Meet Our Speakers!

Elizabeth Mutua

Elizabeth has completed her PhD at Strathmore University School of Computing and Engineering sciences, Kenya. Her research topic is “A Deep Learning Model for Retinopathy of Prematurity Stage III Disease Diagnosis”. Her PhD was funded by the following organizations: Mawazo institute, DAAD, OWSD and Google PhD fellowships. She holds a master’s degree in IT Management from the university of Sunderland (UK), under the sponsorship of Commonwealth scholarship and a bachelor’s degree, BSC Computer Science (First Class Honors) from Kabarak University. She has been a lecturer at Dedan Kimathi University, School of Computer science and IT for the past ten years and the founder of Joasher Technologies & Consultancy, a software developing company based in Nairobi Kenya. She is an active participant of Data Science and Machine Learning conferences where she has been awarded many awards, among them Umuntu Award by Deep Learning Indaba 2023, GOMYCODE poster award 2022, Innovation throughout Africa 2020. She is passionate about mentoring young girls pursuing STEM courses and careers where the year 2016, she founded a RuralYoungTech program, which work to motivate and support girls from slums and rural areas here in Kenya. The program teaches the girls basic computer applications and software development without having them pay a fee. Girls who graduate from the program are linked with Tech companies for internship.

Kiko Muuo

Kiko Muuo is the CEO of Angaza Elimu and Edtech company leveraging AI to deliver on demand skill based learning to African youth to help them thrive in a digital economy

Marilyn Ronoh

Dr. Marilyn C. Ronoh is a Lecturer and Researcher of Applied Mathematics and Infectious Disease Modelling. She is currently teaching at the University of Embu, Kenya on a full-time basis. She has a BSc. degree in Mathematics, MSc. in Applied Mathematics and PhD in Applied Mathematics (Mathematical Modelling). She is also an alumni of the Mawazo PhD Scholars programme and has supported the implementation of the Mawazo Learning Exchange (MLEx) programme and the MLEx mentorship programme. Her recent research centered on constructing mathematical models to understand the transmission dynamics of HIV/AIDS among the adolescents and young people in Kenya. She has authored and co-authored published manuscripts in emerging infectious diseases. Currently, she is involved in multidisciplinary and international research collaborations, particularly modelling the social drivers of HIV/AIDS disease, sexual and reproductive health research, infectious diseases and climate changes and applications of artificial intelligence to HIV/AIDS disease dynamics among the youth in Kenya

Mohammed Fazalullah Qudrath

Mohammed Fazalullah (call me “Faz”) is a Senior Developer Advocate at AWS for the MENA region. He is based in the UAE and educates and empowers developers on achieving cloud capabilities, allowing them to concentrate on interesting problems while AWS handles the heavy lifting. An architect and a technical evangelist at heart, he speaks on various trends in the technology space with the focus of building and scaling in the cloud in and around Asia. He has designed and built products for over 18 years in the enterprise and SME space, along with building engineering teams and helping them scale.

Marcel Salathé

Marcel Salathé (born 1975 in Basel) is a Swiss digital epidemiologist. He is currently an associate professor at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) He is the director of the Lab of Digital Epidemiology, based at EPFL’s Geneva Campus. In the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, Salathé was the most quoted scientist in the Swiss media.

Darlington Akogo

Darlington Akogo is a global leader in Artificial Intelligence. He’s the Founder and Chief Executive Officer at minoHealth AI Labs; an AI Healthtech company; karaAgro AI; an AI-powered Plant & Pest Disease Detection and Precision Agriculture platform, Runmila AI Institute; an AI and Data Science training institute, and Gudra AI Studio; an organisation broadly exploring AI and Exponential Technologies applied various domains including Transportation, Sanitation and Energy.

He’s the Lead (Topic Driver) for Topic Group on AI for Radiology under the United Nations International Telecommunications Union (ITU) and World Health Organization (WHO) Focus Group on ‘Artificial Intelligence for Health’ (FG-AI4H). At UN FG-AI4H, Akogo leads the development of global regulations and standards for AI in radiology.

Emmanuel Noutahi

Emmanuel Noutahi is a principal scientist and technical leader at Valence Labs, a research engine within Recursion Pharmaceuticals.
His work spans representation learning, out-of-distribution generalization, generative modeling, and human-in-the-loop approaches for scientific discovery.
He led the creation of LOWE (LLM-Orchestrated Workflow Engine), an innovative system using LLMs for orchestrating drug discovery workflows, marking a significant step towards autonomous AI agents in scientific discovery.
Emmanuel has also made substantial contributions to Datamol, an open-source framework for AI in drug discovery, and co-founded Studio Point Virgule in Benin, which hosts projects like Eureka, aiming to highlight the work of African researchers.

Mary-Anne Hartley

Mary-Anne “Annie” Hartley is an Assistant Professor in Biomedical Informatics and Data Science. Her research is focused on developing and validating novel data-driven tools designed to improve healthcare in low-resource settings, with a special interest in Africa.

She completed her undergraduate degrees at the Universities of Pretoria and Cape Town before moving to Switzerland, where she completed a PhD and MD at the University of Lausanne, with an MPH at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

In 2019, she started the research group, “Intelligent Global Health” in the School of Computer Science at the Swiss Institute of Technology (EPFL) and continues this work in LiGHT (Laboratory for intelligent Global Health Technologies).

Through these groups, she maintains a strong presence and partnership between EPFL and Yale through student exchange, research collaboration, and a visiting professorship.

The groups collaborate with international NGOs and clinical partners to create and validate needs-based digital global health technology using novel approaches in data science and informatics.

Sandeep Reddy

Sandeep has a background in Health Service Management, Medical Informatics, Public Health and Medicine. In addition to a medical degree, he has qualifications in medical informatics, management and public health. Following some years in clinical practice and medical education, Sandeep attained extensive experience managing various health service projects and formulating high-level policy in Australia, New Zealand and Europe. Sandeep has in the past focused on teaching and research in healthcare management and public health. He is now researching and teaching the application of artificial intelligence in healthcare, evaluation of health technology and hospital management.

Judy Gichoya

Judy is a medical doctor specializing in radiology with training and more than 6 years experience in informatics. She has worked with multiple organizations for global health in Kenya, Ethiopia, Uganda, Colombia and Tanzania implementing mhealth and ehealth solutions targeting patient care.

Her passion is to create health care ecosystems through a social entrepreneurship model that combines her medical and technology skills.

Andrews Kangah

Ata serves as the Lead Software and DevSecOps Engineer at MinoHealth AI Labs, an AI Healthtech company, and KaraAgro AI Labs, an AI-powered Plant & Pest Disease Detection and Precision Agriculture platform. Ata contributed in the past to The Startup and Better Programming on Medium as a content creator. He was also a mentor at the 2021 Google Africa Developers Scholarship Program as a cloud track instructor. Prior to his current role, Ata was a Contingent Software Engineer at Morgan Stanley, where he contributed to the Central Tools team.

David Kihumba

David Kihumba, a finance, supply chain & business management professional with over a decade of experience in several sectors and currently working as value chain manager in Global Health & Sustainability unit in Novartis.

Tariq Daouda

Dr. Tariq Daouda specializes in applications at the intersection of Artificial Intelligence and
Biomedical sciences. He holds a bachelor’s in mathematics and Computer Science from the
Université de Lorraine, a Master’s in Machine Learning from Université de Montréal, and a
PhD in Bioinformatics also from the Université de Montréal. Dr. Daouda then moved to
Boston to pursue postdoctoral training, where he was affiliated to the Broad Institute,
Harvard Medical School, and the Massachusetts General Hospital. He recently joined the
University Mohammed VI Polytechnic to become head of AI for biomedical applications at
the Faculty of Medicine. His research focuses on the development of novel artificial
intelligence methods to improve our understanding of biology and accelerate the
development of clinical applications. Over the years he has worked on the identifications of
markers of cancer and infection at the surface of cells, the integration of different types of
single cell sequencing to create accurate maps of individual cell biology, and the analysis of
viral sequences to identify strains likely to transition between species.

