AMLD Africa 2021

Walid Daou

Passionate about how Machine Learning and AI can have an impact on all businesses, Walid Daou currently runs Advanced Analytics initiatives at OCP. He started his career in Financial Markets, as a Quantitative Trader in London, in Barclays Capital and in a Hedge Fund, Capula. He then founded and run an Edtech company in France and Morocco for six years, that became the leader in the market of preparation of competitive exams, in Morocco. Machine Learning enthusiast, he teaches the ""AI for Executive"" course at EDHEC. Walid Daou is a Graduate from Ecole Polytechnique and Ecole des Mines de Paris, in Applied Mathematics.

Carolina Odman

Dr. Ödman is Associate Professor at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa and Associate Director, Development and Outreach at the Inter-University Institute for Data Intensive Astronomy (IDIA). Trained in physics at EPFL in Switzerland, she holds a PhD in cosmology from Cambridge University, UK where she worked on Bayesian approaches to cosmological parameter estimation. She has done research in several fields of physics and developed educational programmes based on science from early childhood to postgraduate training. She has also worked in a financial technology startup. She now focuses on researching and bringing a development agenda to science. Her work has earned her numerous awards nationally and internationally. In 2018 she was awarded a Special prize by the International Astronomical Union for her work in Education Development and Outreach. Most recently, she was part of the #InspiringFifty 2020 South Africa cohort.

Stefano Ermon

Stefano Ermon is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science in the CS Department at Stanford University, where he is affiliated with the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and a fellow of the Woods Institute for the Environment. His research is centered on techniques for probabilistic modeling of data and is motivated by applications in the emerging field of computational sustainability. He has won several awards, including four Best Paper Awards (AAAI, UAI and CP), a NSF Career Award, ONR and AFOSR Young Investigator Awards, a Sony Faculty Innovation Award, a Hellman Faculty Fellowship, Microsoft Research Fellowship, Sloan Fellowship, and the IJCAI Computers and Thought Award. Stefano earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science at Cornell University in 2015.

Aisha Walcott-Bryant

Aisha is a Senior Technical Staff Member and manager at IBM Research Africa - Nairobi, Kenya. She leads a team of phenomenal, brilliant researchers and engineers that use AI, Cloud, and other technologies to advance the state-of-the art in the Future of Health and Climate. Aisha has a strong interest in developing AI tools for Global Health (see her work on COVID-19 interventions, https://ibm.github.io/wntrac), and working across sectors to create innovative, sustainable AI solutions to transform emerging economies. She is also a program co-chair for ICRA'22, https://www.icra2022.org, and looking to engage the African community in AI, robotics, and automation.

Karim Beguir

Karim Beguir is the CEO and Co-Founder of InstaDeep, twice nominated in the global AI100 list. Karim helps companies come to grips with the latest AI breakthroughs and deploy them to improve efficiency and ROI. As a graduate of France's Ecole Polytechnique and former Program Fellow at New York University's Courant Institute, he has a passion for teaching and using applied mathematics. He's also a Google developer expert, a mentor at Google for Startups Accelerator and a steering committee member of Deep Learning Indaba. Karim is on a mission to democratize AI and make it accessible to a wide audience.

Tawfik Jelassi

Dr. Tawfik Jelassi was appointed UNESCO Assistant Director-General for Communication and Information on 1st July 2021. In this position, he is responsible for the Organization’s programmes on building inclusive knowledge societies, leading digital transformation, strategizing the role of ICT in education, and fostering freedom of expression. Dr. Jelassi holds a Ph.D. doctorate in information systems from New York University (USA) and postgraduate diplomas from the University of Paris Dauphine (France). Dr. Jelassi has extensive experience in higher education, scientific research, and information & communication technologies. He held academic, corporate and government leadership positions in Europe, the USA, and Tunisia. Among others, he was Programme Director and Professor of Strategy and Technology Management at IMD Business School in Lausanne (2015 – June 2021). Prior to that, he served as Minister of Higher education, Scientific Research and Information & Communication Technologies in the democratic transition government of Tunisia (2014 – 2015). Prior appointments included being Chairman of the Board of Directors of Ooredoo Telecom in Tunisia, Dean at Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées (Paris), and Professor & Chairman of the Technology Management Department at INSEAD (Fontainebleau).

Anitha Vijayakumar

Anitha Vijayakumar is a Technical Project Manager on the TensorFlow team. She got her engineering degree from India and a Masters in Computer Engineering from UCLA. She has been working at Google for more than 9 years and is most recently leading program management for the TensorFlow Ecosystem.

Kamal Bhattacharya

Kamal Bhattacharya is a Professor for Computer Science at IU International University in Berlin and Co-Founder <a href="http://advancity.com/">Advancity.com</a>. Kamal held multiple research and management roles around the globe. He served as a VP &amp; Director at IBM Research, Chief Innovation Officer at Safaricom, Senior Lecturer at MIT Sloan, commissioner of Pathways for Prosperity, and several other roles focusing on the use of technology in International Development. He holds a PhD in Theoretical Physics from Göttingen University in Germany, has published 50+ papers in international scientific journals and conferences, and holds 20+ patents

