Carl Scheffler, Ph.D.,
Professor, Head of College of Computational Sciences
Accomplishments
- Recipient of the Mandela Cambridge Scholarship from the Cambridge Commonwealth Trust
- M.Sc. cum laude in Computer Science from the University of the Western Cape in South Africa, for research on visual feature tracking
- B.Sc. cum laude from the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa, where he was a top undergraduate student in the Faculty of Natural Sciences
- Created an adaptive math and science practice system as technical director at Siyavula.com, an education technology startup. The system is still in use by thousands of South African students.
- Implemented event sourcing, recommender, and other data-driven systems at Takealot.com, South Africa’s largest online retailer
Carl Scheffler has extensive experience as an academic and an industry professional in machine learning. Prior to Minerva he acted as the technical lead at an edtech startup in South Africa, after which he joined South Africa’s largest online retailer as a founding member and, eventually, technical lead of the machine learning team. Professor Scheffler earned his Ph.D. in Bayesian Inference from the University of Cambridge.
Professor Scheffler has been teaching university students on and off since starting work on his M.Sc. research. He has traveled from Africa to Europe, India, the Americas, and the Middle East to help teach hands-on use of technology in underserved communities. He believes that people learn best by doing, and that we truly understand a concept once we can build something with it. Professor Scheffler teaches the Modern Computational Statistics concentration course.