Alexandra Ebert

Alexandra Ebert is a Responsible AI, synthetic data & privacy expert and serves as Chief Trust Officer at MOSTLY AI. As a member of the company’s senior leadership team, she is engaged in public policy issues in the emerging field of synthetic data and Ethical AI and is responsible for engaging with the privacy community, with regulators, the media, and with customers. She regularly speaks at international conferences on AI, privacy, and digital banking and hosts The Data Democratization Podcast, where she discusses emerging digital policy trends as well as Responsible AI and privacy best practices with regulators, policy experts and senior executives. Apart from her work at MOSTLY AI, she serves as the chair of the IEEE Synthetic Data IC expert group and was pleased to be invited to join the group of AI experts for the #humanAIze initiative, which aims to make AI more inclusive and accessible to everyone. Before joining the company, she researched GDPR’s impact on the deployment of artificial intelligence in Europe and its economic, societal, and technological consequences. Besides being an advocate for privacy protection, Alexandra is deeply passionate about Ethical AI and ensuring the fair and responsible use of machine learning algorithms. She is the co-author of an ICLR paper and a popular blog series on fairness in AI and fair synthetic data, which was featured in Forbes, IEEE Spectrum, and by distinguished AI expert Andrew Ng.

Kamil Seghrouchni

Kamil Seghrouchni, a Machine Learning Engineer with a Life Sciences Engineering background from EPFL and a Data Science minor, specializes in AI solutions for healthcare at Visium SA. His work includes applied research and the deployment of ML models, notably achieving significant advancements with pharma clients. He has managed a large portfolio of ML projects in production and contributed to over 10 AI strategy developments for industry leaders. Kamil’s role in moderating a panel on AI and healthcare, coupled with his experience in animating tracks, highlights his ability to bridge technical expertise with practical healthcare applications. His volunteer work and leadership in organizations, such as the Applied Machine Learning Days in Africa, underscore his dedication to the AI community and healthcare innovations.

Sandra Barteit

Sandra Barteit holds a Master of Science in Analytics (Computational Data Analytics), a Master of Arts in Computational Linguistics, and a doctorate (Dr.sc.hum.) from the Institute of Global Health at Heidelberg University. Her dissertation comprised of a mixed-methods evaluation of a Zambian e-learning medical intervention, which was part of a larger effort to improve medical education in Zambia through digital technologies, and Dr Barteit leads as the principal investigator: the Blended Learning in Zambia (BLZ) project, which is a partnership between the largest medical university in Zambia and an international organization (Levy Mwanawasa Medical University).

Bonaventure F. P. Dossou

Bonaventure Dossou is a Computer Science Ph.D. student at McGill University & Mila, specializing in Natural Language Processing (NLP) applied to low-resource languages, particularly those of African origin, and Healthcare. Holding a Bachelor of Science with honors in Mathematics from Kazan Federal University, Russia, and a Master of Science with honors in Computer Science and Data Engineering from Jacobs University Bremen, Germany, Bonaventure’s interests lie in Natural Language Processing, including Machine Translation, Large Language Modeling, Speech Recognition, and Information Retrieval for low-resourced languages. Additionally, he is actively involved in Machine Learning for Healthcare, focusing on areas such as Drug Discovery, small molecule generation, and gene therapy.

Bonaventure has developed several Afro-centric NLP systems, including the FFRTranslate, AfroLM, and Okwugbe ASR Python libraries. Prior to pursuing his Ph.D., he served as a research intern at the Mila Quebec AI Institute, contributing to Drug Discovery projects utilizing Deep Learning and Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets) under the guidance of Yoshua Bengio and Dianbo Lui. His professional experience also includes roles as an NLP Researcher at Google Research, an NLP Data Scientist at Roche Canada, and a Research Scientist at ModelisLabs, where he tackled challenges in the Health and Pharma domains.

Mazdak Abulnaga

Mazdak Abulnaga is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Computer Science and AI Lab (CSAIL) and Harvard Medical School. His research is focused on the development of machine learning and geometry processing methods for applications in health care.
Currently, he is pursuing research in computational neuroscience, where he aims to develop a standardized representation of the brain for functional analysis. He is also pursuing research applications in structural biology.  Previously, he completed his Ph. D. in computer science at MIT. He was part of CSAIL, where he was co-advised by Prof. Polina Golland and Prof. Justin Solomon. During this time, he was part of the Medical Vision Group and the Geometric Data Processing Group. The primary focus of Dr. Abulnaga’s Ph.D. research was on advancing machine learning and shape analysis for computer graphics and healthcare. His research focused on developing methods to study fetal-maternal health using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). He developed a standardized representation for the placenta which is currently being used by researchers globally to study several disorders in pregnancy affecting fetuses globally. During his PhD, he collaborated closely with physicians and clinical researchers at Boston Children’s Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital, to deploy these methods for research in fetal-maternal health.  Dr. Abulnaga received several PhD fellowships the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, the NSERC Postgraduate Scholarship, the MathWorks Fellowship, and the Siebel Fellowship.  Beyond research, he has a particular interest in improving technical communication and mentorship. At MIT, he led several initiatives dedicated to supporting and improving research opportunities for students. You can find more details on his website: http://abulnaga.com/.

Leah Mutanu Mwaura

Dr. Leah Mutanu Mwaura is currently a full-time faculty at the United States International University – Africa in the department of computing, where she teaches Computer Technology courses for undergraduate and graduate programs. She has a special interest in Software engineering and Information Systems Research. Her research activities include designing Early Warning Systems and Autonomous Computing solutions for development, with related publications in these areas. She has over fifteen years of research and teaching experience in academia. As part of her work in academia, she has supervised students in various computer-related research areas. Leah holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science and a Master of Science degree in Managing Information Systems.

Nour Ghalia Abassi

Nour Ghalia Abassi is a Business Leader at DigeHealth and a Data Scientist with a specialized interest in sound recognition in gastro-enterology.

With an educational background focused on integrating AI into medtech.

With her team at DigeHealth, Nour has developed a medtech device designed to monitor patients with bowel disorders by recognizing, counting and categorizing bowel sounds. This innovation reflects Nour Ghalia’s commitment to applying data science to improve patient outcomes.

Her work in data science is directed towards creating a system capable of flagging anomalies. It aims to distinguish non-invasively between normal and abnormal bowel behaviors, underscoring her commitment to advancing non-intrusive diagnostic methods in healthcare.

Angelica Willis

Angelica Willis is a software engineer and AI Researcher at Google who has a passion for leveraging artificial intelligence to advance the quality and longevity of human life. Her core work involves developing AI-driven healthcare solutions to help doctors make better decisions. Previous career adventures include machine learning research at Apple, NASA, and Bank of America.

Willis received a master’s degree in computer science, with a focus in artificial intelligence, and in human-computer interaction, from Stanford University. Her graduate school research focused on AI-based tutoring systems designed to help K-12 students gain math, science, and reading skills outside of the classroom. She earned an undergraduate degree in computer science from North Carolina A&T State University.

Honored as an NSF Graduate Research Fellow, Willis is also a Google Women Techmaker Scholar, an Apple HBCU Scholar, and a Buick National Achiever. She is an advocate for computer science education and diversity in STEM, and was recognized by President Obama as a 2016 White House Champion of Change for Computer Science Education. In her free time, Angelica enjoys advising startups through the Google for Startups Founder’s Academy program and cooking (both her own recipes and ones generated by an AI model she built).

Vukozi Marivate

Prof Vukosi Marivate is an Associate Professor of Computer Science and holds the ABSA UP Chair of Data Science at the University of Pretoria. He specialises in developing Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods to extract insights from data, with a particular focus on the intersection of ML/AI and Natural Language Processing (NLP). His research is dedicated to improving the methods, tools and availability of data for local or low-resource languages. As the leader of the Data Science for Social Impact research group in the Computer Science department, Vukosi is interested in using data science to solve social challenges. He has worked on projects related to science, energy, public safety, and utilities, among others. Prof Marivate is a co-founder and CTO of the Lelapa AI, an African startup focused on AI for Africans by Africans. Vukosi is a chief investigator on the Masakhane NLP project, which aims to develop NLP technologies for African languages. Vukosi is also a co-founder of the Deep Learning Indaba, the leading grassroots Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence conference on the African continent that aims to empower and support African researchers and practitioners in the field.

