Dane Brown is Associate Professor of Computer Science at Rhodes University, Makhanda, where he coordinates Honours and postgraduate research. He is an NRF Y-rated researcher.
He holds a PhD in Computer Science from Rhodes University and an MSc cum laude from the University of the Western Cape, where his thesis addressed South African Sign Language. He was a biometrics researcher at the CSIR from 2014 to 2017, joined Rhodes in 2017 and was Visiting Associate Professor at the University of Warwick in 2020.
His research applies computer vision and machine learning to conservation, such as monitoring wildlife populations from camera imagery. The core aim is to cut the expert labelling time that conservation programmes cannot afford and to make models trained on available data work at new sites without retraining. His STIAS project builds on the monitoring system for the critically endangered African penguin with conservation partners including South African National Parks. He is the AI lead co-investigator on MobiFish, a Foundational Biodiversity Information Programme project on South African marine fish imagery and eDNA. He is a member of the South African Young Academy of Science, where he runs academic writing workshops, and is part of the national Future Professors Programme.