Title: High-Performance Computing Architecture and Parallel Computing

Speakers: Prof Onime Clement (ICTP, Trieste) and Dr Solomon Gizaw (Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia)

Timetable:

Bios:

Prof Onime Clement (ICTP, Trieste): Clement E. O. ONIME from the Information and Communication Technology Section (ICTS) of the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) is a Professor  of  Computer Science; Computer Engineering and Computational Data Science.

His research areas include  Data Science, Big Data Analytics, Artificial Neural Networks, Mobile Computing, High Performance Computing, Super Computing and Green Computing.

In the last 7 years, he has organized over 10 international training activities (summer schools and workshops) in different parts of the world on different topics including Data Sciences, High Performance Computing, Mixed Augmented & Virtual Reality and has taught graduate level courses on Artificial Neural Networks, Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, Big Data Analytics, High Performance and Parallel Computing for Science, Technology and Engineering. Also, served on review/editorial teams for an IEEE transaction and several international journals/conferences on computing, technology and engineering education. He is a member of several international research and professionaodies including the IEEE, ACM and the RDA.

Clement has being the recipient of commendations for his contributions to the growth of development of Research and Education Networks (RENs), HPC centres and Computational Science in Africa.

Dr Solomon Gizaw (Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia): Dr. Gizaw completed his PhD at the Localisation Research Center (LRC) of the University of Limerick (UL). He holds an MSc in Computer Science and a BSc in Applied Mathematics from Addis Ababa University (AAU). He is a key contributor to the development and innovation of the Service-Oriented Localisation Architecture Solution (SOLAS), a component-based open-source localization platform.

He has offered volunteer services at several institutions, notably as one of the founders of the Ethiopian Free and Open-Source Software Network (EFOSSNet), where he served as Regional Manager from 2005 to 2009. He was a council member of the Free and Open-Source Software for Africa (FOSSFA) from 2006 to 2010 and a secretariat member of the African Network Localization (ANLoc) from 2008 to 2015.

Dr. Gizaw has organized various short-term training courses in Ethiopia, including the CODATA-RDA Research Data Science Summer School in Trieste, Italy, and the CODATA-RDA Research Data Science Summer School in Kigali, Rwanda. He currently works as an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at Addis Ababa University and is the director of the Computational Data Science Graduate Program at AAU. He also serves on the advisory board of the Pan African Information Communication Technology Association (PAICTA) and as secretary for the Computational and Engineering Society of Ethiopia (CSESE).

CORE-AI NITheCS_Masterclass – 20231129

The first Masterclass of the CoRE-AI will take place on 1st November 2023. Prof David Sumpter (University of Uppsala) will present a half-day introduction to using machine learning and modelling in football for data Scientists, PhD students and industry professionals. He will go through how to use logistic regression to fit an expected goals model of quality of chances. Furthermore he will look at models of pass success and value using other ML methods. By the end of the day you will understand how to use football data and to fit simple models to it. This lecture will also provide an introduction to the challenges of putting data science in to practice.

The details of teh vent can be found here: Masterclass: Data science and modelling of football

Uppsala University warmly welcomes the CoreAI members to our historic city. During this two day workshop, we will plan how we can move Europe and Africa forward together in Artificial Intelligence and Computational Thinking research.

All Uppsala researchers are welcome and encouraged to join. This is a chance to start new research projects and hear about new AI research. To participate, please send an email to Kajsa Hallberg-Adu (kajsa.hallberg.adu@antro.uu.se) stating also if you would like to present 5 or 10 minutes on your research.

Thursday 16th of November (Day 1)

Morning session: Get to know each other

Room 100155, Theatrum Visuale, Ångström Laboratory

8:45 Taxis from hotel to Ångström.

9:15 – 9:30 Welcome by Robin Strand (Head of Department of information Technology, Uppsala)

9:30 – 10:20 Presentations by cluster members (5 minutes each!)

Large-scale AI and Language Models

9:30 Solomon Gizaw Tulu (University of Addis Abeba) Current AI Researches in Ethiopia.

9:35 Ekta Vats (Department of Information Technology, University of Uppsala) Efficient text modelling and recognition at scale

9:40 Joyce Nakatumba-Nabende (Makerere University) Large Language Models for Multilingual Localised and Targeted Agricultural Advisory to Smallholder Farmers

Maths, IT and AI

9:55 John Mango Magero (Makerere University) Eastern Africa regional collaboration in Mathematics since 2002

10:00 Maria Andreina Francisco Rodriguez (Department of Information Technology, Uppsala) Discrete Optimisation Using AI

10:05 Patrick Weke Oloo (University of Nairobi) Data Science and AI Training at the University of Nairobi through APHREA-DST Project

10:20 -11:00 Coffee break (jointly with Division of System and Control)

11:00 – 12:30 Presentations by cluster members (5 minutes each!)

