Last week, when Wits University announced a R55-million donation from Anglo-American to turn the old Johannesburg Planetarium into a “digital dome”, it promised more than just a facelift.
The imposing structure that sits alongside the gateway to the east campus of the university has welcomed more than 4-million visitors since it was built in the late 1950s. Now, it is being repurposed for the 21st century.
“We are creating a high-tech 360° IMAX-like theatre, just better,” said Professor Roger Deane, director of the Wits Centre for Astrophysics, at an event unveiling the new vision on Monday. However, he said it would serve a greater purpose: to “assist researchers across all disciplines to visualise data in a profound way”.
“For many researchers across various fields, we feel as if we are drowning in data, which is coupled with the challenge of datasets becoming more complex and more multi-dimensional. A facility like the new Wits Anglo American Digital Dome is a way of honing a more intuitive and immersive understanding of big data, where we will be able to visualise our work.”
He gave examples like teaching anatomy to first-year medical students, visualising particle showers in the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland, or testing new games built by gaming design students.
The rebuilding of the Planetarium is part of a programme to mark the University’s centenary this year, led by vice-chancellor and principal Professor Zeblon Vilakazi. He also emphasised the role the new structure would play in expanding digital technology to other scientific disciplines, “from climate modelling, artificial intelligence applications, to new avenues in the digital arts.”
“There are many shared projects with common objectives, developing high level skills to move our economy towards a digital age and create employees of the future to co-create new beneficial knowledge,” he said
He reminded the audience that Wits was first established as a mining school in Kimberley, and still worked on harnessing intellectual capacity and power to make mining safer and more sustainable. But the digital dome project was about something more.
“This is our moonshot moment, which will nurture and inspire the next generation of innovators, changemakers and solution finders. They will, despite our challenges… dream beyond our imagination and take us to the next age as a country and as a continent.”
However, it was Anglo American CEO Duncan Wanblad who put in full perspective what the initiative would mean for innovation and discovery:
“This high tech, research-intensive facility will enable future generations of aspiring African students to contribute to solving some of society’s most pressing challenges.
“Whether that’s enabling researchers to map multi-layered biodiversity data, or providing access to the public to explore the universe with telescopes, like the Square Kilometre Array, or just exploring new ways of visualising and presenting very complex datasets, this new facility will become the expression of who we are as a people here in South Africa: both curious and inventive.”
While it is a given that the world is going through a time of unprecedented disruption, and the amount of data available has been exploding in recent years, it is less commonly appreciated that analysing large data sets will become a fundamental basis for competition.
Especially for a country like South Africa, said Wanblad, it would underpin new waves of productivity, growth and innovation.
“Data is challenging, and it’s challenging our world as we know it today. The mining industry is no different in terms of this challenge. Our industry is very, very data rich, and we harness but a fraction of that data, whether that’s the temperature in tires of trucks, all the way through integrated, digitalised operating centres.
“Data science, machine learning and artificial intelligence are all the elements of enabling us to transform vast quantities of this data into predictive intelligence. And that provides us with information from the sensor right the way through to the boardroom.”
* Arthur Goldstuck is founder of World Wide Worx and editor-in-chief of Gadget.co.za. Follow him on Twitter on @art2gee
