Virtual Data Science Africa Kampala 2020

Virtual DSA event update

Thu, 11 Jun 2020 09:00:00 +0000

The DSA organization has been closely monitoring the situation with COVID-19 pandemic around the world, and especially Kampala. Guided by our desire to keep the participants out of harms way as much as possible, we are organizing a virtual replacement of the Kampala event starting on July 24th. We believe that the DSA community of both part and new participants can still benefit greatly from the virtual event. This event is also a small part of our response to the pandemic, i.e. equipping more people with the relevant data science skills needed to tackle the COVID challenge.

We are working hard to finalize a rich and diverse program and will share the details here. In the meantime, we ask that participants (including those who had applied for the original in-person summer school) to register online here. There will be no additional python tests, although we highly encourage participants to go through relevant introductory materials listed in http://www.datascienceafrica.org/dsa2020kampala/schedule/

We are also using this platform as a call for abstracts for the workshop part of the program. Abstracts should be 2-4 pages (optional longer papers are ok as well) and cover relevant topics including but not limited to:

Data Science for the Sustainable Development Goals
Health care
Agriculture
Wildlife conservation
Disaster response
Geo-spatial modeling
Telecommunications data modeling
Economic monitoring
New data science and machine learning methods
COVID related applications
Language modeling

The deadline for submission of abstracts is July 10th, 2020

For more info, contact us at dsakampala2020@gmail.com

COVID-19 Update

Thu, 07 May 2020 09:00:00 +0000

We have been closely monitoring the situation with COVID-19 pandemic around the world, and especially the developments at the intended DSA event site in Kampala. Even though the number of cases have so far been relatively small in Uganda (see https://www.health.go.ug/covid/), we have made a decision to no host an in-person event in June in Kampala. We did not take this decision lightly, and are guided by the safety of DSA participants and organizers as well as the communities we interact with. DSA at its core, is all about communities and right now, these communities are being tested by this unprecedented challenge in a way that makes even the short-term future very unpredictable.

What happens now? We are still planning to host a DSA event in Kampala towards the end of the year, with details still being worked out. In addition, we are also working on a plan to host an on-line only event in June as a near-term replacement for the June event. We are glad that so many participants have already applied to the summer school program, and are working on the next steps of how we can have everyone benefit maximally with the June online event and the later in-person event.

For more info, contact us at dsakampala2020@gmail.com

Call for Participation

Mon, 02 Dec 2019 09:00:00 +0000

The next iteration of Data Science Africa meetings will happen between June 22nd and 26th 2020 in Kampala, Uganda.

We are looking forward to your participation in the summer school, field work projects and the workshop.

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, Amazon, Swansea University Medical School, Facebook, Pulse Lab Kampala, the AI and Data Science (AIR) lab-Makerere University, ARM and Dedan Kimathi University of Technology (DeKUT).

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.

Some topics of interest include:

Data Science for the Sustainable Development Goals
Healthcare
Agriculture
Wildlife conservation
Disaster response
Geospatial modelling
Telecommunications data modelling
Economic monitoring

Additional info will be added here

Any questions? Email organizers at info@datascienceafrica.org