Mark Irura Gachara

Mark Irura is currently an Artificial Intelligence Advisor with GIZ. Previously, he has been an analyst with extensive experience heading end-to-end digital implementations for bilateral and multilateral development agencies, government ministries, and the private sector.

Cornelius Maroa

Professional Summary:

An accomplished AI Researcher and Data Scientist, Cornelius is currently making significant strides in artificial intelligence through His role as a Co-founder at Intelliverse AI. With a passion for promoting AI research and innovation, Cornelius has dedicated His career to exploring the boundaries of AI technology and its applications.

Career Highlights:

• – AI Researcher and Data Scientist: Cornelius has a rich background in data science, specializing in developing advanced algorithms and predictive models that power AI solutions. His research has contributed to machine learning, neural networks, and AI-driven analytics breakthroughs.
• – Co-founder of Intelliverse AI: Leading the charge in AI innovation, Cornelius co-founded Intelliverse AI, a company at the forefront of AI technology. Under His leadership, the company has developed cutting-edge AI solutions transforming industries and driving technological progress.

Marvin Ngese

Marvin is Technical Program Manager / Engineering Manager / Machine Learning Engineer specializing in signal and image processing, specifically in the field of computer vision. He has a strong background in handling and analyzing sensor cloud data.

Alfred Ongere

Alfred Ongere is an AI consultant , founder and programs lead of Ai Kenya. He has been leading capacity development and general ecosystem building in artificial intelligence in Kenya for the past 6 years. He is a passionate Artificial intelligence evangelist dedicated to helping individuals and organizations understand how best to leverage and be part of the AI revolution.

Girmaw Abebe Tadesse

Girmaw is a Principal Research Scientist and Manager at Microsoft AI for Good Research Lab which aims to develop AI solutions for critical problems across sectors including agriculture, healthcare, biodiversity, etc. Prior to that he was a Staff Research Scientist at IBM Research Africa working on detecting and characterizing systematic deviations in data and machine learning models. At IBM Research, Girmaw led multiple projects in trustworthy AI including evaluation of generative models, representation analysis in academic materials and data-driven insight extraction from public healthy surveys, with active collaborations with external institutions such as Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Stanford University, Oxford University and Harvard University. Previously, Girmaw also worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Oxford, where he primarily developed deep learning techniques to assist diagnosis of multiple diseases, with collaborations with clinicians and hospitals in China and Vietnam. Girmaw completed his PhD at Queen Mary University of London, under the Erasmus Mundus Double Doctorate Program in Interactive and Cognitive Environments, with a focus on computer vision and machine learning algorithms for human activity recognition using wearable cameras. He has interned/worked in various research groups across Europe, including the UPC-BarcelonaTech (Spain), KU Leuven (Belgium), and INESC-ID (Portugal). Girmaw is an Executive Member for IEEE Kenya Section, and he is currently serving as a reviewer and program committee member for multiple top-tier AI focused journals and conferences.

Tanya Berger-Wolf

Dr. Tanya Berger-Wolf is the Director of the Translational Data Analytics Institute and a Professor of Computer Science Engineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering, as well as Evolution, Ecology, and Organismal Biology at the Ohio State University. Recently she has been awarded US National Science Foundation grant to establish a new field of study: Imageomics. As a computational ecologist, her research is at the unique intersection of computer science, wildlife biology, and social sciences.

Berger-Wolf is a member of the US National Academies Board on Life Sciences and CNRS International Scientific Advisory Board, Artificial Intelligence for Science, Science for Artificial Intelligence (AISSA) Centre. She served on the Global Partnership on AI (GPAI) working group on AI and Biodiversity, WWF working group on AI Collaboration to End Wildlife Trafficking, AAAS-FBI Big Data in the Life Sciences and National Security Working Group, and the organizing committee of the National Academies First U.S.-Africa Frontiers of Science, Engineering, and Medicine Symposium, among many others.

Berger-Wolf is also a director and co-founder of the AI for wildlife conservation software non-profit Wild Me, home of the Wildbook project, has been chosen by UNSECO as one of the top AI 100 projects worldwide supporting the UN Sustainable Development Goals. It has been featured in media, including Forbes, National Geographic, The New York Times, CNN, and The Economist.

Prior to coming to OSU in January 2020, Berger-Wolf was at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is widely published and is a sought-after invited speaker. Berger-Wolf has received numerous awards for her research and mentoring, including the highest honor of University of Illinois Scholar, UIC Distinguished Researcher of the Year, US National Science Foundation CAREER, Association for Women in Science Chicago Innovator, and the UIC Mentor of the Year.

Santiago Hincapie Potes

Santiago Hincapie Potes is a Research Engineer at Google Research team in Accra. Santiago’s current work focuses on using AI for weather forecasting in low-resource regions. Prior to Google, I worked as a Machine Learning Engineer in various startups in America.

Julian Kuehnert

Julian is a Research Scientist at IBM Research Africa in Nairobi, Kenya. He is part of the Climate & Sustainability initiative, working with climate impact models for improved decision making. His current research interests focus around boosted calibration of model parameters using Bayesian optimization frameworks and uncertainty estimation in dynamical systems using Machine Learning approaches.

Prior to joining IBM Research in 2020, Julian studied Geophysics and received his PhD in 2019 from the IPGP in Paris, France, where he worked at the interface of computational and environmental seismology.

If you want to get a personal glimpse into Julian’s life at the research lab in Nairobi, you can listen to his conversation with Jon Lenchner and Victor Akinwande on the “On Not Knowing” podcast, available on Spotify and Audible.

Attila Steinegger

Attila is leading the digital transformation of WWF. He drives WWF’s digital strategy and roadmap as well as the use of emerging technologies such as remote sensing, artificial intelligence and Web 3 for conservation purposes. In addition, he acts as expert speaker, panelist and represents WWF in various committees around topics of digitalization, emerging technologies and sustainability. Prior to that, he used to work for 10 years at various consulting firms, focusing on strategy, innovation and digital transformation. In 2023, he was named as one of the Top 100 Digital Shapers in Switzerland by Bilanz. He holds a bachelors degree in Business Administration from the University of Applied Sciences St. Gallen and a masters degree in Corporate Sustainability from Cranfield University in the UK.

Warren Ochieng

Ochieng Warren is the Cofounder & CEO of Intelliverse,

a collaborative AI research platform and innovation

ecosystem that empowers AI Researchers, AI engineers, data scientists, Machine Learning Engineers, and Data Engineers across Africa with the tools, datasets, and vibrant community they need to build AI solutions to solve some of the continent’s most pressing challenges.

With a background in Economics and Statistics, Warren has over 5 years of professional experience working as a software engineer at CM Advocates, Adanian Labs and Asanti Consulting, with key focus on building robust and scalable applications.

He is passionate about building public private partnerships and building a bridge between

academia and industry to foster sustainable development across the African

continent

Mohamed Abdelfattah

Mohamed Abdelfattah is an Assistant Professor at Cornell Tech and in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Cornell University. His research interests include deep learning systems, automated machine learning, hardware-software codesign, reconfigurable computing, and FPGA architecture. Mohamed’s goal is to design the next generation of machine-learning-centric computer systems for both datacenters and mobile devices.

Mohamed received his B.Sc. from the German University in Cairo, his M.Sc. from the University of Stuttgart, and his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto. His Ph.D. was supported by the Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship and he received three best paper awards for his work on embedded networks-on-chip for FPGAs. His Ph.D. work garnered much industrial interest and has since been adopted by multiple semiconductor companies in their latest FPGAs. After his Ph.D., Mohamed spent time at Intel’s programmable solutions group, and most recently at Samsung where he led a research team focused on hardware-aware automated machine learning.

Steve Firsake

Steve Firsake is a Geospatial Engineer with a Software development and Data science background who has been working in cross-cutting fields for the past 10 years. He has worked for organisations such as NASA, FAO, World Vision and is currently the Senior Geospatial Engineer at Amini. He is passionate about the opportunities and research outcomes that spatial data science offers to solving real world challenges especially in the global South.

John Kamara

John Kamara by heart is a Tech Entrepreneur with over 20 successful years of experience working in new market acquisitions across various technology verticals in Europe, America, Asia and Africa.
John is one of Africa’s leading experts on how businesses can leverage key technology trends, instantly transform organizations and drive competitive advantage for impact in industries including finance, agriculture, health, education, gaming and startup enterprises.

