UCT Student Startups Go To Market
11 October, 2019
From a build-your-own skincare product to a delivery service for students run by students, aspiring entrepreneurs from the University of Cape Town’s Genesis Project established their businesses, as part of the Honours-level Postgraduate Diploma in Management in Entrepreneurship (PDE).
“Our vision was to revolutionise skincare by providing our customers with an opportunity they have never had before – to customise their skincare products according to their unique skin type and needs,” said BYO Skin Co-Founder and UCT student entrepreneur, Mufaro Chiwara. “With support from Dr Rael Futerman at the UCT Design School, we were able to innovate a unique skincare solution, never before seen in South Africa.”
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NiDS: telling South Africa’s story since 2008
11 October, 2019
After 10 years of forging partnerships and delivering research excellence, the Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit (SALDRU) at the University of Cape Town (UCT) has drawn to a close its time as implementation partner for the National Income Dynamics Study (NiDS). Murray Leibbrandt, professor of economics at UCT and director of SALDRU, provides a retrospective on this phase in South Africa’s first and only national household panel study.
With a nationally representative sample of over 28 000 people from 7 300 households across the country, NiDS was launched in 2008.
NiDS was developed by the South African Presidency as an instrument to gain a better understanding of the socioeconomic dynamics at play in South Africa – a little more than a decade into democracy. The idea was to gain first-hand information about the livelihoods of those who call South Africa home – whether citizens or not – with a focus on overarching societal themes ranging from fertility and mortality to education and migration to income dynamics.
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Acclaimed Professor Leyland Pitt on Unstructured Text Analysis
08 October, 2019
On Thursday 5th September 2019, UCT had the honour of holding a research seminar by the esteemed Professor Leyland Pitt, who is the Dennis F. Culver EMBA Alumni Chair of Business (Beedie School of Business, Simon Fraser University, Canada) and Distinguished Fellow in Marketing (Hanken School of Economics, Finland). The prolific marketing professor has over 350 publications in leading peer-reviewed journals.
"80% of all the world’s data are unstructured, including user-generated texts, blogs, photos, videos, social media updates... all highly qualitative formats that do not follow well-defined sets of rules," said Prof Pitt. "Many tools have been developed to enable researchers to make sense of this data. These include dictionary-based software such as LIWC and DICTION, neural network-based graphical interpretation packages such as Leximancer, artificial intelligence suites such as IBM’s Watson, and, bibliographic analysis tools such as VOSViewer." In his research seminar, Prof Pitt introduced these tools and explained how they can be used to analyse unstructured text for research, by referring to recent publications that employ them.
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