Benji Meltzer

<div class="trix-content"> Benji obtained a BSc in Mechatronics Engineering at UCT, after which he worked as a software engineer and business analyst at the Cyest Corporation in Johannesburg, Chile and Australia.  Next he obtained an MSc in Neurotechnology at Imperial College London. His main research areas at Imperial focussed on machine learning and computational neuroscience. Thereafter he joined Uber, where he worked as an Operations Manager for Sub Saharan Africa. He was responsible for building the analytical models that led to data-driven, strategic decisions around supply growth, efficiency and performance. Benji is currently the co-founder and CTO of Aerobotics, a Cape Town based company using aerial imagery to help farmers find problems early and optimize performance. Benji is responsible for both the data science and software application areas of the business, designing and building predictive, automated insights that farmers can use to easily make decisions through a range of web and mobile applications. </div>

Amit Joshi

<div class="trix-content"> Amit Joshi is a Professor of AI, Analytics and Marketing Strategy at IMD. He is the Program Director of the <a href="https://www.imd.org/da/digital-analytics-course/">Digital Analytics</a> open programs, the co-director of the program on <a href="https://www.imd.org/ai/artificial-intelligence-course/">Artificial Intelligence</a> and the Director of the <a href="https://www.imd.org/dtp/digital-diploma/">Digital Excellence Diploma</a>. In 2020, he was named a ‘Digital Shaper’ in Switzerland, as one of a handful of individuals who would shape the digital economy in the future. Amit is an award-winning professor and researcher and has interacted with a variety of corporate clients in several industries, including telecom, banking and financial services, media, manufacturing, retailing, pharma, education and automobiles. He is frequently invited to provide keynote speeches the world over, and also provides advisory services to senior executives. Amit’s research, which focuses on long-run marketing strategy, analytics and AI applications, has been published in top journals, including Journal of Marketing, Marketing Science, Journal of Consumer Culture, Journal of Cultural Economics and Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science. His research has twice won the MSI / H. Paul Root Award, for the best paper in the Journal of Marketing (2010 and 2015) the Robert D. Buzzell Best Paper Award (2006) for the MSI publication with the most long-term impact and been nominated for the Sheth Foundation Award for long-term contributions. His dissertation won an honorable mention in the 2004 Alden G. Clayton Dissertation Proposal Competition. He is also an award-winning case writer. His research and opinions have been extensively covered in the popular press and media, appearing in outlets including NPR, CNN, NBC, Nikkei, Fast Company, Business Standard, Fox News, Bloomberg, Forbes, Investor Relations Magazine, The Conversation, and Science Daily. Amit earned his bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Pune, a Post Graduate Diploma in Management (P.G.D.M.) from the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta, India, and a Ph.D. is from the UCLA Anderson School of Management. </div>

Moustapha Cisse

<div class="grid__item"> <div class="markdown__body"> <div class="trix-content"> Research Scientist and Head of Google AI Center, Accra. Founder and Director of African Masters Of Machine Intelligence at African Institute for Mathematical Sciences. </div> </div> </div>

Rachid Guerraoui

Rachid Guerraoui is a professor in computer science at EPFL where he leads the Laboratory of Distributed Computing. He worked in the past with Ecole des Mines de Paris, CEA Saclay, HP Labs in Palo Alto and MIT. He has been elected ACM fellow and professor of the College de France. He was awarded a Senior ERC Grant and a Google Focused Award.

Catherine Nakalembe

Dr. Nakalembe is an Associate Research Professor at the University of Maryland. She is the NASA Harvest Africa Program Director, is a member of the NASA SERVIR Applied Sciences Team serving as the Agriculture and Food Security Thematic Lead. Catherine has broad research interests including applications of satellite remote sensing and machine learning to agriculture and food security, land use and land-use change mapping, water resources, and climate change, and supports several capacity-building in the use of remote sensing for agriculture monitoring and research. She is a 2020 Africa Food Prize Laureate for her dedication to improving the lives of smallholder farmers by using satellite technology to harness data to guide agricultural decision-making. Her efforts have also promoted the formulation of policies and programs that are directly impacting farmers against the impacts of food failure. Dr. Nakalembe was a 2020 UMD Research Excellence Honoree and in 2019 was a recipient of the Inaugural GEO Individual Excellence Award. She was featured in the 2020 Women and GIS, Volume 2: Stars of Spatial Science ESRI Press book. Her work led to the development and establishment of food security and crop monitoring bulletins that integrate satellite data including the Tanzania National Food Security Bulletin, the Uganda National Integrated Early Warning Bulletin, Kenya, Rwanda Crop Monitor reports, and the Eastern Africa Crop Monitor as well as designing the trigger mechanism of the disaster risk financing program in Uganda that has supported over 300,000 households in the Karamoja region as part of her Ph.D. research.

Houcemeddine Turki

Born on May 24, 1994 in Sfax, Tunisia, Houcemeddine Turki is an open science advocate and a long-term contributor to Wikimedia Projects including Wikipedia and Wikidata. He is currently a board member of Wikimedia Tunisia User Group and of Wikimedia and Libraries User Group. He is also a member of Wiki Indaba Steering Committee, the coordination body for African Wikimedia Movement. As well, Houcemeddine Turki is a Research Assistant at the Data Engineering and Semantics Research Unit, University of Sfax, Tunisia. He is working on various fields including Data Science, Biomedical Informatics, Semantic Web and Scientometrics. Moreover, Houcemeddine Turki is a medical student at the University of Sfax, Tunisia.

