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Herselman, an adjunct professor at the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University and a principal researcher who leads the Living Labs research group at the CSIR, is no stranger to awards. Her work has been recognised locally and internationally. In 2005, she was named Women Researcher of the Year at Tshwane University of Technology. In 2000, she was awarded a scholarship of the Deutsche Akademischer Austauschdienst of the International Women's University to attend a summer semester at the University of Hamburg, in the project field of information.
With a double Masters degree (in education and business information systems) and a doctorate in the use of computer games for teaching, her research focuses on the use of information and communications technology for business enhancement, rural community informatics and e-health projects.
The IEEE awards event comes just ahead of the first annual conference for Living Labs in Southern Africa Network (LLiSA), which takes place at the CSIR International Convention Centre on 23 and 24 November 2009. As hosts of the LLiSA network, Herselman and her CSIR-based team have put together this event which has drawn over 150 registrations from all over southern Africa.
Living Labs is recognised internationally as a methodology and an innovation approach that works well in a multidisciplinary context in various settings, such as urban and rural environments.
It allows all stakeholders - government, society, industry and academia - to achieve their own goals and outcomes in support of a specific community. Users and citizens become active participants in experimentation and testing during projects and not merely passive receivers of innovation. In fact, all parties stand to gain through equal partnerships in the process.
The first LliSA conference event follows the launch of the initiative in February 2009. The interest demonstrated by commercial entities, non government organisations and universities at this event confirms that the Living Lab concept is seen as a winning recipe in southern Africa.
The LLiSA board has representatives from industry, academia, communities, the Department of Science and Technology, local governments and southern African Living Labs who are members of the European Network of Living Labs, as well as the Cooperation Framework on Innovation Systems between Finland and South Africa (COFISA) and the South Africa-Finland Knowledge Partnership on ICT (SAFIPA).
Herselmans past projects include database administration, as well as data collection in Limpopo on malaria detection via satellite navigation systems for the ReGlan rural community hospital project. This project focused on assisting EU countries in the development of an early detection and prevention system for serious diseases.
Her expertise has also been applied to technology assessment of rural communities. This was aimed at identifying which technologies are available and which technology adoption models are implemented by rural communities in SA.
She is currently busy with a National Research Foundation-funded research project on technology assessment models in rural communities in South Africa.
ABOUT IEEE
IEEE stands for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. Today, the organisation has expanded into so many related fields and has become so well known that it is simply referred to by its acronym, IEEE, pronounced Eye-triple-E.
IEEE is an association which is dedicated to fostering technological innovation and excellence for the benefit of humanity, and is the worlds largest technical professional society. It serves professionals working in all the electrical, electronic and computing fields and related areas of science and technology. IEEEs roots go back as far as 1884 when electricity was just beginning to gain a foothold and become a major force in society. It was then known as the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, and boasted Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell among its early members, who were of course two of the leading lights of the era.
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