#Top15YoungGeeks: Meet Sifiso Nkabinde
During the Youth Month, Geekulcha name and honor Top 15 Young Geeks in South Africa. These are the minds marking their stamp and playing a greater role in the Digital Revolution. These are Geeks who have been identified as being a role player in the transformation.
Sifiso Nkabinde, 15 Year Old Coder
He's a 15 years old software developer from Johannesburg. Sifiso started programming at the of age 10 after an introduction at the Sci-Bono Clubhouse since then, he developed an interest in 3D design, Robotics and Software development. After a couple of months of practice, he created demos such as an Android Weather App as a test of his skill, later a chat application finally a ride-hailing app he named Travel.
The youngest participant at the Hackathon is Sfiso, he’s just 14 years old and he wants to help to predict future crime incidents by using machine learning, AI, and data mining.
— Ayanda Dlodlo (@MinAyandaDlodlo) September 30, 2018
He says the solution can predict with fair accuracy where the next hijacking.#IgniteHack pic.twitter.com/3MviMjKfDO
After developing an interest in robotics, he decided to participate in international robotics competitions such as the First Tech Challenge (FTC) which required good design and engineering skills. Because of the great impression he had shown through his various projects, he was awarded a fully packaged scholarship by South African Businessman and Tech Entrepreneur Andile Ngcaba.
At the age of 14, he attended his first hackathon, the ITWeb Security Summit Hackathon in 2018, where him and his team built a social media filter and held the 3rd spot prize, later in that year, he participated in the TadHack MTN hackathon where his worked on an an Android and web application addresses fraudulent sim swop requests by allowing customers to do self-automated sim-swop.
At TadHack he held the 'Rising Star' Award. Later in that year, he got an introduction to Machine Learning with Azure, at the Microsoft AI Hackathon for social good, his team worked on an application that analyzes images of crops and identifies symptoms of a diseased plant all through machine learning.
Talk about investing in your craft. Young @BruceSifiso got himself a new machine from the prize money that he won at the @MTNza #TadhackJHB. He says that he was tired with his celeron #MSAIHack pic.twitter.com/SrplzNhi6G
— M I X O 📷💻😎 (@4otune) December 13, 2018
In the next 5 years, he wishes to continue learning adding to his skills stack, software development and Machine Learning. One of his dreams is to study at MIT and finally start a company addressing the world’s needs through technology.
There have to be reasons that you get up in the morning and you want to live. Why do you want to live? What's the point? What inspires you? What do you love about the future? If the future does not include being out there among the stars and being a multi-planet species, I find that incredibly depressing.
- Elon Musk
Connect with Sifiso