Victor Jotham Ashioya

As a Machine Learning Engineer at Omdena, Victor drives change in real-world problems through open source data science projects, employing data collection, preprocessing, and modeling techniques. He has contributed to multiple projects in domains such as healthcare, education, and sustainability, using Python and SQL to build predictive models and machine learning algorithms.

He is also a Community Manager at TechUp Africa, where he leverages his background in NLP, Responsible AI, and data privacy advocacy to create and share content, resources, and opportunities for aspiring and emerging data scientists in Africa. He is passionate about extracting insights and creating innovative solutions using ethical AI practices and advocating for responsible data use. He holds a Bachelor of Applied Science in Data Science from WorldQuant University and several certifications and courses in data science, machine learning, cloud, and cybersecurity. He is excited to continue growing his experience and skills in data science, especially in language, ethics, and data privacy.

Elnathan Tiokou

Elnathan Tiokou is a Ph.D. student and researcher in cutting-edge Artificial Intelligence. He is dedicated, and determined to contribute to changing the Narrative of Africa, building Trustworthy, Inclusive and Responsible Artificial Intelligence systems.

Besides Artificial Intelligence, he is the Founder of the young African tech company CHRONEXIS. In his spare time, he creates content on social media to inform, educate and inspire people with his knowledge, stories, experiences, and achievements.

His mission is to make young people believe they can achieve greatness in their lives and this with nothing less than a deep hunger. He is open to opportunities which could include: Partnerships, Fellowships, Mentorships, and many others…

Akram Zaytar

Akram is a Senior Research Scientist at the Microsoft AI for Good Lab specializing in leveraging satellite imagery and advanced computer vision techniques to address environmental challenges.
He did his postdoc at IBM Research working on weather forecast postprocessing and geospatial ML tooling.
He is deeply invested in exploring the frontiers of deep neural networks, foundation models, and advancing the field of self and weakly-supervised learning.

Ismaila Seck

Dr. Ismaila Seck is CTO of Lengo, where he leads efforts to build AI models for shopkeepers in Senegal now and across Africa in the future. Ismaila is also a young teacher-researcher: after obtaining his engineering degree in Mathematics and Modeling, he did a thesis on “adversarial examples” at INSA Rouen before joining the African Master of Machine Intelligence (AMMI) as a post-doctoral researcher where he worked on ASR (Automatic Speech Recognition). He is also very active in the Senegalese AI community, GalsenAI, as the Academic Program Manager.

Kudzai Shaun Mpakairi

Experienced wildlife conservation researcher with a proven track record in the higher education industry. Skilled in data analysis, management, leadership, training, research, and machine learning. Kudzai’s multidisciplinary research interests include climate change, natural resources management, land-use assessments, and machine learning applications to wildlife conservation. Currently pursuing a Ph.D. at the University of the Western Cape.

Yassine Hamdaoui

As the CEO of NEURODATA, Yassine Hamdaoui leads a global team of experts in creating and scaling AI solutions for various industries and domains. With over 6 years of experience, Yassine has been instrumental in developing innovative applications of machine learning and computer vision, with a particular focus on optical character recognition (OCR) and handwriting text recognition (HTR). Yassine is the mind behind NEUROPARSER, an advanced OCR technology designed to facilitate quick and accurate extraction of text and data from images. NEUROPARSER supports handwriting text and over 64 languages, including Arabic.

Under Yassine’s leadership, NEURODATA’s OCR solution empowers customers to effortlessly scan and digitize printed documents, receipts, invoices, forms, and more, converting them into editable text for use in their preferred applications. Yassine holds a degree in Computer Software Engineering from ESPRIT, where skills in prototyping and developing proofs of concept were acquired. Additionally, a solid foundation in mathematics and physics was laid at IPEIM.

With a strategic vision, leadership prowess, and change management skills, Yassine excels in leading multidisciplinary projects and teams. Driven by a passion for solving complex problems, Yassine is dedicated to delivering value to NEURODATA’s customers and partners.

Ines Bahej

Hicham El Habti

Hicham El Habti is the President of Mohammed VI Polytechnic University. With a strong background in both corporate and education management, he plays a key role in fostering organizational development, leading the formulation and implementation of the university’s strategic vision, and driving transformation initiatives. His leadership focuses on promoting institutional reforms, enhancing operational efficiency, and establishing impactful collaborations at both local and international levels.

Hicham El Habti has extensive expertise in Applied Mathematics and Economics. He also holds an engineering degree in Economics, Management, and Finance from l’École Normale des Ponts et Chaussées in Paris.

Guillaume Scheurer

Guillaume Scheurer earned his Law degree from the University of Neuchâtel and pursued postgraduate studies in International Security Policy at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva, Switzerland.

His early career included working at a law practice in Neuchâtel, where he was called to the bar, and serving as a lawyer at the general directorate of a large private insurance company near Zürich from 1990 to 1992.

His prior government service includes:

• Ambassador to Ukraine and Moldova (2015-2019)
• Deputy Head of the Delegation to the Swiss Delegation to the OSCE (2013-2015), including during Switzerland’s Chairmanship of the OSCE in 2014
• Deputy Head of the Swiss Embassy in Washington, D.C. (2009-2013), where he also led the Political and Legal Section
• Deputy Head of the Political Division for Human Security, Peace Promotion, and Human Rights at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Berne (2005-2008)

Nadia Fassi-Fehri

Hassan Chafi

Dr. Hassan Chafi is the Vice President of Research and Advanced Development at Oracle, where he also leads the expansion of Oracle’s R&D team in Morocco.

In his role, Dr. Chafi oversees a range of projects, from exploring early-stage research ideas to identifying opportunities for transforming these ideas into advanced software services integrated into Oracle products. His team has made significant contributions to Oracle’s flagship product, the Oracle Database, including the introduction of the new ISO SQL graph query standards, which have been natively implemented in the database.

Dr. Chafi holds more than 60 technical patents and has an extensive background in computer engineering.

Education:

• PhD in Computer Engineering (2014), Stanford University
• MS in Computer Engineering (2006), Stanford University
• BS in Computer Engineering (2004), University of Maryland, College Park

Nicholas Kelley

Nicholas Kelley is the Director Data Science & A.I. Innovation in the central Novartis Data & AI organization, and has two main priorities. First, to identify, prioritise, and launch key use-cases for the AI Innovation Lab in line with its mission of delivering reusable AI capabilities for the scientific and medical core of the business. Second, on a broader enterprise perspective, to better define the AI opportunities landscape across the value chain. Here the key focus is on continued improvement of our Novartis data science foundation through innovative partnerships and by leading the data science community and capability building initiatives.
Recent initiatives include seeding and driving AI solutions such as Generative Chemistry as part of the partnership with Microsoft Research, the first cross-Novartis Data Science challenge in collaboration with MIT, and launching the AI for Life Residency program. Nick has a formal background in computational methodology with a Ph.D. in Biophysics from Stanford University, with career experience in computational biology, chem- and bioinformatics, and most recently in the application of A.I. and machine learning in health.

Valeria De Luca

Valeria De Luca is associate director and senior principal data scientist at the Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research, where she works on multi-modal data-driven approaches to quantify patient’s response to disease and treatment. Prior to joining Novartis in 2017, she was a postdoctoral research fellow at UCSF and ETH Zurich focusing on predictive models for critical care. She holds a PhD in Computer Vision from ETH Zurich on personalized cancer treatments.

Fatima-Zahrae Nakach

Mihaela van der Schaar

Olorunfemi Situ-Amoo

Stephen Tashobya

Yoshua Bengio is recognized worldwide as one of the leading experts in artificial intelligence, best known for his pioneering work in deep learning. His contributions earned him the 2018 A.M. Turing Award, often referred to as *the Nobel Prize of Computing*, alongside Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun.

He is a Full Professor at Université de Montréal and serves as the Founder and Scientific Director of Mila – Quebec AI Institute. He also co-directs the CIFAR *Learning in Machines & Brains* program as a Senior Fellow and acts as the Scientific Director of IVADO.

