Welcome to the website of the Workshop on Data Science in Africa, to be held at Dedan Kimathi University of Technology in Nyeri, Kenya.

The last few years have witnessed an explosion in the quantity and variety of data available in Africa, produced either as a by-product of digital services, from sensors or measuring devices, satellites and from many other sources. A number of practical fields have been transformed by the ability to collect large volumes of data: for example, bioinformatics with the development of high throughput sequencing technology capable of measuring gene expression in cells, or agriculture with the widespread availability of high quality remote sensing data. For other data sources – such as mobile phone usage records from telecoms operators, which can be used to measure population movement and economic activity – we are just beginning to understand the practical possibilities.

Data science seeks to exploit advances in machine learning and statistics to make sense of the growing amounts of data available from various sources. In Africa, a number of problems in areas such as healthcare, agriculture, disaster response and wildlife conservation would benefit greatly if domain experts were exposed to data science techniques. These skills would allow practitioners to extract useful information from these abundant sources of raw data.

The workshop aims (1) to bring together leading researchers and practitioners working on data science methods or applications relevant to Africa, and (2) to provide training on state of the art data science methods to students and others interesting in developing practical skills.

Summer School on Machine Learning and Data Science
Dates: 15 June - 17 June 2015
Venue: Dedan Kimathi University of Technology, Nyeri, Kenya
 

In the tradition of previous Africa Data Science workshops, a summer school on machine learning and data science will be held prior to the main workshop. This summer school will target graduate students, researchers and professionals working with huge amounts of data or unique datasets.

The summer school will focus on introductory and advanced lectures in data science and machine learning as well as moderate to advanced practical and tutorial sessions where participants will get their hands wet wrangling and munging datasets and applying cutting edge machine learning techniques to derive inference from the data. Lectures will be given by distinguished world renown researchers and practitioners including researchers from Sheffield University, IBM Research, Facebook, Pulse Lab Kampala and the AI and Data Science (AIR) lab-Makerere University.

The school will also involve end-to-end tutorial sessions from professionals walking the participants through a real data analytics problem from data acquisition to data presentation. To benefit from this course participants are encouraged to have some background in programming particularly programming with Python.

School programme outline:

Lecture Schedule

Time

Activity

Material

08:00-09:00

Arrival and Registration

09:00-09:30

Opening Remarks
Ciira Maina - Dedan Kimathi University of Technology


09:30-10:30

Lecture 1: Introduction to Machine Learning and Data Science
Neil D. Lawrence - University of Sheffield

PDF slides

10:30-11:30

Break

11:00-13:00

Lecture 2: Regression
Neil D. Lawrence - University of Sheffield

PDF slides

13:00-14:00

Lunch

14:00-17:00

Lab 1 Regression
Michael T. Smith - University of Sheffield
Andreas Damianou - University of Sheffield
Ciira Maina - Dedan Kimathi University of Technology

PDF slides ipynb

Time

Activity

Material

Classification

09:00-10:30

Lecture 3: Classification
John Quinn - Makerere University and UN Global Pulse

10:30-11:30

Break

11:00-13:00

Lecture 4: Worked Example: Malaria Parasite Classification
John Quinn - Makerere University and UN Global Pulse

13:00-14:00

Lunch

14:00-17:00

Lab 2
Michael T. Smith - University of Sheffield
John Quinn - Makerere University and UN Global Pulse
Andreas Damianou - University of Sheffield
Neil Lawrence - University of Sheffield
Ciira Maina - Dedan Kimathi University of Technology

Time

Activity

Material

Unsupervised Learning

09:00-10:30

Lecture 5: Clustering
Ciira Maina - Dedan Kimathi University of Technology

PDF slides

10:30-11:30

Break

11:00-13:00

Lecture 6: Dimensionality Reduction
Andreas Damianou - University of Sheffield

13:00-14:00

Lunch

14:00-17:00

Lab 3
John Quinn - Makerere University and UN Global Pulse
Andreas Damianou - University of Sheffield
Ciira Maina - Dedan Kimathi University of Technology

ipynb

17:00

Concluding Remarks
Neil D. Lawrence - University of Sheffield
John Quinn
Andreas Damianou - University of Sheffield
Ciira Maina - Dedan Kimathi University of Technology

The summer school is now fully subscribed, and registration has closed.

