Ashesi hosted the 2019 Data Science Africa (DSA) workshop and summer school, welcoming over 100 participants over the course of the week to campus. 

Since 2015, the annual convening has provided a space for students, researchers, professionals and thought-leaders to engage on how data science can be leveraged in answering some of the biggest developmental questions in Africa. “In Africa, a number of questions in areas such as healthcare, agriculture and disaster response would benefit greatly if domain experts were exposed to data science techniques and tools,” shared Charles Isah Saidu, Program Chair for DSA. “It’s important that we do good end-to-end data science; going to the field, collecting data using various means and technologies, and then applying machine learning techniques to build good problem-solving models. The DSA exists to help provide insights into some of these methods.”

Held at Ashesi from October 21st to the 25th, the convening focused on a range of introductory to advanced lectures and hands-on sessions in data science and machine learning. Over the period, participants worked with datasets and cutting edge machine learning techniques to derive inference. The sessions were led by researchers and practitioners from Sheffield University, Amazon, Swansea University Medical School, Facebook, Pulse Lab Kampala, the AI and Data Science (AIR) lab ay Makerere University, ARM and Dedan Kimathi University of Technology (DeKUT).
“We usually don’t place significant value on data in this part of the world,” shared David Sampah, Computer Science faculty at Ashesi. “What we don’t realise is that data can help generate information which will be paramount for decision making and progress. We must use a systematic approach to problem-solving, where feedback from the system can be used as input for analytics and refinement. Being part of this workshop was a great eye-opener to some of the talent and resources we can harness within the continent.”