Walid Krichene

Walid Krichene works at Google Research on large-scale optimization and recommendation. He received his Ph.D. in EECS in 2016 from U.C. Berkeley where he was advised by Alex Bayen and Peter Bartlett, a M.A. in Mathematics from UC Berkeley, and a M.S. in Engineering and Applied Math from the Ecole des Mines Paristech. He received a best paper award at KDD 2020, the Leon Chua Award and two outstanding instructor awards from U.C. Berkeley. His research interests include convex optimization, stochastic approximation, and recommender systems.

Jonathan Whitaker

Jonathan is a Data Science consultant and educator based in Zimbabwe. His work is varied, ranging from 'traditional' data science to deep learning and generative art. You can find some of his personal research on http://www.datasciencecastnet.home.blog/

Aisha Raheem

Founder of Farmz2U, an agritech enterprise based in Nigeria and serving Sub-Saharan African markets. Farmz2U’s solution was recognized as a promising practice by the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations, thus validating its social impact. Also, UK NGO ‘One Young World’ measured Farmz2U’s social return on investment as 49 versus an aggregate score of 19 which further indicates its impact.

Mustapha Hamdi

Associate Professor, INSAT Tunisia AI expert UNESCO Co-Founder of Deepth, startup working on Augmented Intelligence for Health Tech. Coordinator: www.innovchallenge.com

Elyes Manai

Elyes Manai is a Machine Learning Consultant, Educator and Mentor. He helps companies tap into the power of data science to reduce costs and increase revenue as well as build relationships with relevant target audiences through educational content and community building. He graduated from a Masters of Research in Artificial Intelligence and is passionate about making Machine Learning more robust, efficient, and explainable. Elyes is heavily invested in impactful work, mainly through education and community building. He regularly hosts talks and workshops, creates Youtube content, contributes to open source projects and mentors startups. Specifically, he used to lead the Facebook Developer Circles Tunisia community, co-founded PyData Tunisia &amp; Data Co-Lab and mentored startups at the Google For Startups Accelerator. His work has been recognised by Google and he's now the youngest Google Developer Expert in Machine Learning in the MENA region. Elyes has made it his mission to support others and create opportunities though education and mentoring.

Ivan Zvonkov

Ivan Zvonkov is a Machine Learning Engineer at NASA Harvest/University of Maryland where he works on operationalizing machine learning research relating to agriculture and food security. Before joining NASA Harvest, Ivan worked at a fintech start-up where he developed machine learning and data science solutions for automating trade finance document processing. Ivan completed his BEng in Software Engineering at the University of Western Ontario where he developed an award-winning forest fire forecasting project for his capstone.

Abdelhak Mahmoudi

Abdelhak is Associate Professor of Computer Science at Mohammed V University (Rabat, Morocco) and permanent Researcher at L'IMIARF Laboratory. His main research involves ML/DL in Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing applied to Healthcare. In the past, in 2010, Abdelhak worked as a Machine Learning Research Engineer at Institut de Neurosciences de la Timone (INT) (Marseille, France) under the Neuromed project in the 7th European Framework. In 2014, he joined, as a Postdoc ML Researcher, the Partnerships for Enhanced Engagement in Research (PEER) project administered by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS)

Anass Sedrati

Anass Sedrati is the vice president of Wikimedia Morocco, the official Wikimedia affiliate in Morocco. He is one of the founders of the group, and organized several Wikipedia-related event, both locally and internationally. Anass is among the team that created Wikipedia Darija and Wikipedia Tachelhit. Anass is working as a management and strategy consultant, and pursues a PhD in IoT security and governance.

Bernard Wright

16 years in emerging markets developing GIS, imagery analysis and AI/ML products and services tailored to the local context. I love tech delivered in a sustainable, scaleable and impactful package

Kimessha Paupamah

I am a Solutions Architect at AWS. My interests lie in Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing. I am currently pursuing a Master's degree at the University of Witwatersrand with my research focused on Adversarial Learning in NLP. In my spare time I enjoy taking long walks with my dog.

Gabrielle Dompreh

Hi, my name is Gabrielle Dompreh and I am a AI Specialist Solutions Architect at AWS. I'm passionate about problem solving across various industry segments with the use of AI/ML. Outside of work I enjoy gaming, writing and creating digital art

Lydia Khalfoun

Hi, my name is Lydia Khalfoun and I am an Associate SA at AWS. I love working in innovative projects with blockchain and IA/ML. Outside of work, I love the nature and like travelling, hiking and biking.

Saubia Khan

Hi, my name is Saubia Khan and I am an Associate Startup SA at AWS. My main interest lies in AI/ML particularly in healthcare and recently in accessibility.

Imane Khaouja

IMANE KHAOUJA received an engineering degree in computer science with a major in business intelligence from ENSIAS, in Rabat, Morocco, in 2014. She is currently pursuing a Ph.D. degree in the Mohammed v University, in Rabat, Morocco, with a co-direction with the International University of Rabat. She was a recipient of the Google Ph.D. Fellowship in 2018 Her research interests include NLP and information extraction.