In 2019, he was honored with the prestigious Killam Prize, and in 2022, he became the computer scientist with the highest h-index in the world. He is a Fellow of both the Royal Society of London and the Royal Society of Canada and has been appointed as an Officer of the Order of Canada.

Concerned about AI’s societal impact and ensuring it benefits all, he played a key role in the development of the Montreal Declaration for the Responsible Development of Artificial Intelligence.

Sneha Jha

Yves Gaetan Nana Teukam

Yves is a Pre-Doctoral Researcher at IBM Research affiliated with the Technological University of Eindhoven. He has a background in Bioinformatics and Data Science.
During his master thesis, he worked on synthesis planning using deep learning. Part of this work resulted in a publication in Nature Communication in 2022. Yves, as a contributor to the Generative Toolkit for Scientific Discovery, is currently working on generative models for enzyme design using evolutionary-based algorithms.

Theophilus Aidoo

Joana Reuss

Elhousna Faouzi

Ghita Mezzour

Dr. Ghita Mezzour serves as the Moroccan Minister in Charge of Digital Transition and Administration Reform. Before her appointment, she worked as both an entrepreneur and an academic, focusing on the development of digital solutions with significant socio-economic impact. She holds a PhD from Carnegie Mellon University, as well as a Master’s and a Bachelor’s degree from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. Dr. Mezzour has been recognized with multiple international awards for her contributions to the field.

Foutse Khomh

Foutse Khomh is a Full Professor of Software Engineering at Polytechnique Montréal, Canada CIFAR AI Chair on Trustworthy Machine Learning Software Systems at Mila – Quebec AI Institute, and FRQ-IVADO Research Chair on Software Quality Assurance for Machine Learning Applications.

He received a Ph.D. in Software Engineering from the University of Montreal in 2011, earning the Award of Excellence. In 2019, he was awarded the CS-Can/Info-Can Outstanding Young Computer Science Researcher Prize, Canada’s highest recognition for an early-career academic in Computing.

His research interests include software maintenance and evolution, machine learning systems engineering, cloud engineering, and dependable and trustworthy ML/AI. His work has received four 10-Year Most Influential Paper Awards and six Best/Distinguished Paper Awards.

He has served on the program committees of several international conferences, including ICSE, FSE, ASE, ICSM(E), SANER, and MSR, and has reviewed for multiple top international journals in Software Engineering and AI, including EMSE, TSC, TPAMI, TSE, and TOSEM.

He has also served on the steering committees of SANER (chair), MSR, PROMISE, ICPC (chair), and ICSME (vice-chair). Additionally, he initiated and co-organized the *Software Engineering for Machine Learning Applications (SEMLA)* symposium and the *RELENG (Release Engineering)* workshop series.

He is on the editorial board of multiple international software engineering journals (e.g., *IEEE Software, EMSE, JSEP*) and is a Senior Member of IEEE.

Abderrahman Skiredj

Abdellah El Mekki

Bakary Diarrassouba

Lawrence Nderu

Elena Sinel

Elena Sinel is a multi-award-winning social entrepreneur committed to revolutionizing education worldwide.

Teens In AI is her latest initiative, driven by her passion for AI and its potential to create a lasting positive impact. Officially launched at the ITU’s AI for Good Global Summit, its mission is to build pipelines for underrepresented talent, enhancing diversity and inclusion in artificial intelligence.

The initiative provides young people aged 12-18 with early exposure to AI for social good through expert mentoring, talks, workshops in AI/ML, human-centered design and ethics, hackathons, accelerators, company tours, and networking opportunities. The vision is to ensure AI is developed by a diverse group of thinkers and doers, advancing AI for the benefit of humanity.

Elena is a highly sought-after speaker. Her recent achievements include:

• Winner – Women4Technology Industry Leadership Award, Mobile World Summit 2020
• Winner – Diversity Award, Mobile World Summit 2020
• 50 Most Influential Women in UK Technology, Computer Weekly, 2019
• CERPrize Winner, 2019

Lucilla Sioli

Ms. Lucilla Sioli is the Director for Artificial Intelligence and Digital Industry within the Directorate-General CONNECT at the European Commission.

She is responsible for coordinating the European digitization of industry strategy and developing policies in the fields of artificial intelligence (AI) and semiconductors. The directorate also supports research, development, and innovation in key digital industrial technologies, including microelectronics, photonics, robotics, and AI.

Lucilla holds a PhD in economics from the University of Southampton (UK) and another from the Catholic University of Milan (Italy). She has been a civil servant with the European Commission since 1997.

Walid Daou

Passionate about how Machine Learning and AI can have an impact on all businesses, Walid Daou currently runs Advanced Analytics initiatives at OCP.
He started his career in Financial Markets, as a Quantitative Trader in London, in Barclays Capital and in a Hedge Fund, Capula.
He then founded and run an Edtech company in France and Morocco for six years, that became the leader in the market of preparation of competitive exams, in Morocco.
Machine Learning enthusiast, he teaches the “”AI for Executive”” course at EDHEC.
Walid Daou is a Graduate from Ecole Polytechnique and Ecole des Mines de Paris, in Applied Mathematics.

Eslam Hussein

Hamza Bendahou

Mathurin Videau

Esther Oduntan

Abdel Labbi

Dr. Abdel Labbi is an IBM Distinguished Engineer and Head of Data & AI at IBM Research – Zurich. He leads a global team of researchers and engineers in developing the next-generation Hybrid Cloud Data Fabric, designed to provide secure, efficient, and governed enterprise data for AI.

With over 20 years of experience in research, engineering, consulting, and teaching, Dr. Labbi specializes in large-scale Data & AI platforms and digital transformation. He holds a PhD in Applied Mathematics from the University of Grenoble (France) and an MBA from Henley Business School (UK).

Dr. Labbi has collaborated with several Fortune 500 companies on cutting-edge AI projects and has co-authored more than 80 research papers and two books on various aspects of Data and AI theory and applications.

Jörg Schad

Jörg Schad is the CTO at ArangoDB. In a previous life, he has worked on or built machine learning pipelines in healthcare, distributed systems at Mesosphere, and in-memory databases.
He received his Ph.D. for research around distributed databases and data analytics.
He’s a frequent speaker at meetups, international conferences, and lecture halls.

Damien Hilloulin

Damien Hilloulin is a Principal Member of Technical Staff at Oracle Labs Zurich, where he focuses his work on Graph Machine Learning and Recommender Systems projects.

Mario Viviani

Mario Viviani is Manager of Developer Relations for Omniverse at NVIDIA, based in London, UK. His team focuses on helping developers and partners get familiar and onboard on NVIDIA Omniverse. Passionate technologist and hands on-developer, he’s ex-Amazon, where he led the global Apps and Games Tech Evangelism team; previously was co-founder of startups and led his own consulting company in mobile apps development. International speaker with 200+ past talks, he is always projected into the future and into what is the next “big thing”!

João Pedro Martins

João Pedro Martins leads the AI Technical Strategy team for EMEA, part of Microsoft’s Worldwide Success organization, a team with deep technical skills in AI/ML focused on helping our customers bring their AI workloads to life in Azure.

Andreas Kopp

Harmke Alkemade

Harmke Alkemade supports customers in various industries with Data Science and AI use cases that leverage the Azure services, in the role of Specialized AI Cloud Solution Architect in a global team. Previously she worked as a Cloud Solution Architect Data & AI in the Dutch subsidiary of Microsoft. Before joining Microsoft, Harmke followed a graduate program in Artificial Intelligence and worked on various data science and programming projects.

Cyrus Vahid

Ali Hussein

Ali Hussein is an AI researcher at Ronin Institute. He works in low-resource NLP and AutoML/NAS

Ibrahim Yusuf

Ibrahim is an AI Research Engineer at InstaDeep. He is passionate about utilizing AI for the betterment of humanity and has expertise in geo-spatial machine learning, computer vision and computational biology. Ibrahim’s portfolio showcases projects ranging from enhancing food security and disaster response to advancing immunology research and development.research and development.

Ibrahim Yusuf

Ibrahim is an AI Research Engineer at InstaDeep. He is passionate about utilizing AI for the betterment of humanity and has expertise in geo-spatial machine learning, computer vision and computational biology. Ibrahim’s portfolio showcases projects ranging from enhancing food security and disaster response to advancing immunology research and development.research and development.

