integration of knowledge, reasoning and learning for natural language processing and understanding in various scientific and business use-cases. His team builds AI systems leading and contributing to the global IBM Research strategy to infuse innovation into IBM platforms and products, and localising the developed technology and expertise through partnerships in the continent. Previously, he was a sub-theme lead for Learnable Reasoning in the Neuro-Symbolic AI group.

Dr. Makondo is also appointed as a Visiting Researcher at the School of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, where he is also a Research Associate at the Robotics, Autonomous, Intelligence and Learning (RAIL) Lab. He also serves as a member of the working group on Recommendations Towards the Development of the National AI Strategy of South Africa at the National Advisory Council on Innovation (NACI) at the Department of Science, Technology and Innovation (DSTI), where he served as the chair of the Research and Innovation sub-committee. He is a senior member of South African Institute of Electrical Engineers (SAIEE) and a member of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society (RAS).

Dr. Makondo holds a PhD in Computational Intelligence and Systems Science from the Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan; and an MSc (specializing in Robotics) and BSc in Electrical Engineering from the University of Cape Town, South Africa. His PhD explored learning-based approaches to kinematic and dynamic control of robot manipulators; and his MSc explored kinematic modelling and planning for robot manipulators in underground mining safety inspections.

Prior to joining IBM Research in 2019, he was a robotics researcher at the Mobile Intelligent and Autonomous Systems (MIAS) lab at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), South Africa, where he led a team conducting foundational and applied research in the deployment of mobile robot manipulators in unstructured and dynamic environments. He also served as a Senior Research Associate at the Department of Electrical and Electronic Science, University of Johannesburg, South Africa.

Dr. Makondo has received the following awards:

• the Golden Key International Honour Award

• CSIR MSc studentship scholarship

• the Japanese Government (MEXT or Monbukagakusho) PhD scholarship

• the Google Travel Award Asia

• the National Research Foundation (NRF) Thuthuka Post-PhD grant

• IBM's Research Bronze Research Accomplishment award

Dr. Makondo has served on committees of international conferences and workshops, notably

• the Neuro-Symbolic Agents workshop at the Thirty-Second Thirty-Second International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-23)

• Robotics and Automation workshop at the Deep Learning Indaba

• the Rapid Product Development Association of South Africa (RAPDASA)

• the Deep Learning IndabaX - South Africa

• SAIEE Computing Chapter

• the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) ICRA@40 - Africa satellite conference