Engineer Bainomugisha

Engineer Bainomugisha is an Associate Professor and Chair, Computer Science at Makerere University, Uganda. Through his research work, Engineer is on a mission to harness the transformative power of computational technology and intelligence to tackle complex society challenges for the benefit of humanity. He has pioneered and led several social impact initiatives including, AirQo (https://www.airqo.africa), a Google AI Impact Challenge winner initiative that leverages AI, IoT and Cloud technologies for environmental air pollution monitoring, modelling and analysis in African cities to foster resilience and healthy urban communities. He is also passionate about contributing to quality Computer Science education in Africa that is of sufficient breadth and depth, practical and fast enough. He is a Co-Founder of Sunbird AI (https://sunbird.ai), a not for profit initiative that develops and deploys practical AI systems for social impact.

Hatem Haddad

Hatem Haddad is Co-Founder and CTO atiCompass. He received a doctorate (2002) in Computer Science and Information Systems from University Grenoble Alpes, France. He was Postdoctoral Fellow at VTT Technical Research Center of Finland and at Norwegian University of Science and Technology. He was a visiting researcher at Kent Ridge Digital Labs (KRDL), Singapore. His current research interests include Information Retrieval, Natural Languages Processing, Machine Learning and Deep Learning. He is a PC member or Chair in different conferences and serves as a reviewer for relevant journals in the area.

Thierno Ibrahima Diop

Thierno Ibrahima DIOP is Lead Data Scientist and passionate about NLP and everything that revolves around machine learning. He has been mentoring Data Scientist students and apprentices for 2 years. Before getting into Data Science, he did Freelance work in web and mobile application development. He is co-founder of GalsenAI, an artificial intelligence community in Senegal, Coursera instructor on data science, Google developer expert in machine learning, Machine Learning coursera instructor, ZINDI ambassador in Senegal and co-organizer of GDG Dakar.

Wael Ouarda

Wael Ouarda is an assistant professor of computer science at the Digital Center of Research of Sfax. He received his Ph.D. degree in computer science from the National School of Engineering of Sfax in 2017 for his dissertation on ""Towards a Novel Biometric System of Smart Riding Club."" He is an active member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) since 2012. Wael Ouarda is interested in intelligent systems that operate in large and known domains like Natural Language Processing (NLP), Computer Vision, and Business Intelligence. Most of his research centers around techniques for decision-making. He believes that finding good solutions to these problems requires approaches that cut across many different fields and, consequently, his research draws on areas such as artificial intelligence, decision theory, and operations research. Applications of his research focus on Smart City: Smart Life &amp; Smart Health &amp; Industry 4.0 &amp; Smart Security &amp; Smart Transportation. Wael Ouarda has several conference papers and journals and published more than 40 papers in various areas of artificial intelligence. He was an invited speaker in several Workshops on Artificial Intelligence since 2017.

Kidist Amde Mekonnen

My name is Kidist Amde Mekonnen. My background is in computer science. I got my Bachelor's degree in 2017 from the University Of Gondar, Ethiopia. I got my master's, African Masters in Machine Intelligence (AMMI) program from Facebook and Google in 2020 from the African Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Rwanda. I am a current scholar at the University of Trento, Italy, where I am pursuing a Master's in Data Science. I am a Mentor at MeetMentors. I am a cofounder and core member of the women in AI Ethiopia team. I am working for a mentorship program in collaboration with the women in AI and robotics Germany team. I have worked as an assistant lecturer at the University of Gondar. I have worked as a teaching Assistant at AddisCoders.

Galina Alova

Galina is based at the University of Oxford’s Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment. Her work focuses on quantifying barriers to the global electricity sector’s transition to renewable energy and away from fossil fuels. In her work, she applies machine-learning-based techniques to uncover novel insights form large complex asset-level datasets, to inform future energy infrastructure investment decisions. Two of her recent studies were published in Nature Energy, including one on predicting Africa’s future capacity mix. This work was covered by over 100 news outlets and radio programmes, including BBC, The Guardian, Bloomberg, The New York Times and TIME. Previously at the OECD, an international organisation in Paris, Galina led projects for the public and private sector on the extractive sector's decarbonisation, green development finance and natural capital management. Galina’s experience also includes the role of an economic adviser to the Minister of Industrialisation and Trade in Namibia. She started her career as an economist in the UK and Scottish Governments. Galina holds an MPhil in spatial economics and real estate finance from the University of Cambridge and MA in economics from the University of Glasgow.

Ihsane Gryech

Ihsane Gryech is a Ph.D. Candidate in Data Science at the International University of Rabat (UIR) as well as ENSIAS, Mohammed V University in Rabat. She Obtained a bachelor's degree at Mohammed V University, Rabat, in mathematics and informatics, then got a master's degree in Big Data from the International University of Rabat. In 2017, she joined the TICLab laboratory as a trainee where she worked on web content by leveraging users intuition to predict items popularity in Social Networks, Sentiment analysis using Social Media, and Air Quality Prediction. In 2018, with a special interest to the environment, she started her PhD and joined the MoreAir project. Ihsane is a Google Africa PhD Fellow. She also won the local Falling walls competition and was the only representative of Morocco at the Falling walls Conference in 2018 in Berlin, Germany.

Hadia Samil

ML researcher , my research interest includes deep learning , Computer vision and NLP .  with hands-on experience of working with real-world data. Skilled in NLP , Computer vision , Python Programming Language, and deep learning. Looking forward to opportunities to work with data in the areas of  NLP and CV that requires a combination of my current knowledge and experience. My goal is to use my academic background to make a positive contribution to society.