AI in life sciences

11:00 Ola Uthman (University of Warwick) AI-based solutions for Global Health.

11:05 Ozlem Tastan Bishop (Rhodes University) Dynamic residue networks and computational drug discovery.

11:10 Prashant Singh (Department of Information Technology, University of Uppsala) Scientific Machine Learning and Data-Driven Science.

11:15 Timothy Kamanu (University of Nairobi) TBA

AI in society

11:30 Chika Yinka-Banjo (University of Lagos) Research snippets

11:35 Andrey Shternshis Fairness and bias-aware Machine Learning and Statistical Experiments

11:40 Ranjula Bali Swain (Center for Sustainable Research, Stockholm) Sustainable Development Goals Monitoring and Interlinkages with AI and Machine Learning.

11:45 Victor Temitope Odumuyiwa (University of Lagos ) A Data-Driven Approach for Equipment Failure Prediction in a Distributed Network

Computational thinking

12:00 Francesco Petruccione (Stellenbosh University) TBA

12:05 David Sumpter (Uppsala University) Mathematics in football

12:30 – 14:00 Lunch, Rullan

Afternoon session: Research brainstorming

14:00 – 15:30 During this session we will rotate three times into different constellations of researchers. You will brainstorm together and produce a title and three bullet points outlining an exciting new research project. This will produce 9 brainstormed research projects. (Rooms 101170, 101174 and 101180)

PhD students and junior researchers will have a separate group led by Lovisa Eriksson.

15:30 – 16:00 Tea break

16:00 – 16:45 5-minute presentation of each of the 9 brainstorming sessions. Decide on 3 projects to work on. (Room 100155, Theatrum Visuale)

16:45 Taxis to the cathedral (or hotel)

Social activity: Tour of Cathedral 

17:00 – 17:45 Core AI’s Kajsa Hallberg Adu gives us an exclusive insight in to the history of Uppsala’s cathedral and the surrounding area.

18:00 – 18:50 Time at hotel to prepare for dinner.

18:50 Meet at hotel to go to restaurant.

19:00 – late Dinner. Swedish traditional food.

Friday 17th of November (Day 2)

Morning session: Masterclass in Responsible AI, bias and fairness

This Masterclass is open to all, especially Masters and PhD students are encouraged to come along.

Room 100155, Theatrum Visuale, Ångström Laboratory

8:45 Taxis from hotel to Ångström.

9:15 – 12:00 A half-day introduction to responsible AI and bias in machine translation models for African languages, in particular. Currently, there is significant growth in the area of building Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools for African languages, despite the lower availability of explicit text data than for English. In this workshop we introduce concepts on Responsible AI and then dive into the building of models for machine translation models for African languages. We then discuss the approach taken to evaluate and quantify the gender bias within a Luganda-English machine translation system using Word Embeddings Fairness Evaluation Framework (WEFE). 

Teachers: Dr. Joyce Nakatumba-Nabende (Makerere University) and Dr. Andrew Katumba (Makerere University)

Notebook: Github here

12:30 – 14:00 Lunch and taxis to Carolina Redoviva

Afternoon session: Let’s do this!

AI4Research, Carolina Redoviva.

14:00 – 15:00 Out of the brainstormed ideas (or others) we start sketching research projects (work in 3 groups, although movement between groups permitted). 

15:00 – 15:30 Tea break

15:30 – 16:30 Masterclass planning and/or continued research proposal development.

Aim:

The Stellenbosch University Launch of the New Africa-Europe Clusters of Research Excellence took place on the 4th of September 2023 at the Stellenbosch Institute For Advanced Studies (STIAS).

Welcome to the web page of the ARUA–The Guild Cluster or Research Excellence Addressing Global and African Challenges through Methods from Artificial Intelligence, Data Science and Theoretical and Computational Thinking.

This is one of the seventeen research clusters that were recently launched at the summit in Brussels of the Vice-Chancellors and Presidents of the African Research Universities Alliance (ARUA) and The Guild of European Research-Intensive Universities (The Guild). The aim of the Clusters is to transform the nature of collaborative research, foregrounding equity as a precondition for excellent and impactful research to address our common societal challenges.

For more information please read the official press release.