Data Science in Africa Workshop
Dates: 18 June - 19 June 2015
Venue: Dedan Kimathi University of Technology, Nyeri, Kenya

Call for Registration

The workshop will be organized around interactive panel discussions. Each panel will discuss how data science can advance the achievement of a specific Global Goal on the African continent.

This is part of the event will unite a wide range of stakeholders, uniting data scientists with representatives from government, development practitioners and the private sector; a unique setting in which innovative solution driven ideas can thrive.

Participants will also develop a framework for attracting young African talent, mentors and researchers from academia, the public sector and the private sector in Africa to engage in activities geared towards harnessing big data and real-time analytics for the public good.

Workshop programme outline:

Schedule

Time

Presentation

08:30-

Arrival and Registration
-

09:00-

Opening Remarks


Professor Ndirangu Kioni, Vice Chancellor - DeKUT


Professor Paul Wambua, DVC RTMCL - DeKUT


Ciira wa Maina - DeKUT

09:00-

Session 1: Agriculture
-

09:20-

Optimizing Small-scale Farm Management in Kenya using a Frugal Plant-Based Approach for Irrigation Scheduling
Lianna Samuel - IBM Research Africa

09:50-

Automated Monitoring of Viral Cassava Disease
Ernest Mwebaze - Makerere University

PDF slides

10:20-10:50

Coffee break
-

-

Session 2: Crisis Management
-

10:50-

Construction Of A Resiliency Platform for Preventing Future Crises In Sierra Leone
Nuri Purswani - IBM Research Africa

11:20-

Umati: Monitoring Dangerous Speech Online
Sidney Ochieng - iHub

11:50-

The Punya Mobile Application Development Platform
Julius Adebayo - MIT

PDF slides

12:20-


-

Session 3: Health, Bioinformatics and Privacy
-

13:30-

Personalised Medicine
Neil Lawrence - University of Sheffield

14:00-

Improved Modelling of Malaria Incidence with Telecoms Data
Martin Mubangizi - Makerere University

14:30-

Differential Privacy
Michael T. Smith - University of Sheffield

ipynb

15:00-15:30

Coffee Break

15:30

Comparative Genomics of Tsetse's Chemosensory Proteins
Rosaline Macharia - ICIPE

16:00-

Concordance of Morphometrics and DNA barcoding in identifying Stingless bee species (Apidae: Meliponinae) in Kenya
Nelly Ndungu - ICIPE

16:30-

Investigating Traditional Systems of Medicine Using Phylogenies Derived from Gene Sequences
Ciira Maina - DeKUT

PDF slides

Time

Presentation

Session 4: Data Sources and Privacy
-

09:00

Free Datasets For All
Prestone Adie - Kenya Open Data Team

PPT slides

09:30

Humanitarian Data Exchange Project
Reuben Cummings - UN OCHA

PPT slides

10:00

New Sources of Information for Planning and Disaster Response
John Quinn - Pulse Lab Kampala/Makerere University

10:30-11:00

Coffee break
-

Session 5: Water

11:00

Using Frugal Smart Meters to Increase Water Security in Kenya
Muuo Wambua - IBM Research Africa

11:30

Understanding Nairobi's Water Supply Landscape: The Data Driven Approach
Peninah Waweru - IBM Research Africa

12:00

Pivoting Entity-Attribute-Value data Using MapReduce for Bulk Extraction
Augustus Kamau - DeKUT

PDF slides

12:30-13:30

Lunch
-

Session 6: Markets and Economy
-

13:30

Auction Systems for Real-Time Agricultural Market Analysis
Kenneth Bwire - Kudu/Makerere University

14:00

Time Series Analysis of Financial Market Data [To be Confirmed]
Cyprian Omari - DeKUT

14:30

Wrap-up and discussion – next steps for data science in Africa?
-

The workshop is now fully subscribed, and registration has closed.

Collaborators

Sponsorship

Sponsoring Data Science Africa, 2015 Event is a great way to communicate your commitment to support the achievement of the sustainable development goals. We thank this year's sponsors: