[ADC #04] African AI Community Discovery
[ADC #04] African AI Community Discovery
I trust you had a blissful week. Today we hit our over 1.8k subscribers milestone š¾š. Special thanks to 1.8k+ of you who read my letters across 36 different countries and 5 US states from different parts of the world where Nigeria, Kenya, India, the US, Ghana, Uganda and South Africa top the list!
I started this newsletter to advocate for the work Africans are doing in the AI/ML space, provide awareness to the world, enhance collaboration by spotlighting peopleās work, increase the adoption of content creation in the data space and build the African data community, so you can stay offline or be in a different part of the world and know all that is happening in the African Data community, More on why I started
I also seek to collaborate with community advocates in the Eastern and Northern parts of Africa to cover a wider range in AI/ML for the Newsletter where my focus at the moment is on Kenya, South Africa, Egypt, Morrocco, Tunisia, Tanzania and Rwanda.
You can reach out on Twitter. if you are familiar with the data community in this region.
Lastly, If you have any idea on how I can make this newsletter more valuable or accommodating for you, donāt hesitate to hit the reply button or reach out onĀ Twitter.
African Data/ML Communities, Events & Meetups
The Open- source festival 2023 now has a new date, it will take place in Lagos, Nigeria from June 15th - 17th, 2023.
The Open Source Community Africa (OSCA) is for open source lovers, enthusiasts, advocates and experts within and across Africa with the sole aim of increasing the rate of credible contributions by African software developers, writers, Data Engineers, Data Scientists, and Machine learning Engineers.
Follow the open source community Africa on Twitter, Website, and Linkedln for more updates
Call for Speakers is now open from March 30th to April 24th where 3 parts align with the data community.
AI / Data Science (Machine Learning)
Geospatial Technologies (OpenStreetMap, QGIS, Location Intelligence)
Community (Technical writing, Career growth, Mental health)
These topics are more accessible to Data scientists, Machine learning Engineers, Geospatial Data scientists, Geospatial analysts, MLOps engineers, ML Developer advocates, ML/AI Technical writers and AI engineers all around open-source.
If you are among these people you should consider submitting a talk or workshop, if not you should consider attending to increase the number of data practitioners as the turnout for the last conference was low for data practitioners according to osca report.
This DBT Lagos meetup is a rare kind in Africa for Analytics Engineers, Data Engineers, Data Scientists and Data Analysts organized by the Young Data Professionals(YDP) community.
DBT Lagos has been updated to April 1st due to the elections.
The Global Power platform Bootcamp is here again!
The third edition is to be hosted in Lagos, Nigeria and it promises to be memorable as usual.
All around the world, user groups and communities want to learn about Microsoft's Power Platform!
This event will be a full day of presentations, and hands-on labs, all focused on Microsoft's Power Platform technologies, including Power Apps, Power Automate, Power pages and Dataverse.
Power Platform Bootcamp happening in Lagos on April 29!!
The Deep Learning Indaba will take place in Accra, Ghana over 6 days, from 3rd - 9th September 2023 (may be subject to change) with the theme āYÉbÉtumiā meaning We Can in English.
The Deep Learning Indaba is an annual meeting of the African machine learning community with the mission to Strengthen African Machine Learning and AI by building communities, creating leadership, and recognising excellence in research and applications by African innovators.
Apply to attend Deep learning Indaba, 2023
Key Facts for Deep learning Indaba:
ā¢ 21 Sponsors in 2018, 34 in 2019, and 31 in 2022.
ā¢ No registration fees for students and postdocs.
ā¢ 400 student travel awards made in 2018, 2019 and 2022.
ā¢ Sponsors included the worldās leading technology firms like Google, Microsoft, Deepmind, Nvidia and so on.
ā¢ Sponsors include continental banks, startups, and government.
The 2nd Edition of DatafestAfrica will be happening in Lagos, Nigeria by October 13 & 14th, 2023. DataFestAfrica is the first-ever event that showcases all career professions within the data space in Africa.
It has three categories:
DataFestAfrica Hackathon known as The DataFestHack.
DatafestAfrica Conference is known as Data Festival for Africans.
Data Community Africa which encapsulates the Hackathon, Conferences and Data professionals.
DataFestAfrica Hackathon - Best Product use-case by data professionals from data analysis, data engineering, data product management and machine learning engineers.
DatafestAfrica Conference - Talks, Workshop, Industry experience by data experts, data companies product showcase, data professionals relationship building.
Data Community Africa seeks sponsorship - Linkedln, Twitter, Youtube
Reach out, if interested in sponsoring.
Check #datafestafrica22 on Linkedln to see attendees or community experience
Jobs and opportunities š
This section holds data jobs from technical writing, community management, data analysis, machine learning, and data engineering. There have always been barriers to Africans getting a well-paid job in the Data/ML space, In the section, I collated some remote jobs in the data field available for Africans.
Machine learning Engineer Customer Success EMEA at Weight and Biases
Pre-Sales and Post-Sales Machine Learning Customer Success Engineer at Iterative.ai
Opportunities
Digital Africa plantation counting challenge - Can you create a semi-supervised algorithm to count trees in plantations in CĆ“te d'Ivoire?
Prizes
1st man - $4 000 USD either as an individual first man or majority male team.
1st woman - $4 000 USD either as an individual first woman or majority female team.
1st person from Ivory Coast - $2 000 USD, different from the top man or woman prize.
2. Intron AfriSpeech-200 Automatic Speech Recognition Challenge - Can you create an automatic speech recognition (ASR) model for African accents, for use by doctors?
Prizes
$2 500 USD
$1 500 USD
$1 000 USD
Africa Biomass Challenge - Can you predict biomass in cocoa plantations in CĆ“te d'Ivoire?