Siobhan Mackenzie Hall

Siobhan Hall is an incoming DPhil student at the University of Oxford, where she’ll be pursuing a project centred around Deep Learning and brain-computer interfaces at the Nuffield Department of Surgical Sciences. Siobhan completed her Masters in 2019 at Stellenbosch University’s Biomedical Engineering Research Group. She has most recently completed a computational neuroscience research internship at the University of Amsterdam, and contributed to an early stage computer-vision start up (Mamba Insights).

Nanjira Sambuli

Nanjira Sambuli is a researcher, policy analyst and strategist interested in and working on understanding the unfolding, gendered impacts of ICT adoption on governance, media, entrepreneurship and culture. Nanjira is a Commissioner on the Lancet &amp; Financial Times Global Commission (Governing Health Futures 2030), President and co-Chair of the Transform Health Coalition, a board member at The New Humanitarian , Development Gateway and Digital Impact Alliance (DIAL). She is also a Ford Global Fellow. Nanjira also sits on several advisory boards, including the World Economic Forum’s Technology and Social Justice Initiatives, &lt;A+&gt; Alliance for Inclusive Algorithms and the Carnegie Council’s AI and Equality Initiative . Additionally, she is a Diplomacy Moderator at the Geneva Science and Diplomacy Anticipator (GESDA).

Rüdiger Urbanke

Rüdiger L. Urbanke obtained his Dipl. Ing. degree from the Vienna University of Technology, Austria in 1990 and the M.Sc. and PhD degrees in Electrical Engineering from Washington University in St. Louis, MO, in 1992 and 1995, respectively. He held a position at the Mathematics of Communications Department at Bell Labs from 1995 till 1999 before becoming a faculty member at the School of Computer &amp; Communication Sciences (I&amp;C) of EPFL. He is a member of the Information Processing Group. He is principally interested in the analysis and design of iterative coding schemes, which allow reliable transmission close to theoretical limits at low complexities. Such schemes are part of most modern communications standards, including wireless transmission, optical communication and hard disk storage. More broadly, his research focuses on the analysis of graphical models and the application of methods from statistical physics to problems in communications. From 2000-2004 he was an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory and he is currently on the board of the series ""Foundations and Trends in Communications and Information Theory."" In 2017 he was President of the Information Theory Society. From 2009 till 2012 he was the head of the I&amp;C doctoral school, in 2013 he served as Dean a. i. of I&amp;C, and since 2016 he is the Associated Dean for teaching of I&amp;C. He is a co-author of the book "Modern Coding Theory" published by Cambridge University Press.

Usman Amjad

Mohamed Kafsi

Co-organizer of AMLD Africa. PhD in Machine Learning

Valeria De Luca

Valeria De Luca is associate director and senior principal data scientist at the Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research, where she works on multi-modal data-driven approaches to quantify patient’s response to disease and treatment. Prior to joining Novartis in 2017, she was a postdoctoral research fellow at UCSF and ETH Zurich focusing on predictive models for critical care. She holds a PhD in Computer Vision from ETH Zurich on personalized cancer treatments.

Alexander Immer

Alexander Immer is a Ph.D. student at the Max-Planck ETH Center for Learning Systems interested in probabilistic machine learning and data science. Before that, he was a Master’s student at EPFL and an intern at RIKEN AIP in Tokyo. The current focus of his work is on scalable Bayesian model selection and applications to biomedical problems.

Victor Kristof

I'm a postdoctoral researcher in machine learning at EPFL in the INDY Lab. My research revolves around the development of machine learning algorithms and statistical models to study human behavior within <strong>social systems,</strong> with a focus on political systems. I develop interpretable models of collaborative and competitive processes, such as peer-production, sports, carbon-footprint perception, voting, and law-making.

Khalil Mrini

Khalil Mrini is a PhD Candidate at the University of California San Diego (UCSD), and works on applying Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning to medical question answering. Globally, his work aims to democratize advances in NLP so that marginalized people can benefit from human language technology. His work is supported by a grant from the US National Institutes of Health, and he has won an Amazon Research Award, as well as Adobe Research Gifts. He has previously interned at Adobe Research and Amazon Alexa, is currently interning at Facebook AI, and will be interning at Google Brain. He is also passionate about diversity and inclusion, and has co-founded the “North Africans in NLP” affinity group.

Chance Coughenour

Chance is a Program Manager at Google Arts &amp; Culture where he coordinates heritage preservation efforts through international partnerships which employ innovative technology for 3D documentation, education, and public dissemination. Recent partnerships include the British Museum, UNESCO, CyArk, World Monuments Fund, Pergamon Museum, Brazil’s National Museum, Rhizome and ML Experiments Fabricius and Woolaroo.

Abdoulaye Diack

Abdoulaye Diack is a husband, father of two and a Program Manager for <a href="https://research.google/">Google AI</a> 🤖 in Accra, where he leads talent building programs and applied AI research projects. He was previously a Program Manager for Google Brain 🧠. With expertise in AI/ML research and research Ops, Abdoulaye has accumulated more than 20 years of engineering and management experience in various countries, focusing on mobile financial services, payments, and big data solutions for Telcos. He holds a BSc degree in Computer Science from Concordia University in Montreal, Canada, and is originally from Senegal. In his current role, Abdoulaye is part of a team that focuses on AI impact-driven research and innovation, with a particular focus on sustainable development in Africa.

