Rate My Professor Jan Buys

Jan Buys is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Cape Town. He holds an MSc from Stellenbosch University and a DPhil from the University of Oxford. His research focuses on natural language processing and machine learning, with particular interests in text generation, linguistic structure prediction, and low-resource language processing. Prior to his current position, Buys served as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Washington, working with Yejin Choi. He completed his doctoral studies at Oxford under the supervision of Phil Blunsom, following his earlier degrees in computer science at Stellenbosch University.

Buys has received several recognitions for his work, including an NRF P-rating from the National Research Foundation of South Africa in 2024 and a Thuthuka grant in 2021. He was promoted to Senior Lecturer effective January 2024. His contributions include numerous peer-reviewed publications on topics such as neural syntactic generative models, low-resource machine translation, and multilingual language models. Buys also engages in teaching courses in data structures, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and natural language processing at UCT, and participates in academic reviewing for major conferences and journals in his field.