Prizes
1st place: $5 000 USD
2nd place: $3 000 USD
3rd place: $2 000 USD
African AI/ML Bootcamp
The DSN AI Bootcamp is an all-expenses-paid learning boot camp that builds Africaās capacity in the use of advanced machine learning and deep learning concepts and drives the application of AI for socio-economic development.Ā Ā
The Bootcamp is driven by a broader strategic intent to accelerate Africaās development through the solution-oriented application of machine learning to solve social and business problems and to galvanise a data science knowledge revolution improving employability, technological innovations and sustainable socio-economic development.
The grand finale of the AI Bootcamp 2023 will hold on-site at the Covenant University, Otta, Ogun State, Nigeria, between August 14 and August 20, 2023, and will accept professionals, researchers, students and developers.
Africa AI Startup News āØ
BioNTech to Acquire InstaDeep to Strengthen Pioneering Position in the Field of AI-powered Drug Discovery, Design and Development.
The transaction includes a total upfront consideration of approximately Ā£362 million in cash and BioNTech shares to acquire 100% of the remaining InstaDeep shares, excluding the shares already owned by BioNTech.
In addition, InstaDeep shareholders will be eligible to receive additional performance-based future milestone payments of up to approximately Ā£200 million. The transaction follows BioNTechās initial equity investment as part of InstaDeepās Series B financing round in January 2022.
Read this to know more
Zindi the biggest network for professional data scientists in Africa, has partnered with Ā Ernst & Young Africa to host a series of machine learning hackathons for its employees.
This hackathon has two aims; to help grow machine learning skills within the organisation, andĀ to get employees involved in generating ideas that will bring the firm's decarbonisation drive to life.
Are you a data engineer, data scientist,Ā ML/MLops engineer, deep learning engineer, NLP engineer, computer vision engineer, or AI research scientist in Africa?
Are you looking forward to getting your next data job?
If yes, Recthub Africa is for you.
Recthub Africa, help data talents get matched to their next data jobs.
Featured Videos From The Community
In this video, Wuraola Oyewusi demystified ChatGPT works in an Africa Language called Yoruba, she aims to make learning data science and machine learning accessible to Africans without considering Language as a barrier.
In this video, Olalekan Elesin An AWS ML Hero and Director of Data Platform and Data Architecture at Robert Ragge GmbH (HRS Group) discusses and shares his insights on how AWS has helped his company, HRS Group, achieve its business objectives. He shares several use cases of how AWS has helped the company improve customer experience and work on social good projects.
In this video, Several ML practitioners in Nigeria discuss how they use machine learning in their workplace. MLOps Community Lagos is the First MLOps community in Africa, The MLOps community in Lagos fills the swiftly growing need to share real-world Machine Learning Operations best practices from engineers in Nigeria, for more experience check out the Meetup page for physical events and Flickr for past experience.
In this video, Marlene Mhaghanmi walks you through the code to use a machine learning algorithm in Python to predict who will win this weekend's games at the FIFA 2022 World Cup Championships. She predicted who will win the championship game between Argentina and France and the game for 3rd place between Morocco and Croatia. Marlene used a type of machine learning model called Random Forest to make the prediction.
In this tutorial, Jaychris explains how to save and serve machine learning models using MLEM in Python.
Featured Articles From The Community
Data professionals from Africa make a lot of contributions and write monthly in the data space.
Their write-ups cover articles across MLOps, Data Engineering, Data Science, Data Communities, Machine learning, Analytics Engineering & Natural language processing and so on.
Monitor ETL pipelines with DVT and DBT tests by Kevin Oyanna
How to Build an AI-Powered Developer Newsletter with Power Platform and ChatGPT3 by Someleze Diko
Deploy SQL Server on Amazon RDS: A Step-by-Step Guide by Abidemi Muibudeen
How to start a career in Data Science in 2023 with aĀ roadmap by Aniekan
Mount Azure Blob Storage, Data Lake Gen2, and Azure SQL to Azure Databricks by Temidayo Ominiyi
Monitoring ML Models with FastAPI and EvidentlyAI by Nwoke Tochukwu
Featured Tweets in the African AI/ML space
Headline Tweet
Sam the CEO of OpenAI popular known for CHATGPT decides to include Lagos, Nigeria among the countries to visit.
Other featured tweets
A Nigerian was among the team that created new Avatars for Microsoft Teams. Olafenwa said It has been an honour for him to spend the last two years building the AI powering the speech-driven avatars where he also got his first patent.
Stephen a student of FUNAAB doing a B.sc in computer science got his offer for a PhD in Machine learning.
Gift Ojeabulu joins the Devrel team of one of the top AI/ML startups in the world.
The first African to work with the Iterativeai team.
Follow DVCorg if you are interested in Data science & Machine learning.
African AI/ML Scholarships
A DeepMind donation will fund 40 scholars per year for the next four years.
The funding covers full scholarships, equipment and computation costs for students. The scholars will be DeepMind scholars and have opportunities to connect with DeepMind's researchers and engineers for mentoring and support.
AIMS invite students from across Africa to apply to be part of the September 2023 cohort and become one of our 40 DeepMind Scholars for the 2023-24 academic year!
The deadline for the first round of the application process is 11:59 PM SAST on 8 April.
Last Wordsš
Thatās all I have for you this month.
As usual,Ā I feel this newsletter will be valuable to all Africans and Non - Africans in the data space including Companies, investors, CEOs, and Data Enthusiasts looking to come into the African market,Ā share this newsletter with them.
I can promise you that youāll be doing them a solid.
Also,Ā share the Newsletter on Twitter, LinkedIn, data communities, and other social platforms, and letās see some more growth next month (we added over 600 new subscribers from the last newsletter!!!)
Till I write to you next month, stay jiggy!!