With the emergence of ever-cheaper and robust hardware, 5G connectivity around the corner, and most importantly, a growing list of real world use cases, we can all agree that Internet of Things (IoT) solutions for enterprise are here to stay. But is that where it ends? Is the end goal of having interconnected devices simply because sounds like something that could be useful to have, perhaps to monitor some sort of reading in a production environment, or simply get timely updates in a supply chain process? IoT will play a much more important role in our future, primarily for the following reasons. Not only are IoT projects ultimately most valuable as big data projects (we are essentially collecting large amounts of data from these IoT devices after all), but ultimately, all IoT projects will apply machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) to the data collected in order to truly move the game forward.

The Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) has partnered with five South African universities to launch the Centre for Artificial Intelligence Research (CAIR) on 24 May 2016. Based at the CSIR and chaired at the University of Cape Town, the centre aims to build research capacity in the field of artificial intelligence, and to ensure work reaches commercialisation. CAIR will also ensure artificial intelligence research is spread beyond the traditional institutions of the field. The five partner universities, or collaboration nodes, are the University of Cape Town (UCT), the University of Pretoria (UP), Stellenbosch University (SU), the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) and North-West University (NWU). The centre is funded by the CSIR, the Department of Science and Technology (DST), and the participating universities, and the wide research scope of the programme is evident by the variety of university departments involved.