Ejiro Onose

I am a machine learning researcher and technical writer.

Amal Tarifa

Amal Tarifa from Tunisia, gets her engineering degree from the National School of Computer Sciences (ENSI) university. In the field of computer sciences, Amal’s Ph.D. thesis (2021) is in the area of Natural Language Processing (NLP), combined with cognitive agents. Amal is also an active researcher at ESPRIT-TECH. She has joined the academic staff of ESPRIT since 2018. She is a scientific member of various known journals and conferences. Besides, she is an NVIDIA certified ambassador

Anant Nawalgaria

Alexander Erfurt

Aminat Amusa

Colleen M. Farrelly

Colleen M. Farrelly is a lead data scientist whose industry work spans TDA, NLP, time series, and GIS applications. She’s passionate about data science for social good. She and Dr. Gaba are the authors of The Shape of Data (No Starch Press, 2023).

Yae Gaba

Dr. Yae Gaba is a postdoctoral researcher at Quantum Leap Africa who specializes on geometry and TDA applications. He is putting together a 2023 workshop on TDA to solve practical problems.

Rockefeller

Rockefeller is a PhD student at University of Stellenbosch and sought-after AI evangelist. His research focuses on deep learning applications and dynamic systems.

Mohamed Kafsi

Co-organizer of AMLD Africa. PhD in Machine Learning

Tawfik Jelassi

Dr. Tawfik Jelassi was appointed UNESCO Assistant Director-General for Communication and Information on 1st July 2021. In this position, he is responsible for the Organization’s programmes on building inclusive knowledge societies, leading digital transformation, strategizing the role of ICT in education, and fostering freedom of expression.
Dr. Jelassi holds a Ph.D. doctorate in information systems from New York University (USA) and postgraduate diplomas from the University of Paris Dauphine (France).
Dr. Jelassi has extensive experience in higher education, scientific research, and information & communication technologies. He held academic, corporate and government leadership positions in Europe, the USA, and Tunisia.
Among others, he was Programme Director and Professor of Strategy and Technology Management at IMD Business School in Lausanne (2015 – June 2021). Prior to that, he served as Minister of Higher education, Scientific Research and Information & Communication Technologies in the democratic transition government of Tunisia (2014 – 2015). Prior appointments included being Chairman of the Board of Directors of Ooredoo Telecom in Tunisia, Dean at Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées (Paris), and Professor & Chairman of the Technology Management Department at INSEAD (Fontainebleau).

Aisha Walcott-Bryant

Aisha is a Senior Technical Staff Member and manager at IBM Research Africa – Nairobi, Kenya. She leads a team of phenomenal, brilliant researchers and engineers that use AI, Cloud, and other technologies to advance the state-of-the art in the Future of Health and Climate. Aisha has a strong interest in developing AI tools for Global Health (see her work on COVID-19 interventions, https://ibm.github.io/wntrac), and working across sectors to create innovative, sustainable AI solutions to transform emerging economies. She is also a program co-chair for ICRA’22, https://www.icra2022.org, and looking to engage the African community in AI, robotics, and automation.

Mustapha Hamdi

Associate Professor, INSAT Tunisia
AI expert UNESCO
Co-Founder of Deepth, startup working on Augmented Intelligence for Health Tech.
Coordinator: www.innovchallenge.com

Magali Cattin

Magali Cattin has a master’s degree in bioengineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Switzerland Lausanne (EPFL) and completed her master thesis at Imperial College London.
During her masters’, she has developed expertise in machine learning as well as regulatory and ethical aspects of data collection. After one year of experience in several areas such as the medtech industry at SurgiBox Inc. and research in refrigeration technologies for vaccine delivery at the EssentialTech Centre, Magali started her PhD at the LTS5 and the EssentialTech Centre, EPFL. Her PhD project focuses on the detection of cervical cancer using machine learning and involves a close collaboration with the Geneva Hospitals (HUG) and the University of Dschang in Cameroon.

Benji Meltzer

Hadia Samil

ML researcher , my research interest includes deep learning , Computer vision and NLP .  with hands-on experience of working with real-world data. Skilled in NLP , Computer vision , Python Programming Language, and deep learning. Looking forward to opportunities to work with data in the areas of  NLP and CV that requires a combination of my current knowledge and experience. My goal is to use my academic background to make a positive contribution to society.

Aisha Raheem

Founder of Farmz2U, an agritech enterprise based in Nigeria and serving Sub-Saharan African markets. Farmz2U’s solution was recognized as a promising practice by the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations, thus validating its social impact. Also, UK NGO ‘One Young World’ measured Farmz2U’s social return on investment as 49 versus an aggregate score of 19 which further indicates its impact.

Bernard Wright

16 years in emerging markets developing GIS, imagery analysis and AI/ML products and services tailored to the local context. I love tech delivered in a sustainable, scaleable and impactful package

Adam Abramson

Dr. Abramson has spent the past 12 years researching, working with and innovating for African smallholder farmers. He is currently building a digital platform for SHFs – Farmster – to accelerate market linkages and access to digital services and information using NLP to optimize the experience for offline users.
www.farmster.co

Catherine Nakalembe

Dr. Nakalembe is an Associate Research Professor at the University of Maryland. She is the NASA Harvest Africa Program Director, is a member of the NASA SERVIR Applied Sciences Team serving as the Agriculture and Food Security Thematic Lead. Catherine has broad research interests including applications of satellite remote sensing and machine learning to agriculture and food security, land use and land-use change mapping, water resources, and climate change, and supports several capacity-building in the use of remote sensing for agriculture monitoring and research.

She is a 2020 Africa Food Prize Laureate for her dedication to improving the lives of smallholder farmers by using satellite technology to harness data to guide agricultural decision-making. Her efforts have also promoted the formulation of policies and programs that are directly impacting farmers against the impacts of food failure. Dr. Nakalembe was a 2020 UMD Research Excellence Honoree and in 2019 was a recipient of the Inaugural GEO Individual Excellence Award. She was featured in the 2020 Women and GIS, Volume 2: Stars of Spatial Science ESRI Press book. Her work led to the development and establishment of food security and crop monitoring bulletins that integrate satellite data including the Tanzania National Food Security Bulletin, the Uganda National Integrated Early Warning Bulletin, Kenya, Rwanda Crop Monitor reports, and the Eastern Africa Crop Monitor as well as designing the trigger mechanism of the disaster risk financing program in Uganda that has supported over 300,000 households in the Karamoja region as part of her Ph.D. research.

Alejandro Yousef Da Silva

Alejandro Yousef da Silva is working at Schneider Electric where he is in charge of the development of microgrid energy management algorithms. He graduated in 2014 in electric engineering and obtained a master of advanced studies in energy systems optimization from the Ecole des Mines ParisTech in 2017

Abigail Annkah

Abigail Annkah is a research engineer at Google. Prior to doing full-time, she was an AI resident. She holds a masters in machine intelligence from the AIMS African Masters in Machine Intelligence program, Rwanda. She is interested in computer vision and optimization based research.

Ihsane Gryech

Ihsane Gryech is a Ph.D. Candidate in Data Science at the International University of Rabat (UIR) as well as ENSIAS, Mohammed V University in Rabat.
She Obtained a bachelor’s degree at Mohammed V University, Rabat, in mathematics and informatics, then got a master’s degree in Big Data from the International University of Rabat.
In 2017, she joined the TICLab laboratory as a trainee where she worked on web content by leveraging users intuition to predict items popularity in Social Networks, Sentiment analysis using Social Media, and Air Quality Prediction.
In 2018, with a special interest to the environment, she started her PhD and joined the MoreAir project.
Ihsane is a Google Africa PhD Fellow. She also won the local Falling walls competition and was the only representative of Morocco at the Falling walls Conference in 2018 in Berlin, Germany.

Mohamed Makni

Mohamed Makni is a civil engineer from EPFL with a background in transport & mobility. He is also the CEO & Co-founder of DeepFlows. They help city planners and governments reduce the time, the cost and the complexity to access granular and accurate traffic data using machine learning. They work towards creating the next generation of traffic management systems to cope with rising urbanisation rates. Their premise is to cut (travel times & emissions) and make cities (liveable & sustainable) for future generations.

