Biography
Iloke Alusala is a final-year student at the University of Cape Town (UCT), where he is completing a BSc in Mechatronics Engineering. He is the founder of the Chevo Collective, a project-based engineering community at UCT, and has completed internships focused on predictive maintenance, building machine-learning systems that spot faults in industrial motors before they break down. His final-year research in UCTʼs African Robotics Unit looks at how a robot can determine its location using 3D Gaussian Splatting, a new way of building photorealistic 3D maps from ordinary images.
Iloke is a six-time winner of international Autodesk engineering contests and a member of UCTʼs Deanʼs Merit List, and was part of the four-person team that built a small supercomputer to win the 2025 CSIR Student Cluster Competition and represent South Africa at the International Supercomputing Conference in Hamburg, Germany. He also represented his province in tennis, plays volleyball, and is a saxophonist with a Grade 8 distinction who has played in big bands and orchestras but enjoys jazz improvisation most.
Iloke shares engineering content with more than 100,000 followers online and takes part in discussions on AI safety and governance, particularly how AI can be developed responsibly in the Global South.
He hopes to pursue studies in robotics at Oxford, with the aim of building robotic systems that work where infrastructure is weakest across Africa.