Zindi, the community for knowledge scientists hosted UmojaHack Africa 2023, a 2-day occasion for knowledge scientists that goals to clear up Africa’s hardest challenges by machine studying on 18-19 March 2023 bringing collectively over 1000 students from 345 universities in 36 international locations to build machine studying models for climate change.
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The UmojaHack Africa 2023 was the most important pan-African inter-university machine studying hackathon, with greater than 1000 students collaborating. The 2-day occasion was sponsored by: Mara, DeepThoughts, Kaggle, MPOWER Financing, African Energy Chamber, and InstaDeep amongst others.
In an announcement, Celina Lee, CEO and co-founder of Zindi, stated: “With the world facing a dramatic shortage of data talent in the next 5-10 years, UmojaHack Africa serves a critical global need in unearthing and upskilling emerging data talent from new markets. We are thrilled with the turnout and enthusiasm of the students who participated in UmojaHack Africa 2023 this year, and look forward to seeing these rising stars develop into successful professionals on the Zindi platform.”
Over 1000 students participated from dorm rooms, laptop labs and pupil hubs across the continent. They labored evening and day across 4 timezones and 36 completely different international locations, together with South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria, Tunisia, Algeria, Egypt and plenty of extra. The hottest problem was to use machine studying to predict carbon emissions on the African continent, whereas different challenges targeted on cryptocurrency modeling, and fixing a Rubik’s Cube utilizing reinforcement studying, one of many superior AI approaches behind ChatGPT.
The winners of every problem are: For the Rubik’s Cube Reinforcement Learning Challenge, the winners had been Akram Badreddine Laissaoui and Nazim Bendib from École Nationale Supérieure d’Informatique (ENSI), Algeria. For the Cryptojacking Detection Challenge, the winners had been Wiem Khlifi, Malek Sahlia, and Firas Jaadari from École Nationale des Sciences de l’Informatique (ENSI), Tunisia. And for the Carbon Dioxide Prediction Challenge, the winner was Stephen Kolesh, from Multimedia University (MMU), Kenya.
Students received prizes of money and on-line studying licenses amounting to greater than $10 000. Sponsors for the occasion included Mara, DeepThoughts, Kaggle, MPOWER Financing, African Energy Chamber, and InstaDeep, who gave skilled recommendation and shared datasets to make the occasion successful.
Zindi has grown the community of collaborating universities to nearly 350 greater training establishments, academies, technical schools, and bootcamps across the continent – no different occasion brings collectively extra academic establishments in Africa. This contains among the main organisations on the continent, comparable to AIMS, University of Cape Town, Makerere University, Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology, and Cairo University, amongst many others.
Avishkar Boopchand, Senior Research Engineer at DeepThoughts, addressed contributors on the day: “We need Africans to build African solutions to African problems. I’m really excited by the young, talented, and enthusiastic population on the continent. We’re not encumbered by old technology and an aging population; we can leapfrog the developed world, learn from their mistakes and leverage tech innovation to solve problems and drive growth. Our core strength is our strong communities – organisations like Zindi, UmojaHack Africa, Masakhane, Deep Learning Indaba, SisonkeBiotik, and Data Scientists Network (DSN), to name a few. UmojaHack Africa is a chance for students to become part of an extremely powerful, continent-wide community of like-minded people that will shape the future of the continent.”
Zindi was established in Cape Town in 2018, with the purpose of constructing knowledge science and synthetic intelligence (AI) abilities accessible to firms on the African continent. With a community of 60 000 knowledge scientists registered on the platform, from greater than 180 international locations around the globe.
This yr’s companions for the occasion included: Alliance4ai, Black Sisters in STEM, Data Science Zimbabwe, Data Scientist Network, Eloquent Data, GIZ FAIR Forward, Women in AI Global, Women in AI South Africa, Data Community Africa, NACOSS, African Business, and AI Media.
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James Musoba
Studying Africa’s startup and know-how scene. I at all times look ahead to discovering new thrilling innovations and vibrant entrepreneurs.
…. to be continued
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