Galina Alova

Galina is based at the University of Oxford’s Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment. Her work focuses on quantifying barriers to the global electricity sector’s transition to renewable energy and away from fossil fuels. In her work, she applies machine-learning-based techniques to uncover novel insights form large complex asset-level datasets, to inform future energy infrastructure investment decisions. Two of her recent studies were published in Nature Energy, including one on predicting Africa’s future capacity mix. This work was covered by over 100 news outlets and radio programmes, including BBC, The Guardian, Bloomberg, The New York Times and TIME.

Previously at the OECD, an international organisation in Paris, Galina led projects for the public and private sector on the extractive sector’s decarbonisation, green development finance and natural capital management. Galina’s experience also includes the role of an economic adviser to the Minister of Industrialisation and Trade in Namibia. She started her career as an economist in the UK and Scottish Governments.

Galina holds an MPhil in spatial economics and real estate finance from the University of Cambridge and MA in economics from the University of Glasgow.

Engineer Bainomugisha

Engineer Bainomugisha is an Associate Professor and Chair, Computer Science at Makerere University, Uganda. Through his research work, Engineer is on a mission to harness the transformative power of computational technology and intelligence to tackle complex society challenges for the benefit of humanity. He has pioneered and led several social impact initiatives including, AirQo (https://www.airqo.africa), a Google AI Impact Challenge winner initiative that leverages AI, IoT and Cloud technologies for environmental air pollution monitoring, modelling and analysis in African cities to foster resilience and healthy urban communities. He is also passionate about contributing to quality Computer Science education in Africa that is of sufficient breadth and depth, practical and fast enough. He is a Co-Founder of Sunbird AI (https://sunbird.ai), a not for profit initiative that develops and deploys practical AI systems for social impact.

Stefano Ermon

Stefano Ermon is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science in the CS Department at Stanford University, where he is affiliated with the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and a fellow of the Woods Institute for the Environment. His research is centered on techniques for probabilistic modeling of data and is motivated by applications in the emerging field of computational sustainability. He has won several awards, including four Best Paper Awards (AAAI, UAI and CP), a NSF Career Award, ONR and AFOSR Young Investigator Awards, a Sony Faculty Innovation Award, a Hellman Faculty Fellowship, Microsoft Research Fellowship, Sloan Fellowship, and the IJCAI Computers and Thought Award. Stefano earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science at Cornell University in 2015.

Moustapha Cisse

Thierno Ibrahima Diop

Thierno Ibrahima DIOP is Lead Data Scientist and passionate about NLP and everything that revolves around machine learning. He has been mentoring Data Scientist students and apprentices for 2 years. Before getting into Data Science, he did Freelance work in web and mobile application development. He is co-founder of GalsenAI, an artificial intelligence community in Senegal, Coursera instructor on data science, Google developer expert in machine learning, Machine Learning coursera instructor, ZINDI ambassador in Senegal and co-organizer of GDG Dakar.

Hatem Haddad

Hatem Haddad is Co-Founder and CTO atiCompass. He received a doctorate (2002) in Computer Science and Information Systems from University Grenoble Alpes, France. He was Postdoctoral Fellow at VTT Technical Research Center of Finland and at Norwegian University of Science and Technology. He was a visiting researcher at Kent Ridge Digital Labs (KRDL), Singapore. His current research interests include Information Retrieval, Natural Languages Processing, Machine Learning and Deep Learning. He is a PC member or Chair in different conferences and serves as a reviewer for relevant journals in the area.

Karim Beguir

Karim Beguir is the CEO and Co-Founder of InstaDeep, twice nominated in the global AI100 list. Karim helps companies come to grips with the latest AI breakthroughs and deploy them to improve efficiency and ROI. As a graduate of France’s Ecole Polytechnique and former Program Fellow at New York University’s Courant Institute, he has a passion for teaching and using applied mathematics. He’s also a Google developer expert, a mentor at Google for Startups Accelerator and a steering committee member of Deep Learning Indaba. Karim is on a mission to democratize AI and make it accessible to a wide audience.

Carolina Odman

Dr. Ödman is Associate Professor at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa and Associate Director, Development and Outreach at the Inter-University Institute for Data Intensive Astronomy (IDIA). Trained in physics at EPFL in Switzerland, she holds a PhD in cosmology from Cambridge University, UK where she worked on Bayesian approaches to cosmological parameter estimation. She has done research in several fields of physics and developed educational programmes based on science from early childhood to postgraduate training. She has also worked in a financial technology startup. She now focuses on researching and bringing a development agenda to science. Her work has earned her numerous awards nationally and internationally. In 2018 she was awarded a Special prize by the International Astronomical Union for her work in Education Development and Outreach. Most recently, she was part of the #InspiringFifty 2020 South Africa cohort.

Houcemeddine Turki

Born on May 24, 1994 in Sfax, Tunisia, Houcemeddine Turki is an open science advocate and a long-term contributor to Wikimedia Projects including Wikipedia and Wikidata. He is currently a board member of Wikimedia Tunisia User Group and of Wikimedia and Libraries User Group. He is also a member of Wiki Indaba Steering Committee, the coordination body for African Wikimedia Movement. As well, Houcemeddine Turki is a Research Assistant at the Data Engineering and Semantics Research Unit, University of Sfax, Tunisia. He is working on various fields including Data Science, Biomedical Informatics, Semantic Web and Scientometrics. Moreover, Houcemeddine Turki is a medical student at the University of Sfax, Tunisia.

Celina Lee

Celina Lee is a co-founder and the CEO of Zindi (www.zindi.africa), the first data science competition platform of its kind in Africa. Celina has a passion for unleashing the power of data for social good. Celina has a proven track record of thought leadership in the intersect between data and development and has played central roles in launching global initiatives including the Alliance for Financial Inclusion (www.afi-global.org), insight2impact (www.i2ifacility.org), and now Zindi (www.zindi.africa). Celina’s work has expansively bridged across the private and public sectors and across various development areas including financial inclusion, micro and small enterprise development, gender, climate change, and public health. She has lived and worked in countries throughout Asia, Latin America, and Sub-Saharan Africa. Celina holds a Bachelor’s of Science in Applied Mathematics with a minor in Computer Science and a Master’s of International Affairs both from Columbia University.

Siobhan Mackenzie Hall

Siobhan Hall is an incoming DPhil student at the University of Oxford, where she’ll be pursuing a project centred around Deep Learning and brain-computer interfaces at the Nuffield Department of Surgical Sciences.

Siobhan completed her Masters in 2019 at Stellenbosch University’s Biomedical Engineering Research Group. She has most recently completed a computational neuroscience research internship at the University of Amsterdam, and contributed to an early stage computer-vision start up (Mamba Insights).

Rachid Guerraoui

Rachid Guerraoui is a professor in computer science at EPFL where he leads the Laboratory of Distributed Computing. He worked in the past with Ecole des Mines de Paris, CEA Saclay, HP Labs in Palo Alto and MIT. He has been elected ACM fellow and professor of the College de France. He was awarded a Senior ERC Grant and a Google Focused Award.

Chance Coughenour

Chance is a Program Manager at Google Arts & Culture where he coordinates heritage preservation efforts through international partnerships which employ innovative technology for 3D documentation, education, and public dissemination. Recent partnerships include the British Museum, UNESCO, CyArk, World Monuments Fund, Pergamon Museum, Brazil’s National Museum, Rhizome and ML Experiments Fabricius and Woolaroo.

Elyes Manai

Elyes Manai is a Machine Learning Consultant, Educator and Mentor. He helps companies tap into the power of data science to reduce costs and increase revenue as well as build relationships with relevant target audiences through educational content and community building.
He graduated from a Masters of Research in Artificial Intelligence and is passionate about making Machine Learning more robust, efficient, and explainable.
Elyes is heavily invested in impactful work, mainly through education and community building.
He regularly hosts talks and workshops, creates Youtube content, contributes to open source projects and mentors startups.
Specifically, he used to lead the Facebook Developer Circles Tunisia community, co-founded PyData Tunisia & Data Co-Lab and mentored startups at the Google For Startups Accelerator.
His work has been recognised by Google and he’s now the youngest Google Developer Expert in Machine Learning in the MENA region.

