Speakers

The 2018 edition of Deep Learning Indaba welcomed 33 brilliant speakers who took time from their busy lives to attend the conference.

Plenary Speakers

Asja Fischer

Assistant Professor, Ruhr-University Bochum

Katja Hofmann

Researcher, Microsoft Research Cambridge

Kyunghyun Cho

Assistant Professor, New York University, and Research scientist at Facebook AI Research

Jeff Dean

Senior Fellow, Google AI. Google Brain lead and co-founder. Co-designer and implementor of Tensorflow, MapReduce, BigTable, Spanner.

Moustapha Cisse

Team Lead, Google AI Ghana; Lead, African Masters in Machine Intelligence, AIMS

Nando De Freitas

Principal Scientist and Team Lead, DeepMind; and Deep Learning Indaba advisory board member

Yabebal Fantaye

Junior Research Chair, African Institute for Mathematical Sciences, South Africa

Speakers for Mathematics for Machine Learning

Learn the key concepts of probability and differential calculus necessary to gain the most from the rest of the week’s programme. This session will be split into 5 smaller classes run in parallel (each covering the same material).

Cynthia Mulenga

Product Manager, Mwabu Zambia; Trainer, Asikana Network; Co-lead Facebook Developer Circle Lusaka

Daniela Massiceti

PhD Candidate, University of Oxford

Kathleen Siminyu

Data Scientist Africa's Talking; Co-organiser, Nairobi Machine Learning and Data Science

Kendi Muchungi

Programme Leader, Africa Nazarene University

Avishkar Bhoopchand

Research Engineer, DeepMind

AI and Africa

In this session we wish to highlight the ongoing as well as new directions of AI/ML work happening in Africa. This session will have two sections, first we will have short presentations 5-10 minutes from senior representatives from AI/ML/Policy companies and organisation (both NGO and governmental). These presentations are meant to provide an overview of what each organisation offers, highlight their successes, learn from challenges encountered and understand opportunities discovered. Following the presentations, we will have a Q&A session to open up the conversation to the audience.

Sumir Panji

Network Manager, H3-Africa

David Sengeh

Chief Innovation Officer at Government of Sierra-Leone

Jon Lenchner

Chief Scientist, IBM Research Africa

Generative Models and Healthcare

This sessions builds on the understanding of generative models, with a focus on applications in healthcare. For the first half, Konstantina will discuss the role of probabilistic thinking, uncertainty and causality, and then look at how these tools can be used to build personalised healthcare tools. In the second part, Shakir will recap the area of generative models, specifically the algorithms for LDA, VAEs and GANs, and then look at how these can be applied in healthcare settings ranging from analysis of electronic health records, medical notes, in drug discovery, and in medical imaging.

Konstantina Palla

Researcher in the Healthcare ML Division at Microsoft Research Cambridge

Shakir Mohamed

Research Scientist, DeepMind, London

Special Session on Reinforcement Learning

David Silver

Principal Scientist, DeepMind

Natural Language Processing

Learn about the recent history of NLP and discuss the biggest open problems in NLP with a panel of experts.

Herman Kamper

Lecturer, Stellenbosch University

Sebastian Ruder

PhD Candidate, Insight Research Centre for Data Analytics; Research scientist, AYLIEN, Dublin

AI Ethics and Policy

This session will tackle the intersections of AI/ML, Ethics and Policy on the continent. Session will be a blend of a practical interactive Ethics session, a talk on fairness and robust discussion via an expert panel made up of researchers, practitioners, policy makers. At the end of the day, we would like to answer: How do we work to inject our own values into AI/ML development in Africa, allow a progressive environment for development and protect our communities?

Timnit Gebru

Research Scientist, Google AI; Black in AI

Osonde Osoba

Engineer, Rand Corporation; Professor, Pardee RAND Graduate School

Mmaki Jantjies

Senior Lecturer, University Western Cape

Linet Kwamboka

Founder and CEO DataScience Ltd

Vukosi Marivate

Chair of Data Science, University of Pretoria; CSIR; and Deep Learning Indaba

Machine Learning in Production

Learn the tricks of the trade for deploying and scaling ML models in a production environment from experienced practitioners.

Omoju Miller

Senior Data Scientist, GitHub

Stuart Reid

Chief Scientist and partner, NMRQL Research

Amine Kerkerni

AI Product Development Lead, InstaDeep

Frontiers of Computer Vision

Learned the basics of Convolutional Neural Networks? Want to know go beyond? Join to extend your understanding of CNNs and how they extract image features for higher-level computer vision tasks like object detection, localisation and semantic segmentation. Following this, we invite a panel of computer vision experts to give their personal insights, advice and expert views on the frontiers of the field: what are the biggest unsolved problems in computer vision, how are they relevant to Africa, and where should African researchers be directing their energy to solve these problems. Also join to hear short spotlight talks given by fellow Indaba attendees – a great opportunity to learn more about current state-of-the-art methods being used in computer vision!