Abigail Annkah

Abigail Annkah is a research engineer at Google. Prior to doing full-time, she was an AI resident. She holds a masters in machine intelligence from the AIMS African Masters in Machine Intelligence program, Rwanda. She is interested in computer vision and optimization based research.

Wei Xiao

Wei Xiao is working on expanding Nvidia’s AI footprint in emerging markets and emerging technologies. Wei has a breadth of expertise in Applied AI, IoT and Mobile. Prior to Nvidia, Wei was leading the AI ecosystem engineering and evangelism team at Arm, driving the success of Arm ML hardware and software penetration through technical partnerships and community engagements. Before that, she spent 7 years at Samsung in the IoT and mobile developer relations teams, covering different roles from an engineer, evangelist to ecosystem engineering management. Wei is enthusiastic about cultivating developer relationships for product growth and innovation, as well as bringing a robust user experience. In her spare time, Wei teaches AIoT course in the Graduate School of Computer Science at Santa Clara University in Silicon Valley.

Alejandro Yousef Da Silva

Alejandro Yousef da Silva is working at Schneider Electric where he is in charge of the development of microgrid energy management algorithms. He graduated in 2014 in electric engineering and obtained a master of advanced studies in energy systems optimization from the Ecole des Mines ParisTech in 2017

Gabriel Tseng

Gabriel is a machine learning engineer at NASA Harvest, where he uses satellite data to better understand which crops are being grown where. Prior to joining Harvest, Gabi worked at Okra Solar, an energy access company, where he investigated applications of machine learning to smart solar mesh grids. Before this, he worked on machine learning for customer analytics in Toronto.

Magali Cattin

Magali Cattin has a master’s degree in bioengineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Switzerland Lausanne (EPFL) and completed her master thesis at Imperial College London. During her masters’, she has developed expertise in machine learning as well as regulatory and ethical aspects of data collection. After one year of experience in several areas such as the medtech industry at SurgiBox Inc. and research in refrigeration technologies for vaccine delivery at the EssentialTech Centre, Magali started her PhD at the LTS5 and the EssentialTech Centre, EPFL. Her PhD project focuses on the detection of cervical cancer using machine learning and involves a close collaboration with the Geneva Hospitals (HUG) and the University of Dschang in Cameroon.

Celina Lee

<strong>Celina Lee</strong> is a co-founder and the CEO of Zindi (<a href="http://www.zindi.africa/">www.zindi.africa</a>), the first data science competition platform of its kind in Africa. Celina has a passion for unleashing the power of data for social good. Celina has a proven track record of thought leadership in the intersect between data and development and has played central roles in launching global initiatives including the Alliance for Financial Inclusion (<a href="http://www.afi-global.org/">www.afi-global.org</a>), insight2impact (<a href="http://www.i2ifacility.org/">www.i2ifacility.org</a>), and now Zindi (www.zindi.africa). Celina's work has expansively bridged across the private and public sectors and across various development areas including financial inclusion, micro and small enterprise development, gender, climate change, and public health. She has lived and worked in countries throughout Asia, Latin America, and Sub-Saharan Africa. Celina holds a Bachelor’s of Science in Applied Mathematics with a minor in Computer Science and a Master’s of International Affairs both from Columbia University.

Moritz Besser

During the whole of his studies of experimental physics at the TU Dresden Moritz was working at the Max Planck Institute (CPfS) in the extreme conditions lab. Besides giving him a profound technical understanding it made him an expert in LabVIEW and the field of solid state research. His fascination for Machine Learning and a genuine ability to explain complex matters makes him the perfect bridge between the industry and our expert technicians.

Mohamed Makni

Mohamed Makni is a civil engineer from EPFL with a background in transport &amp; mobility. He is also the CEO &amp; Co-founder of DeepFlows. They help city planners and governments reduce the time, the cost and the complexity to access granular and accurate traffic data using machine learning. They work towards creating the next generation of traffic management systems to cope with rising urbanisation rates. Their premise is to cut (travel times &amp; emissions) and make cities (liveable &amp; sustainable) for future generations.

Astrid Radermacher

Astrid is a data scientist at Fathom Data, where she heads up the training division. She is a certified RStudio Tidyverse trainer and R evangelist. She will be joined by colleague Amieroh Abrahams to present this lesson on Tidymodels - a tidy approach to modelling in R.

Mouafek Ayadi

Mouafek Ayadi is an IT Consultant &amp; Activist. Holding a Master’s degree in Business Intelligence Engineering, he is currently working as an Innovation Data Scientist at ODDO BHF and serving as a Mentor in Google Africa Developer Scholarship Program as well as having previously been a AWS Educate Ambassador. His certifications include: Certified in Microsoft: Azure Data Scientist Associate Certified in Consulting from Dubai Rochester Institute of Technology An Entrepreneurship background in the USA, Qatar, Tunisia, Spain Proof of training more than 2000 individuals in New Technologies.

Amieroh Abrahams

Amieroh Abrahams is a Junior data scientist at Fathom Data, where she forms part of the training division lead by Astrid. She is a certified CarpentryConnect instructor and R evangelist. She will co-presenting this lesson on Tidymodels - a tidy approach to modelling in R.

Andrew Collier

Andrew is Data Scientist who works mostly in R and Python. He was a Physicist in a previous life.