Elyes has made it his mission to support others and create opportunities though education and mentoring.

Amit Joshi

Walid Daou

Passionate about how Machine Learning and AI can have an impact on all businesses, Walid Daou currently runs Advanced Analytics initiatives at OCP.
He started his career in Financial Markets, as a Quantitative Trader in London, in Barclays Capital and in a Hedge Fund, Capula.
He then founded and run an Edtech company in France and Morocco for six years, that became the leader in the market of preparation of competitive exams, in Morocco.
Machine Learning enthusiast, he teaches the “”AI for Executive”” course at EDHEC.
Walid Daou is a Graduate from Ecole Polytechnique and Ecole des Mines de Paris, in Applied Mathematics.

Anitha Vijayakumar

Anitha Vijayakumar is a Technical Project Manager on the TensorFlow team. She got her engineering degree from India and a Masters in Computer Engineering from UCLA. She has been working at Google for more than 9 years and is most recently leading program management for the TensorFlow Ecosystem.

Wei Xiao

Wei Xiao is working on expanding Nvidia’s AI footprint in emerging markets and emerging technologies. Wei has a breadth of expertise in Applied AI, IoT and Mobile. Prior to Nvidia, Wei was leading the AI ecosystem engineering and evangelism team at Arm, driving the success of Arm ML hardware and software penetration through technical partnerships and community engagements. Before that, she spent 7 years at Samsung in the IoT and mobile developer relations teams, covering different roles from an engineer, evangelist to ecosystem engineering management. Wei is enthusiastic about cultivating developer relationships for product growth and innovation, as well as bringing a robust user experience. In her spare time, Wei teaches AIoT course in the Graduate School of Computer Science at Santa Clara University in Silicon Valley.

Kamal Bhattacharya

Kamal Bhattacharya is a Professor for Computer Science at IU International University in Berlin and Co-Founder Advancity.com. Kamal held multiple research and management roles around the globe. He served as a VP & Director at IBM Research, Chief Innovation Officer at Safaricom, Senior Lecturer at MIT Sloan, commissioner of Pathways for Prosperity, and several other roles focusing on the use of technology in International Development. He holds a PhD in Theoretical Physics from Göttingen University in Germany, has published 50+ papers in international scientific journals and conferences, and holds 20+ patents

Kidist Amde Mekonnen

My name is Kidist Amde Mekonnen. My background is in computer science. I got my Bachelor’s degree in 2017 from the University Of Gondar, Ethiopia. I got my master’s, African Masters in Machine Intelligence (AMMI) program from Facebook and Google in 2020 from the African Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Rwanda. I am a current scholar at the University of Trento, Italy, where I am pursuing a Master’s in Data Science.
I am a Mentor at MeetMentors. I am a cofounder and core member of the women in AI Ethiopia team. I am working for a mentorship program in collaboration with the women in AI and robotics Germany team.

I have worked as an assistant lecturer at the University of Gondar.
I have worked as a teaching Assistant at AddisCoders.

Moritz Besser

During the whole of his studies of experimental physics at the TU Dresden Moritz was working at the Max Planck Institute (CPfS) in the extreme conditions lab. Besides giving him a profound technical understanding it made him an expert in LabVIEW and the field of solid state research. His fascination for Machine Learning and a genuine ability to explain complex matters makes him the perfect bridge between the industry and our expert technicians.

Wael Ouarda

Wael Ouarda is an assistant professor of computer science at the Digital Center of Research of Sfax. He received his Ph.D. degree in computer science from the National School of Engineering of Sfax in 2017 for his dissertation on “”Towards a Novel Biometric System of Smart Riding Club.”” He is an active member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) since 2012.
Wael Ouarda is interested in intelligent systems that operate in large and known domains like Natural Language Processing (NLP), Computer Vision, and Business Intelligence. Most of his research centers around techniques for decision-making. He believes that finding good solutions to these problems requires approaches that cut across many different fields and, consequently, his research draws on areas such as artificial intelligence, decision theory, and operations research. Applications of his research focus on Smart City: Smart Life & Smart Health & Industry 4.0 & Smart Security & Smart Transportation.
Wael Ouarda has several conference papers and journals and published more than 40 papers in various areas of artificial intelligence. He was an invited speaker in several Workshops on Artificial Intelligence since 2017.

Manal Jalloul

Dr. Manal Jalloul is NVIDIA Deep Learning Institute’s certified instructor and University ambassador. She is also the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of AI-Lab, which is the certified delivery partner of NVIDIA DLI in EMEA. AI Lab is an Artificial Intelligence consultancy, training, and solution development company. Dr. Jalloul is Lebanon’s country advisor in the Global Advisory Board of the International Group of Artificial Intelligence. Dr. Jalloul is also a lecturer and researcher at the American University of Beirut. Her research interests lie in the fields of digital image and video processing, 3D printing, parallel computing, and artificial intelligence. She has several peer-reviewed publications in international journals and conferences.

Mouafek Ayadi

Mouafek Ayadi is an IT Consultant & Activist. Holding a Master’s degree in Business Intelligence Engineering, he is currently working as an Innovation Data Scientist at ODDO BHF and serving as a Mentor in Google Africa Developer Scholarship Program as well as having previously been a AWS Educate Ambassador.

His certifications include:
Certified in Microsoft: Azure Data Scientist Associate
Certified in Consulting from Dubai Rochester Institute of Technology
An Entrepreneurship background in the USA, Qatar, Tunisia, Spain
Proof of training more than 2000 individuals in New Technologies.

Jonathan Whitaker

Jonathan is a Data Science consultant and educator based in Zimbabwe. His work is varied, ranging from ‘traditional’ data science to deep learning and generative art. You can find some of his personal research on http://www.datasciencecastnet.home.blog/

Walid Krichene

Walid Krichene works at Google Research on large-scale optimization and recommendation. He received his Ph.D. in EECS in 2016 from U.C. Berkeley where he was advised by Alex Bayen and Peter Bartlett, a M.A. in Mathematics from UC Berkeley, and a M.S. in Engineering and Applied Math from the Ecole des Mines Paristech. He received a best paper award at KDD 2020, the Leon Chua Award and two outstanding instructor awards from U.C. Berkeley. His research interests include convex optimization, stochastic approximation, and recommender systems.

Khalil Mrini

Khalil Mrini is a PhD Candidate at the University of California San Diego (UCSD), and works on applying Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning to medical question answering. Globally, his work aims to democratize advances in NLP so that marginalized people can benefit from human language technology. His work is supported by a grant from the US National Institutes of Health, and he has won an Amazon Research Award, as well as Adobe Research Gifts. He has previously interned at Adobe Research and Amazon Alexa, is currently interning at Facebook AI, and will be interning at Google Brain. He is also passionate about diversity and inclusion, and has co-founded the “North Africans in NLP” affinity group.

Abdelhak Mahmoudi

Abdelhak is Associate Professor of Computer Science at Mohammed V University (Rabat, Morocco) and permanent Researcher at L’IMIARF Laboratory. His main research involves ML/DL in Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing applied to Healthcare. In the past, in 2010, Abdelhak worked as a Machine Learning Research Engineer at Institut de Neurosciences de la Timone (INT) (Marseille, France) under the Neuromed project in the 7th European Framework. In 2014, he joined, as a Postdoc ML Researcher, the Partnerships for Enhanced Engagement in Research (PEER) project administered by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS)

Anass Sedrati

Anass Sedrati is the vice president of Wikimedia Morocco, the official Wikimedia affiliate in Morocco. He is one of the founders of the group, and organized several Wikipedia-related event, both locally and internationally. Anass is among the team that created Wikipedia Darija and Wikipedia Tachelhit.
Anass is working as a management and strategy consultant, and pursues a PhD in IoT security and governance.

Imane Khaouja

IMANE KHAOUJA received an engineering degree in computer science with a major in business intelligence from ENSIAS, in Rabat, Morocco, in
2014. She is currently pursuing a Ph.D. degree in the Mohammed v University, in Rabat, Morocco, with a co-direction with the International University
of Rabat. She was a recipient of the Google Ph.D. Fellowship in 2018 Her research interests include NLP and information extraction.