Professor Barry Dwolatzky was keen about innovation in all that he did. Wits College
To a few of his former college students, Professor Barry Dwolatzky was the “Grand Geek” – a reputation of which he was very proud. However Barry, who handed away in Johannesburg, South Africa on 16 Might 2023, was far more than a pc geek. He was additionally a frontrunner and a visionary within the discipline of software program engineering in South Africa.
On the time of his passing he was 71 years previous. He was by then retired from academia and held the title of Emeritus Professor on the College of the Witwatersrand (Wits), the place he spent a lot of his profession.
However he didn’t actually decelerate: he remained the director of the Joburg Centre for Software program Engineering (JCSE), a job he’d held since 2007. Through the COVID lockdown in 2020, he began a podcast known as Optimizing – Main Africa’s Digital Future and produced eight episodes. He additionally wrote an autobiography known as Coded Historical past – My Lifetime of New Beginnings, which was launched in November 2022.
A pioneer in programming
An alumnus of the Faculty of Electrical and Data Engineering at Wits College, Barry graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering in 1975. He then began a grasp’s diploma, which he transformed to a PhD.
After acquiring his PhD in 1979, he did post-doctoral analysis on the College of Manchester’s Institute of Science and Know-how and at Imperial School in London. Thereafter, he labored as a senior analysis affiliate on the GEC-Marconi Centre within the UK.
I first met Barry in 1989 when he returned to South Africa as a senior lecturer within the Faculty of Electrical Engineering at Wits. I used to be an undergraduate in his class that yr. After I returned to Wits in 1998, he was my MSc supervisor and, after I was appointed as a lecturer within the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, we had been colleagues and buddies.
When he joined the Faculty, there was just one programming course, Engineering Utilized Computing, taught to second-year electrical, civil and mechanical engineering college students. Barry recognized the rising significance of programming and data expertise in engineering fields earlier than anybody else in South Africa actually had. Right this moment, the Faculty of Electrical & Data Engineering’s curriculum incorporates two second-year programming programs and a third-year course that’s obligatory for all electrical and data engineering college students. Barry was instrumental in introducing all these programs.
He was additionally the driving pressure behind the college’s identify change: “Data Engineering” was added within the yr 2000 with the introduction of a software program stream that will be distinct from {the electrical} engineering stream.
The thought didn’t come from the blue. Speaking to folks in numerous corporations, Barry realised that many of the faculty’s graduates went into the knowledge and communications expertise (ICT) sector moderately than into the classical electrical engineering fields like electrical technology, transmission and distribution, excessive voltage engineering and management engineering.
That’s what prompted the event and introduction of the software program stream. At the moment, computer systems had been turning into extra widespread in lots of industries and the cell phone sector was beginning to take off.
Software program to drive improvement
Within the late Eighties, the then CEO of Eskom, South Africa’s nationwide electrical energy utility, introduced a mass roll-out of electrification known as Electrical energy for All. Between 1990 and 2000, about 2.5 million homes had been related to the nationwide grid. At the moment, Barry began engaged on a software program programme that will help engineers in planning the electrification of townships, traditionally black city residential areas.
Quite a few postgraduate college students underneath his supervision labored on features of this software program. He known as this system CART (Laptop-Aided Reticulation of Townships). In 1997, he took a year-long sabbatical and labored full time on CART, growing it right into a viable business product that was used to assist within the design of the electrification of many townships.
In 2005, Barry launched the Joburg Centre for Software program Engineering. He turned its director in 2007. It was the work he did by means of the centre that established him as an vital thought chief within the software program and IT area. Amongst different issues, the centre hosted masterclasses with world famend software program specialists.
Innovation champion
In 2012, Barry recognized some previous buildings owned by Wits College in Braamfontein, a high-rise downtown space of Johannesburg, as a super web site for an innovation hub. Many individuals converse fondly of how Barry took them right into a derelict disco with solely the sunshine from his cell phone and enthusiastically defined how this was going to be a tech co-working area. He raised funding and reworked the rundown buildings into the innovation hub that’s at the moment one of many college’s flagship tasks.
It’s known as the Tshimologong Digital Innovation Precinct. Tshimologong (a seTswana phrase for “place of recent beginnings”) gives an area for digital start-ups, in addition to coaching in digital applied sciences, and is used as a co-working area. Barry was Tshimologong’s first director and was honoured for this visionary challenge with the Vice Chancellor’s Award for Analysis and Instructing in 2016.
Even after retiring, Barry remained dedicated to and pushed by the thought of innovation. He labored alongside Wits College’s deputy vice-chancellor, Professor Lynn Morris, to ascertain the Wits Innovation Centre. It was launched on 17 April 2023.
He handed away in a Johannesburg hospital on 16 Might together with his spouse Rina and his youngsters Leslie and Jodie at his aspect.
Estelle Trengove doesn’t work for, seek the advice of, personal shares in or obtain funding from any firm or organisation that will profit from this text, and has disclosed no related affiliations past their tutorial appointment.