General Chair: Ciira Maina
Program Chair: Ernest Mwebaze
The workshop was organized around paper presentations and interactive panel discussions. Participants interested in presenting their work at the workshop were invited to submit a short abstract describing the application of data science methods to problems relevant to Africa. Each submission was limited to a maximum of three pages following the provided LaTeX template. Participants were later notified whether their work would be presented orally or as a poster.
The workshop focused on research addressing low-resourced, developing-world challenges in the following broad areas:
- Data Science for the Sustainable Development Goals
- Healthcare
- Agriculture
- Wildlife Conservation
- Disaster Response
- Geospatial Modelling
- Telecommunications Data Modelling
- Economic Monitoring
During the panel discussions, the workshop brought together a wide range of stakeholders, including data scientists, representatives from government, development practitioners, and private-sector leaders. This created a unique environment where innovative, solution-driven ideas flourished.
Participants also developed a framework for attracting young African talent, mentors, and researchers from academia, the public sector, and private industry to engage in initiatives geared toward harnessing big data and real-time analytics for the public good.
Workshop programme outline:
DSA 2018 Nyeri Workshop Day 1
Time |
Presentation |
|
|
08:00-09:00 |
Arrival and Registration |
|
|
09:00-09:30 |
Workshop Opening |
|
|
09:30-10:00 |
Keynote 1 |
|
|
10:00-10:30 |
Keynote 2 |
|
|
10:30-11:00 |
Coffee Break |
|
|
11:20-11:40 |
Talk 2 - Towards 2050: Big data-driven decision support in integrated smallholder farming systems |
|
|
11:40-12:00 |
Talk 3 - How do models learn: understanding feature importance in image classification models |
|
|
12:00-12:20 |
Talk 4 - Transfer learning for mobile phone credit scoring |
|
|
12:20-13:00 |
Panel 1 - Data for public good |
|
|
13:00-14:00 |
Lunch Break & group photo |
|
|
14:00-14:30 |
Keynote 3 - TBA |
|
|
14:30-14:50 |
Talk 5 - TBA |
|
|
14:50-15:10 |
Talk 12 - Mapping exposure of cattle to Rift Valley fever virus along their migratory routes |
|
|
15:10-15:30 |
Talk 7 - Machine learning approach to reducing student dropout rate |
|
|
15:30-16:00 |
Tea Break |
|
|
16:00-16:40 |
Panel 2 - Building local capacity - Africa Data Science Community |
|
|
16:40-17:00 |
Day 1 Wrap-up |
DSA 2018 Nyeri Workshop Day 2
Time |
Presentation |
|
08:00-09:00 |
Arrival and Registration |
|
09:00-09:30 |
Announcements & logistics |
|
09:30-10:00 |
Keynote 4 |
|
10:00-10:30 |
Keynote 5 |
|
10:30-11:00 |
Coffee Break |
|
11:00-11:20 |
Talk 8 - A real-time simplified smart agriculture system for small-scale greenhouse farming |
|
11:20-11:40 |
Talk 9 - Data-driven patient diagnosis with Dr. Elsa |
|
11:40-12:00 |
Talk 10 - Air quality monitoring |
|
12:00-12:30 |
Panel 3 - Applications of data science in government |
|
12:30-12:40 |
Talk 11 - DeKUT IoT and Data Science Projects |
|
12:40-13:00 |
Spotlight talks |
|
13:00-14:00 |
Lunch Break |
|
14:00-14:30 |
Keynote 5 - TBA |
|
14:30-14:50 |
Talk 12 - Converging blockchain and next-gen AI technologies for biomedical research |
|
14:50-15:10 |
Talk 13 - Why Data Science is so important in Off-Grid Solar |
|
15:10-15:30 |
Tea Break |
|
16:00-16:20 |
Panel 4 - Lessons from DSA 2018 |
|
16:20-16:30 |
Closing |