Celebrating Youth Month 2020: Systems engineer using data science to tackle COVID-19
The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in South Africa has seen the Department of Science and Innovation's entities and partners reprioritising their work to support government in tackling the virus.
From the biomedical space to using data science, the scientific community has really put its shoulder to the wheel to make a difference.
Zamantshinga Mtshali is a Senior Linux Systems Engineer at the Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC). She is working on a COVID-19 project called Telco COVID-19 analytics, aimed at movement tracking.
The CHPC, a unit of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), was established to provide world-class high-performance computing, enabling cutting-edge research with a high impact on the South African economy. Supported by the Department of Science and Innovation, the CHPC is working to increase South Africa's global competitiveness and to accelerate Africa's socio-economic upliftment through the effective application of high-end cyberinfrastructure.
Home to the fastest supercomputer on the African continent, the CHPC has made major investments in developing young talent like Mtshali.
Explaining the Telco project, Mtshali said that, among other things, the initiative was analysing COVID-19 self-screening data and monitoring the movement of citizens across the country. The data is used to improve understanding of the effectiveness and impact of the lockdown and to support evidence-based decisions by the National Department of Health.
The project uses anonymous mobile data sourced from South African operators, which is transferred to the CHPC's OpenStack cloud platform, where it is analysed to determine patterns of movement.
Mtshali is immensely proud of the project and hopes that that it continues to expand to support not only the National Department of Health, but also other statutory bodies in decision making.
A qualified computer scientist, Mtshali believes in using data science to solve national and international problems, and thinks that South African industries should maximise their use of data science to gain a competitive edge.
The CHPC supports young people through a number of education and outreach programmes, creating public awareness of the role of computational science, particularly high-performance computing, in everyday life, and encouraging learners and students to study and pursue careers in computational science and engineering.
One of these outreach programmes is the Student Cluster Competition, which starts in July every year. Students from various universities around the country receive training on Linux systems and high-performance computing. Their training concludes with an assignment that requires each team to build a prototype cluster. The teams selected in this round go on to compete in the national round of the Student Cluster Competition, which takes place at the CHPC National Conference in early December that year. The winning team from the national competition goes on to represent the country at an international high-performance computing event in Germany the following year. South Africa has scooped first place at this global event several times, but will not be able to participate this year owing to the COVID-19 outbreak.
The DSI is celebrating young scientists and researchers in the national system innovation during the month of June, when the country mark’s the June 16, 1976 student uprising.
