Welcome to the DSA 2026 Workshop Schedule, where cutting-edge research meets practical innovation in data science and artificial intelligence. Held at Makerere University, Kampala, Uganda, the two-day workshop brings together researchers, practitioners, industry leaders, and innovators to present original research, exchange ideas, and discuss emerging technologies shaping Africa's AI landscape. The programme features keynote presentations, technical paper sessions, poster presentations, and interactive discussions spanning foundational data science, Generative AI, African language technologies, responsible AI, cybersecurity, data governance, and impactful applications across healthcare, agriculture, education, finance, climate, and beyond. Explore the full schedule below and plan your participation in an engaging forum dedicated to advancing data-driven solutions for Africa.
DSA 2026 Workshop Time Table |
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| Day | Time | Session Type | Details | Track | SPEAKER |
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1
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08:00 - 08:30 | Arrival & Registration | - | - | - |
| 08:30 - 09:00 | Opening | Welcome Remarks | - | ||
| 09:00 - 09:30 | Speech | Official Opening | - | - | |
| 09:30 - 10:30 | Keynote 1 | African Language Models: The New Frontiers' | All |
Dr. John Quinn and Dr. Ernest Mwebaze, Sunbird AI
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| 10:30 - 11:20 | Break | Coffee Break, Group Photo, and Networking | - | - | |
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11:20 - 13:00
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Paper Session 1
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What Happens to AI When the Lights Go Out? Infrastructure-Aware Robustness Benchmarking of Vision and NLP Models Under African Deployment Conditions |
All
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Sunday Aspita Abraham (MLC, Nigeria) | |
| Hybrid Kolmogorov–Arnold Graph Neural Networks and Probabilistic Graphical Models for Retention Time Prediction in Pharmaceutical LC–MS Workflows | Farouk Zainab (AIMS Senegal) | ||||
| Mapping Brick Kilns Using Semantic Segmentation of Multi-Modal Satellite Imagery | Patrick Anaku (Makerere University, Uganda) | ||||
| Learning Ordinal Latent Representations for Subject-Independent Parkinsonian Rigidity Estimation | Okello Andrew Peters (Makerere University, Uganda) | ||||
| When Synthetic Data Hurts: DCGAN Augmentation Failure Under Extreme Data Scarcity for Cassava Disease Classification in East Africa | Innocent Nyalala (SAAIL Lab, Tanzania) | ||||
| 13:00 - 14:30 | Break | Lunch & Networking | - | - | |
| 14:30-15:10 | Invited Talk | AI on the Edge & Resource-Constrained Environments | Arm | ||
| 15:10-16:45 | Panel discussion | Data Scarcity, Uncertainty, and AI in African Contexts | All | Moderator: Dr. Joyce Nakatumba Nabende | |
| 16:45 - 16:50 | Closing | - | - | - | |
| 18:00-20:00 | Welcome Reception | ||||
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2
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08:00 - 08:30 | Arrival | - | - | - |
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09:00 - 10:00
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Paper Session 2
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Attention-Based and Physics-Informed LSTM Models for Interpretable Weather Forecasting |
All
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Immaculate Kamusiime (Makerere University, Uganda) | |
| Automated Quality Control of Rainfall Telemetry via a Luenberger Virtual Sensor | Samuel Mbugua (Dedan Kimathi University of Tech, Kenya) | ||||
| Digitizing Informal Market Negotiation: A Culturally-Aware AI Chatbot for E-Commerce in Sub-Saharan Africa | Nana Dilan Kenye (University of Buea, Cameroon) | ||||
| Explainable and Uncertainty-Aware Variational Graph Recurrent Neural Network for Brain Tumor Classification from MRI | Bonou Bienvenu A. Eudes (AIMS Sénégal) | ||||
| 10:00 - 10:30 | Break | Coffee break and Networking | |||
| 10:30-12:00 | Panel Session | The Future of Careers and Work in the AI Era (A panel discussion of the roadmap to getting there) |
Moderator: Dr. Godliver Owomugisha | ||
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12:00-13:00
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Poster Session
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All
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| Automated Early Detection of Rheumatoid Arthritis in Radiographs Using Neural Networks | Jerome Teyi (AIMS Senegal) | ||||
| Low-Resource Swahili–Kalenjin Neural Machine Translation via QLoRA Fine-Tuning of NLLB-200 | Cyprian Kiplangat (Kabarak University, Kenya) | ||||
| Bridging the Language Gap in Text-to-SQL: Adapting LLMs for Chichewa in a Low-Resource Setting | John Eze (AIMS Rwanda) | ||||
| Evaluating Machine Learning Algorithms for Predicting Tuberculosis Cases in Mulago National Referral Hospital: | Ekiru Ernest Ochepa (Makerere University, Uganda) | ||||
| Few-Shot Transfer Learning for Cassava Leaf Disease Detection Under East African Field Conditions | Innocent Nyalala (SAAIL Lab, Tanzania) | ||||
| Auditing Representation in Crop Disease Benchmark Datasets Intended for Sub-Saharan African Deployment | Innocent Nyalala (SAAIL Lab, Tanzania) | ||||
| Agentic AI Framework for Uncertainty-Aware and Explainable Stroke Detection in Data-Scarce African Healthcare Settings | Wisdom Komla Domevenou (ISSEA, Cameroon) | ||||
| Explainable Respiratory disease classification: using respiratory sound and patient’s symptom data | Hiwot Habtamu (Adama S&T University, Ethiopia) | ||||
| Leveraging Open-Source LLMs for Political Discourse Analysis in Africa: Stance and Sentiment in Malian Coup Tweets | Gedeon Gbedonou (University of Abomey-Calavi, Benin) | ||||
| Contactless fish weighing | TeegWende Zougmore (Université Nationale de Burkina, Burkina Faso) | ||||
| Contactless Vital Signs Monitoring via Remote Photoplethysmography for Low-Resource African Healthcare Settings | AGBAN Kokou Ezechiel (Togo Data Lab, Togo) | ||||
| Low-Resource ASR for Kalenjin: Transfer Learning and Language Model Integration | Kevin Obote (Strathmore University, Kenya) | ||||
| Adapting Large Language Models to Localized Domains using QLORA | William Udousoro Joseph (University of Lagos, Nigeria) | ||||
| 13:00 - 14:00 | Break | Lunch & Networking | - | - | |
| 14:00-14:30 | Reproductive Health in Africa Innovation Challenge presentations and awards | Track I: Access to Comprehensive Early Pregnancy Loss Care REPAIR-AI Track II: Empowering Informed Decision-Making for Contraception ChaguoAI |
All | Lucy Natecho Namusonge GODFREY MBUGUA |
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| 14:30-15:30 | Awards & Closing Ceremony | ||||
VENUE: https://maps.app.goo.gl/Ae7NtAnb8JXyX7uB8
>> DSA 2026 Summer School Schedule
