The Deep Learning Indaba 2024 invites the submission of short papers (up to 6 pages) featuring substantial, original, and unpublished research in all aspects of Machine Learning and Deep Learning (see list of topics of interest at the bottom of the page). Submissions are limited only to selected attendees, therefore, a Baobab participant ID is required as part of the submission. Authors of Short Papers, will also be expected to present their research as posters during the Research in Africa Showcase Days.

Special Theme: “Open science, open data, and open models”

Important Dates

  • 31 July 2024  – Deadline Extented for submission of short papers by authors
  • 15 August 2024 – Reviews Released
  • 20 August 2024 – Pre-Indaba Camera Ready & Posters Submission

Submission Topics

DLI 2024 aims to have a broad technical program. Relevant topics for the DLI 2024 include any topic related to Machine Learning and Deep Learning.

Paper Submission Details

Paper submissions should follow all of the DLI submission requirements, including:

  • Authorship
  • Citation and Comparison
  • Withdrawal Policy
  • Ethics Policy
  • Limitations
  • Paper Submission and Templates

Final versions of accepted papers will be given two additional pages of content (up to 8 pages) to address reviewers’ comments.

Why Submit to DLI?

There are many good reasons to submit to the DLI, such as:

  • Mentorship program: DLI provides a unique opportunity for authors to receive constructive feedback and to improve their work through a pre-submission mentorship program. Note that sign up for mentorship is required.
  • Improving your publication record: publishing a paper as an undergraduate or as a MSc/MA student is beneficial when applying for a PhD program. Publishing a paper in DLI can greatly help to improve students’ publication record.
  • Exploratory Studies: We encourage the submission of studies with positive and negative results providing insights on why and in which scenarios a particular method succeeds and fails.

All accepted papers will be presented either as oral presentations or during poster sessions, which will give authors an opportunity to interact with and to present their work to a large and diverse audience, including top researchers in the field and assigned mentors.

Pre-Submission Mentorship Program

The DLI offers authors the opportunity to receive feedback prior to submitting their final work for review. The goal of the pre-submission mentorship program is to improve the quality of writing and presentation of the author’s work, not to critique the work itself. Participation is optional but encouraged. The pre-submission mentorship is not anonymous. First time authors are highly encouraged to submit papers and to sign-up for mentorship to improve paper submissions.

Authors wishing to participate in the pre-submission mentorship must submit their paper draft 1 month before the paper submission deadline.

Note that even though the mentoring is not done anonymously, the paper needs to be anonymized. We will check for the formality of the paper including formatting before we match it with mentors.

The participants will be assigned a mentor who will review and will provide feedback within four weeks. This mentor will not be the same person who will review the final submission. The feedback will be in the form of guidelines and suggestions to improve the overall writing, which should ideally be incorporated before the actual submission deadline.

You CAN submit a paper for the Indaba even if you did not participate in the pre-submission mentoring. If you did submit a draft for pre-submission mentoring, you will need to make a new submission for the final version of the paper.

Submission Requirements

Papers consist of up to six (6) pages of content, plus an unlimited number of pages for references. Upon acceptance, papers will be given two additional pages of content (up to 8 pages). Authors are encouraged to use the additional pages to address reviewers’ comments. 

Paper submissions must use the official DLI 2024 style templates, which are available and downloadable here: DLI Template Kit.  We strongly encourage participants to use the Latex template. All submissions must be in PDF format and must conform to the official style guidelines, which are contained in these template files. The review process will be double-blind, and thus all submissions must be anonymized.

Paper language must be in English.

TOPICS OF INTEREST

The technical program will consist of, but is not limited to, the following topics of interest:

  • Natural Language Processing
    • Resources and Evaluation
    • Large Language Models
    • Machine Translation
    • Multilinguality and Linguistic Diversity
    • Natural Language Generation
    • Natural Language Understanding
    • Question Answering
    • Summarization
    • Semantics: Lexical, Sentence level, Document Level, Textual Inference, etc.
    • Information Retrieval 
    • Multimodal NLP
    • NLP Applications
  • Vision, Image and Speech technologies
    • Computer vision
    • Image processing (e.g., security/surveillance tasks)
    • Face, Gesture, and Action Recognition
    • Object recognition
    • Character identification
    • Motion and tracking
    • Speaker and language recognition
    • Speech analysis
    • Automatic speech recognition
    • Speech generation
  • Big Data, Cloud Computing, Data Analysis and Visualization
    • Big Data Analysis & Visualization
    • Predictive Modeling for Data Analysis
    • Network Analysis
    • Exploratory Data Analysis
    • Social Media Analytics, Networking and Social Networks
    • Intelligent Systems for IOT
    • Cloud computing in the IOT
    • Robotics (e.g., control of autonomous vehicles)
  • Learning methods and systems
    • Machine learning
    • Learning in low-resource settings, e.g., edge ML, tiny ML
    • Reinforcement learning
    • Generative models
  • Applications in and/or alignment with SDGs in the following areas:
    • Medicine, health, bioinformatics and systems biology
    • Agriculture, Energy, Climate change
    • Industrial and engineering applications
    • Security applications
    • Smart cities, Internet of Things, Blockchain and autonomous driving
    • Game playing 
    • Intelligent virtual environments
    • Economics, business, finance 
    • Forecasting applications
    • Ethics in NLP

Organisers: 

  • Albert Njoroge Kahira (Publications Chair)
  • Christine Mwase
  • Hatem Haddad
  • Bruno Ssekiwere
  • Lesego Makhafola

For questions related to paper submission, please reach us out at publications@deeplearningindaba.com