Antje Barth

Antje Barth is a Developer Advocate for AI and Machine Learning at Amazon Web Services (AWS) based in Düsseldorf, Germany. She is co-author of the O'Reilly Book, ""Data Science on AWS."" Antje is also co-founder of the Düsseldorf chapter of Women in Big Data. She frequently speaks at AI and Machine Learning conferences and meetups around the world and chairs and curates content for O’Reilly AI Superstream events. Previously, Antje was an engineer at Cisco and MapR focused on data center technologies, cloud computing, big data, and AI applications.

Chris Fregly

Chris Fregly is a Principal Developer Advocate for AI and Machine Learning at Amazon Web Services (AWS) based in San Francisco, California. He is co-author of the O'Reilly Book, "Data Science on AWS." Chris is also the Founder of many AI-focused global meetups including the global "Data Science on AWS" Meetup. He regularly speaks at AI and Machine Learning conferences across the world including O’Reilly AI, Open Data Science Conference (ODSC), Big Data London, Big Data Spain, and Nvidia GPU Technology Conference (GTC). Previously, Chris was Founder at PipelineAI where he worked with many AI-first startups and enterprises to continuously deploy ML/AI Pipelines using Spark ML, Kubernetes, TensorFlow, Kubeflow, Amazon EKS, and Amazon SageMaker.

Shinez Chalabi

Shinez is an industry manager at Google MENA where she brings Google's tech, data and digital strategies to the public sector and telecommunications industries. Before joining Google, she worked at Bell Mobility in Canada, Kiva in Kenya and at McKinsey in Dubai where she led digital and advanced analytics transformations in the Middle East and Africa across several sectors including cleantech and renewables. Shinez holds an MBA from Oxford University, a M.Sc. in industrial engineering and an advanced analytics translator certification.

Emilian Popa

<div class="trix-content"> Africa focused investor and entrepreneur. Founder and CEO of ILARA Health, a high tech point of care diagnostics venture which aims to democratize access to diagnostics across developing markets. Passionate about prevention and early detection of diseases. Avid biohacker. Emilian has over 10 years of successful launching, fundraising, growing, exiting technology ventures in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Russia. Present focus on Africa. 7 years of experience with leading consulting firm in Europe, US, Africa. Joint MBA Columbia Business School / London Business School. </div>

Eduard Booty

Edward Booty has experience across public, private and non-profit healthcare organisations such as Novartis, Capgemini, and the Department of Health in the United Kingdom. As a result, he has worked extensively on digital healthcare; patient and market access; performance improvement; payment systems; health insurance; business development; and new service delivery models. This experience spans both developed countries and emerging markets.

Adam Abramson

Dr. Abramson has spent the past 12 years researching, working with and innovating for African smallholder farmers. He is currently building a digital platform for SHFs - Farmster - to accelerate market linkages and access to digital services and information using NLP to optimize the experience for offline users. www.farmster.co

Rosina Norton

Rosina has been working in the international renewable energy industry for over 8 years, with the most recent years focused in the fast-growing pay-as-you-go industry. As Head of Data Science &amp; Analytics at M-Kopa, she leads a team of data scientists and analysts who are harnessing the power of data to enable the innovative financing of smartphones, solar powered home systems including lighting, televisions and fridges and digital financial services.

Elizabeth Nyeko

Founder &amp; CEO at Modularity Grid, a deep tech startup funded by Innovate UK, Google and Airbus. Profiled in WIRED and the MIT Tech Review 35 Under 35 Innovators global list, Elizabeth worked in academia at Imperial College London, and prior to that co-founded Mandulis Energy, a renewable energy infrastructure company funded by KfW, UNCDF, Total, Fresco Capital and others. She started her career in M&amp;A at Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers, and holds an MSc from Oxford University.

Lauren Newbould

Lauren is a Data Scientist with experience across multiple sectors and a background in social science and statistics. She is passionate about creative and clear data visualisation with the aim to make data accessible and understandable for all audiences. At Rural Senses, Lauren helps to make the voices of rural communities in developing countries heard so that project developers can better understand their values, thus leading to better outcomes for the projects and the communities they intend to serve. Her aim is to empower individuals and organisations to make confident, data-driven decisions and is an advocate for ethical and open data science.

Nourchene Ferchichi

Nourchene is an AI Research Engineer at Instadeep Tunisia. She has deep skills in Natural Language Processing (NLP). She has worked on challenging research projects focusing on the latest advanced NLP models. She has also delivered product projects responding to real world business cases.

Twaha Zia

I am a professional MBBS student and researcher at DOW University of Health Sciences, Pakistan, Asia. My research interest include scientific volume rendering and medical imaging data visualization for education, training, non-invasive surgery and treatment.

Faten Ghriss

Faten Ghriss is a AI software engineer and Team Lead at InstaDeep. She has a few years of experience as a backend and data engineer. Faten is currently working in a Reinforcement Learning based project at InstaDeep where she helps solve a scheduling and dispatching problem. She's the co-founder of Young Tunisian Coders Academy, an organization that teaches kids coding, robotics and soft skills.

