Simukai Utete is a Zimbabwean robotics scientist, and was the academic director of the South Africa branch of the

African Institute for Mathematical Sciences The African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS) is a tertiary education and research institute in Muizenberg, South Africa, established in September 2003, and an associated network of linked institutes in Senegal, Ghana, Cameroon and Rwa ...

(AIMS). Her work has focused on multi-robot systems and

data fusion Data fusion is the process of integrating multiple data sources to produce more consistent, accurate, and useful information than that provided by any individual data source. Data fusion processes are often categorized as low, intermediate, or hi ...

Early life and education

Utete attended

Balliol College Balliol College () is a constituent college of the University of Oxford. Founded in 1263 by nobleman John I de Balliol, it has a claim to be the oldest college in Oxford and the English-speaking world. With a governing body of a master and ar ...

Oxford University The University of Oxford is a collegiate research university in Oxford, England. There is evidence of teaching as early as 1096, making it the oldest university in the English-speaking world and the second-oldest continuously operating u ...

, after being awarded a

Rhodes Scholarship The Rhodes Scholarship is an international postgraduate award for students to study at the University of Oxford in Oxford, United Kingdom. The scholarship is open to people from all backgrounds around the world. Established in 1902, it is ...

. She holds a DPhil in Robotics (Engineering Science).

Career

For four years, Utete led the Mobile Intelligent Autonomous Systems (MIAS) field robotics group at the

Council for Scientific and Industrial Research A council is a group of people who come together to consult, deliberate, or make decisions. A council may function as a legislature, especially at a town, city or county/shire level, but most legislative bodies at the state/provincial or nati ...

in Pretoria. In 1994, she published ''Routing for Reliability in Decentralised Sensing Networks'' in collaboration with H.F. Durrant—Whyte. This was a conference paper that focused on management and configuration in decentralized sensing networks. The paper demonstrated that it was possible to overcome local failures and reallocate tasks while still maintaining system constraints. In 1998, she published ''Local Information Processing for Decision Making in Decentralised Sensing Networks,'' a conference paper focused on the use of local information processing in decision making in decentralized sensor systems. The article described the problems that can arise from this system when the nodes receive inconsistent information. In 1999, in collaboration with Billur Barshan and Birsel Ayrulu, she published ''Voting as Validation in Robot Programming,'' which investigated the use of voting as a conflict resolution and information extraction technique. The paper argued that a single outcome should be encouraged when data sources from different sensors contradicted each other, rather than relying on an abstract average. This outcome can be achieved through voting, here referring to a data fusion technique. She later became the academic director for AIMS South Africa, where she helped to organize the 2021 AIMS Mathematics in Industry Study Group. This was a five day workshop where academics and graduate students collaborated with industry representatives to address research concerns submitted by local industries.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Utete, Simukai Living people Women in computing Women roboticists Zimbabwean scientists Alumni of the University of Oxford Year of birth missing (living people)