Workshops end the Indaba week. We have have a set of workshops covering all parts of the

Thursday, 25 August 2022

NLP @ Deep Learning Indaba

Full day workshop.

🕸Website

Overview. The goal of the workshop is to provide an overview of relevant and cutting-edge topics to participants, to connect students interested in NLP with each other and with leaders in the field, and to provide students the opportunity to obtain feedback on their work as well as to improve their skills.

Optimization in machine learning

Morning session

AI and Startups

Morning session.

Africa ML and Health Workshop

Half-day workshop

🕸Website

Join us in celebrating machine learning (ML) research for health from researchers in Africa and connect with researchers working on problems related to health in Africa. We provide a space for open dialogue about the state and potential of ML in Digital Health across Biomedical Informatics / Health Informatics, Bioinformatics and Mobile Health. Helping to identify issues for Africa in the Digital Health space that impact using machine learning as well as spotlighting successes stories that provide important insights.
The SisonkeBiotik aims to be an incubator for developing capacities in Africa for machine learning in digital health through open and participatory community action.

From Specialists to Generalists: The World of Generalised RL agents

Half-day workshop

🕸 Website

Reinforcement Learning as a field has exploded in popularity in recent years, with ambitions to tackle problems in a wide range of real-world applications, such as medicine, robotics and finance. However, there is a gap between the typically small, simulated problems that RL excels at and the larger, more complex, dynamic and unpredictable real-world environments to which we wish to apply RL. To help bridge this gap, a great deal of emphasis has been placed on generalisation, the ability for an RL agent to generalise to new situations. The focus of this workshop is to expose researchers and students from all across the African continent to the latest advances in the field of generalisation in RL, as well as spark some discussion about the future direction of this nascent field. The main agenda of the workshop includes keynote talks from top researchers in the field, short talks from a number of African research groups, and a panel discussion on generalisation in RL

Workshop on Computer Vision

Half-day workshop.

🕸 Website

The workshop will focus on computer vision algorithms using less labels and/or less data. Classically, machine learning relies on abundant annotated data. This is prone to cultural biases, since datasets are commonly recorded in western countries, as well as distribution bias due to rare events, such as adverse weather/lighting conditions which are rarely included in public datasets.

Speakers of this workshop will showcase recent researches on alternative strategies to reduce the need of labels (e.g., domain adaptation, domain generalization) or the need of data (e.g., few-/zero-shot learning, continual learning). Alternately, other strategies that rely on accessible priors will be presented, like self-supervised, cross modal, or model-based learning. The applications will focus, but not be limited to, autonomous driving and robotics. The workshop will have a poster session for selected works. Relevant original and/or published articles are welcome.

Friday, 26 August 2022

ML at the Edge

Half-day workshop.

🕸 Website

Most of the world is using machine learning in resource-constrained environments. In contrast, modern machine learning models are becoming larger, with computationally intensive training procedures.. The rise of these larger models have also led to efforts to make machine learning more efficient and deployable at the edge. In this workshop, we put a focus on efficiency research and ML deployment at the edge.

African-Francophone in AI, challenges and opportunities

Half-day workshop.

🕸 Website

A forum to gather and connect African francophones who are in AI to discuss the issues other francophones ai practitioners are facing when trying to dive into ai. Suggest solutions and discuss what has been done so far.

An Afro-feminist Approach to AI Governance and Policy

Half-day workshop.

This workshop aims to contribute to the positive framing and shaping of offline and digital futures related to areas directly impacted by Artificial Intelligence as well as subsisting and emerging technologies. With the aid of this workshop, we offer an opportunity in line with our goals at Pollicy, to foster inclusivity and diversness, to highlight some of the relevant issues and advance understanding of an Afro-feminist data futures framework that centres the expertise of women (as well as other minorities) and their own experiences and needs. By highlighting and identifying these often intersecting needs, the needs, threats and benefits will be cast in relief and engender conversation regarding where exactly to begin to govern AI on the continent. At the end of this workshop, we want to leave the relevant stakeholders who are our participants with the requisite skills, knowledge and experience on the issues revolving around AI deployment and use as well as governance methods in addition to a useful framework for navigating the necessary issues. It is also our goal to achieve the following objectives:

  1. To engage participants in sharing real-life examples regarding their work in these steps and practical steps on how to move this conversation forward.
  2. Develop a framework with participant input for adoption and implementation by relevant organisations.
  3. We are also keen to discuss how our framework may be translated for use by other communities and groups.

Trustworthy AI: Bias + Explainable + Interpretable AI

Half-day workshop