TCS | Bruce Mellado on the tech-led fight against air pollution in South Africa [Video]

South African scientists and researchers have built a cost-effective air-quality monitoring system using internet of things and artificial intelligence technologies.

Bruce Mellado, professor of particle physics and director of the Institute for Collider Particle Physics at Wits University, is one of the key people behind the new initiative, which is aimed at improving air quality in South Africa and eventually other markets around the world. He recently joined Duncan McLeod on the TechCentral Show to discuss the project.

Mellado, who also director at the iThemba Laboratories for Accelerator Based Sciences – a unit of South Africa’s National Research Foundation – takes TechCentral through the devices, how they were built and how they’re being deployed in South Africa to detect reportable problems with air quality.

“We decided to create, for the first time in South Africa, a cost-effective air-quality monitoring system based on sensors, IoT and AI. We have named this system Ai_r,” Mellado wrote in a …