CoRE-AI Kickoff in Uppsala

CoreAI Kickoff in Uppsala

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.

Thursday 16th of November (Day 1)

Ångström Laboratory

Morning session: Get to know each other

9:15 – 9:30 Welcome by Thomas Schön (Head of AI Research Group, Uppsala)

9:30 – 10:30 10 minute presentations by cluster members 

10:30 -11:00 Coffee break

11:00 – 12:30 10 minute presentations by cluster members

12:30 – 14:00 Lunch

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.

15:30 – 16:00 Tea break

16:00 – 17:00 5-minute presentation of each of the 9 brainstorming sessions. Decide on 3 projects to work on.

Social activity: Tour of Cathedral 

18:00 – 19:00 Core AI’s Kajsa Hallberg Adu gives us an exclusive insight in to the history of Uppsala’s cathedral and the surrounding area.

19:00 – late Dinner. Swedish traditional food.

Friday 17th of November (Day 2)

Ångström Laboratory

Morning session: Masterclass in Responsible AI, bias and fairness

9:30 – 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)

12:00 – 13:30 Lunch

Afternoon session: Let’s do this!

13:30 – 14:30 Out of the 9 brainstormed ideas (or others) we start sketching three research projects (work in 3 groups, although movement between groups permitted).

14:30 – 15:00 Tea break

15:00 – 16:00 Masterclass planning and/or continued research proposal development.