Raesetje Sefala
Researcher at The Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR)
Johannesburg, Gauteng, Other
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolRaesetje Sefala is an AI researcher and PhD candidate with nine years of applied data science experience focused on machine learning and computer vision for social impact. At DAIR she builds ground-truth spatial datasets and analyzes satellite imagery to quantify the long-term effects of spatial segregation in post-Apartheid South Africa, drawing on prior work mapping poverty and traffic-safety risks in Nigeria and Jakarta. Her background includes internships at Mila and research roles at UC Berkeley and the University of Chicago’s Data Science for Social Good, where she combined model optimization, image clustering, and spatial analytics to produce operational tools for policymakers. She pairs strong technical skills—dataset curation, CNN modification, parallelized model optimization—with domain experience in urban policy, making her work both methodologically rigorous and action-oriented. An early VR and AR developer who once taught robotics logic to undergraduates, she brings a practical, multidisciplinary perspective to computational social science.
10 years of coding experience
2 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Science - MS Computer Science, Master of Science - MS Computer Science at University of the WitwatersrandDoctor of Philosophy Computer Science, Doctor of Philosophy Computer Science at McGill University
Github Skills (5)
satellite-images8
software-design6
css4
computer-vision4
javascript3
Programming languages (3)
Github contributions (5)
sefalab/sefalab.github.io
Dec 2018 - Apr 2024
Personal website
Contributions:1 release, 8 PRs, 51 pushes in 5 years 4 months
reactnextjs
sefalab/Spatial_Project
Mar 2019 - Jan 2022
Using satellite images and computer vision to study the evolution and effects of spatial apartheid in South Africa.
Contributions:22 commits, 18 pushes in 2 years 10 months
computer-visionsatellite-images
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