AMLD Africa 2021 - success for the 1st edition

The conference held online from September 2-4 on Socio, featured 12 guest speakers and 38 presentations from various academic and business professionals. 800 participants watched the event live from 50 different African countries and 64 from around the world! The event had extensive media coverage with over 600 news outlets in Africa and over 250,000 impressions on social networks.

During two days, the speakers covered six main themes. To quote the major talks, here are the keynotes and panels of the different tracks:

AI & Agriculture:

• Measuring and optimizing agricultural production using aerial imagery and machine learning: Keynote by Benji Meltzer, co-founder, and CTO of Aerobotics. Based in Cape Town, Aerobotics uses aerial imagery to help farmers quickly detect problems and optimize performance.
• Earth Observation and Machine Learning for Food Security in Africa: Keynote by Dr. Catherine Nakalembe, Associate Research Professor at the University of Maryland, Director of NASA's Harvest Africa Program, and a member of NASA's SERVIR Applied Science Team, as the lead for the Agriculture and Food Security theme.

AI & Healthcare:

• The Great Potential of AI to Address Global Health Challenges: Keynote by Aisha Walcott-Bryant, Senior Technical Staff Member and Manager at IBM Research Africa - Nairobi, Kenya.
• [Panel Discussion] - How AI is helping healthcare reach the unreachable: moderated by Valeria De Luca, principal Data Scientist at Novartis with Emilian Popa CEO and founder of Ilara health and Eduard Booty CEO and founder of Reach52.

AI & NLP:

• AI Language Models - Latest Developments: Keynote by Karim Beguir, Karim Beguir is the CEO and co-founder of InstaDeep, which has been named twice to the AI100 global list. Karim helps companies take the latest AI breakthroughs and deploy them to improve efficiency and ROI.
• [Panel Discussion] Natural Language Processing and the African Context with Instadeep and Rural Sense: moderated by Abdoulaye Diack Research Program Manager, Google AI with Nourchene Ferchichi, AI Research Engineer at Instadeep and Lauren Newbould Data Scientist at Rural Senses.

AI & Community:

• Building a Research Cloud for Africa: Keynote by Carolina Odman, Associate Professor at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa, and Associate Director for Development and Outreach at the Inter-University Institute for Data-Intensive Astronomy (IDIA).
• AI, the past and the future: Keynote by Rachid Guerraoui, professor of computer science at EPFL where he directs the Distributed Computing Laboratory. - Taking AI from the lab to the real world: Keynote by Amit Joshi, professor of AI, analytics and marketing strategy at IMD. He is the director of the Digital Analytics open programs, co-director of the Artificial Intelligence Program, and director of the Digital Excellence degree.
• TensorFlow and the AI Community: Keynote by Anitha Vijayakumar, Technical Project Manager on Google's TensorFlow team.
• Why we need a movement to train 100,000 ML practitioners across Africa: Keynote by Kamal Bhattacharya, Professor of Computer Science at IU International University Berlin and co-founder of Advancity.com.

AI & Environment:

• Measuring Economic Development from Space with Machine Learning: Keynote by Stefano Ermon, Assistant Professor of Computer Science in the Department of Computer Science at Stanford University, where he is affiliated with the Artificial Intelligence Lab and a member of the Woods Institute for the Environment.
• [Panel Discussion] How AI is Changing the World of Low-Carbon Electric Power Systems: Shinez Chalabi, Head of Industry at Google MENA, Elizabeth Nyeko, Founder and CEO of Modularity Grid, a deep technology startup funded by InnovateUK, Google and Airbus, and Rosina Norton Head of Data Science and Analytics at M-Kopa.

AI for Social Good:

• Creating a Virtual Culinary Assistant for the Visually Impaired using ML Services on AWS: by Gabrielle Dompreh, AI Specialist, Solution Architect at AWS, Saubia Khan, Startup SA Associate at AWS, and Kimessha Paupamah, Solution Architect at AWS.

The third day was as exciting as the first two, with informative and fruitful workshops, 10 in total, some given by professionals from renowned companies such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google, and NVIDIA. To name a few:

• Data Science on AWS: by Antje Barth, Developer Advisor, AI, and Machine Learning, AWSand Chris Fregly, Principal Developer Advocate, AI, and Machine Learning and co-author ofthe O'Reilly book, "Data Science on AWS.
• Fundamentals of Accelerated Data Science with RAPIDS [NVIDIA]: Given by Dr. Manal Jalloul, a certified instructor and the academic ambassador for the NVIDIA Deep Learning Institute. She is also the co-founder and CEO of AI-Lab, which is NVIDIA DLI's certified partner in the EMEA region.
• Tidy Modelling in R: Andrew Collier, Senior Data Scientist, Fathom Data, Amieroh Abrahams, Junior Data Scientist, Fathom Data and Astrid Radermacher Data Scientist of Fathom Data - Moroccan Darija Wikipedia: Basics of Natural Language Processing for a
• Low-Resource Language: Imane Khaouja, Ph.D. student at Université Mohammed V, Anass Sedrati, Vice President, Wikimedia Morocco, Abdelhak Mahmoudi, Associate Professor, Université Mohammed V, Khalil Mrini, Ph.D. candidate in NLP, University of California at San Diego and Ihsane Gryech, Ph.D. candidate in Data Science at Université Internationale de Rabat (UIR) as well as at ENSIAS, Université Mohammed V de Rabat
• Introduction to Recommendation Systems: by Walid Krichene, Google Research.
• Machine Learning & Deep Learning for Computer Vision: From Zero to Hero: Wael Ouarda, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the Centre de Recherche Numérique de Sfax, Tunisia.