HOWZIT WITSIES, and happy September! Despite the stories below about AI, this newsletter was not written using an AI bot. Have we already reached the future, where artisanal and human-made are at a premium? Or are we all explorers, with all the potential still ahead? We remain grateful for our community here, and for the journey that has led us from Wits, to the US.

OUR OWN BOARD MEMBER WON AN EMMY

Wits Fund board member, David Jammy, won a 2025 Creative Arts Emmy award for his work – as executive producer of “Conan O’Brien: The Kennedy Center Mark Twain Prize for American Humor”. Congratulating him, his very proud fellow board members said that this amazing accolade is richly deserved.

As we feel gratitude for the blessings in our lives, one way to pay it forward is through making an impact in a person’s life that will uplift them, and their familes, for generations to come.
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WITS DAY 2025: PAINTING THE TOWN BLUE

From Yale Road to Braamfontein, one giant wave of yellow and blue. The 2025 Wits parade was a takeover to remember. 💛💙🎉 Click here for more highlights of the day.

WATCH: the highlight reel of the 2025 Wits Parade.

Google.org backs the Wits MIND Institute with US$1M boost

The Machine Intelligence and Neural Discovery (MIND) Institute has been awarded core funding of US$1 million by Google.org.

Led by Professor Benjamin Rosman, who was named in the ‘Thinkers’ category of TIME magazine’s TIME100 AI 2025 recently, the Wits Mind Institute is home to some of Africa’s leading fundamental AI researchers, and this landmark investment will supercharge its research and drive next-generation breakthroughs in natural and artificial intelligence.

Importantly, this strategic support will boost the Institute’s targeted capacity development and network-building programs, which centre around outcomes-driven collaboration across disciplines, and dialogue among academia, industry, policymakers and others.

Since its launch in November 2024 — building on more than a decade of Wits University’s investment in postgraduate education, capacity building, and pan-African AI initiatives — The Wits MIND Institute has rapidly become a hub for cutting-edge research and thought leadership.

Read more here.

How Can Generative AI and the Music Industry Co-Exist? 

As AI models create and distribute music, lyrics and vocal likeness while evolving faster than laws can adapt, the risk of courtroom battles grows. In a new paper, US-based Witsie Charles Goldstuck (Wits BAccSci 1983) presents a bold legal and commercial framework for AI-generated music.

“The task ahead is not to resist AI, but to ensure that it evolves within a multi-stakeholder governance framework that protects creative labor, enables innovation and scales with the velocity of the disruption. AI services and human content creators must coexist and both be allowed to thrive,” says the author of the paper, Charles Goldstuck, a trailblazer in the global music industry, and a PhD candidate at the University of the Witwatersrand, in Johannesburg.

“This paper explains why we must find a mutually beneficial path forward in which the music industry and AI platforms resort to negotiated settlements and collaboratively develop new licensing agreements.”

Generative AI models create music through the large-scale ingestion of copyrighted works to produce new audio, melodies, lyrics and vocal likeness. They also distribute music through licensed, data-driven personalized listening experiences. New AI-systems are evolving faster than existing legal and technical infrastructures can adapt, backed by powerful investors and integrated into global consumer platforms. How, then, can AI platforms and the music industry co-exist without ending up in the courtrooms?

Read more here.

Witsie Develops Eye-Patch to Fight Blindness

Wits PhD researcher Kruti Naik is conducting her doctoral study on a drug-loaded eye patch. This platform is being explored as a localized, non-invasive alternative for delivering treatments for vision-related diseases.

Naik is based at the Wits Advanced Drug Delivery Platform (WADDP), who  are developing innovative pharmaceutical systems that aim to transform access to treatment, with solutions tailored for the African context. This work sits at the intersection of pharmaceutical science, public health equity, and technology access.

Read more here.

Wits in 60 Seconds

Wits is driving innovation across disciplines, from launching the AI and African Music pilot project that fuses artificial intelligence with creativity, to hosting its first Entrepreneurship Education Summit at Wits Business School. PhD student Kruti Naik is pioneering microneedle eye patches and hydrogels that could transform treatment for blindness-causing eye diseases in Africa, while Wits’ signing of the Africa Charter marks a commitment to reshaping research collaborations across the continent. Wits also hosted the first CIVIS Blended Intensive Program in Maternal and Neonatal Immunization outside Europe, connecting students from Africa and Europe in a new model of global learning. Read more here.

Wits Virtual Tour

See Wits University in Action! Want a closer look at life on campus? For a Virtual Tour of Your Old Haunts, Click here.