Khalil Gorsan Mestiri

<div class="trix-content"> Khalil Gorsan Mestiri is an AI Research Engineer at InstaDeep, working extensively on leveraging AI for the benefit of solving real world problems with a focus on railway systems and routing problems. He is currently working on prototyping and implementing a deep reinforcement railway dispatching solution that handles the train rescheduling of the Germany fleet at-scale. Born and raised in a mediterranean north African country, Tunisia, Khalil has a deep interest in its history from Carthage to nowadays. </div>

Claude Formanek

Claude Formanek is 24 years old and lives in Cape Town South Africa. He completed a undergraduate degree (B.Sc.) in Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Cape Town (UCT) in 2019. In 2020, he completed his B.Sc. Hons. In Applied Computational Mathematics at UCT. Claude did two research projects in his Honours year, one on Deep Reinforcement Learning and another on Graph Neural Networks. He was awarded first class grades for both projects. In 2021 Claude enrolled for a M.Sc. In Applied Computational Mathematics at UCT. His supervisor is Dr. Jonathan Shock and his research is on Offline Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning. Concurrently Claude is also doing a full-year internship at InstaDeep ltd. Claude is a research intern working in the Cape Town based InstaDeep research team. The Cape Town team is led by Dr. Arnu Pretorius and primarily focuses on research in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL). In June 2021 the Cape Town team released an open-source framework for MARL called Mava which they have been developing since the start of the year. Claude was one of the main contributors on that project, having written a significant amount of code in the code-base.

Martin Müller

Mr Müller has a long experience working at the interface between science, science policy and diplomacy. After an initial stay in academia and completing a doctoral degree in biomedical engineering, Mr Müller joined SwissCore – the Swiss Contact Office for Education, Research and Innovation (ERI) – in Brussels and worked at the interface of science, science policy and diplomacy, first as a research advisor and then as co-director. He joined GESDA in September 2019 as Executive Director of the Academic Forum where he coordinates the anticipatory input of the broader scientific community on a range of issues, such as the future of artificial intelligence, brain-inspired computing, genetic engineering or complex systems.

Muhammad Umair

<div class="trix-content"> Doing MS (Data Science) from NED University of Engineering &amp; Technology and also a passionate data science practitioner at Pakistan premier data science consultancy company “Love For Data”, Karachi, Pakistan as a Data Analyst. My area of interest is Deep Learning, Reinforcement learning, Temporal data analysis, Network science and Information theory. I love the Mathematics and Statistics behind the models that make imaginations into reality. My objective is to pursue a research-based career to solve real-world problems. </div>

Manal Jalloul

Dr. Manal Jalloul is NVIDIA Deep Learning Institute's certified instructor and University ambassador. She is also the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of AI-Lab, which is the certified delivery partner of NVIDIA DLI in EMEA. AI Lab is an Artificial Intelligence consultancy, training, and solution development company. Dr. Jalloul is Lebanon's country advisor in the Global Advisory Board of the International Group of Artificial Intelligence. Dr. Jalloul is also a lecturer and researcher at the American University of Beirut. Her research interests lie in the fields of digital image and video processing, 3D printing, parallel computing, and artificial intelligence. She has several peer-reviewed publications in international journals and conferences.

Wissem Allouchi

Wissem obtained a BSc in Computer Science at EPFL, then MSc in Communication Systems with a specialisation in Machine Learning. His main research areas at EPFL focused on Graph learning. Wissem is currently developing NLP and Speech Recognition solutions at Swisscom to better understand and serve their customers.

Nour Ghalia Abassi

<div class="trix-content"> Nour Ghalia Abassi is a Business Leader at DigeHealth and a Data Scientist with a specialized interest in sound recognition in gastro-enterology. With an educational background focused on integrating AI into medtech. With her team at DigeHealth, Nour has developed a medtech device designed to monitor patients with bowel disorders by recognizing, counting and categorizing bowel sounds. This innovation reflects Nour Ghalia’s commitment to applying data science to improve patient outcomes. Her work in data science is directed towards creating a system capable of flagging anomalies. It aims to distinguish non-invasively between normal and abnormal bowel behaviors, underscoring her commitment to advancing non-intrusive diagnostic methods in healthcare. </div>

Muthoni Wanyoike

As a sophisticated, intelligent, and solutions-focused technocrat, Muthoni has blazed a trail of industry accomplishments and notable recognitions from lead industry leaders such as InstaDeep Limited, Africa's Talking, and Women in Machine Learning and Data Science. Having cultivated an unequivocal forte for unearthing greater capabilities in product strategy, Business Development, and Data Science, she earned a reputation as a thought leader who is equally as analytical as she is visionary. She dives headfast into solving complex deep-seated challenges by uncovering possibilities and reframing thinking to capitalize on opportunities that have previously eluded predecessors through leveraging distinction in enterprise market insight and on-demand software expertise.

Mazen Mahdi

Passionate about data in all of its forms, psychology, and social human interactions. Avid believer in paying it forward!

Fabrice Lauper

Fabrice Lauper is supporting the ICRC's digital transformation efforts, which includes looking for ways to extend the use of new technologies for humanitarian operations, while protecting affected populations from digital risks

Alexandre Fasel

Humera Tariq

Humera Tariq is a professor of computer science at the University of Karachi, Pakistan. She received her Ph. D in computer science for her dissertation on “ Region growing approach for segmentation of Brain MR Images” in 2015. She also holds a B.E degree in Electrical Engineering from NED University, Pakistan. Most of her research centers around medical image processing, pattern recognition, high-performance computing, and techniques for decision making and data mining. Applications of her research include the development of image and video processing algorithms, games, and simulation. She is an active NVIDIA DLI University Ambassador since 2019 and conducts various workshops on deep learning at both national and international forums.