2019 Artificial Intelligence Bootcamp

Welcome to the 2019 bootcamp. This year, we will run in multiple streaming sessions, culminating in the Finals of the InterCampus Machine Learning competition and the intermediate stream on Deep Learning concepts.

It is a six-day residential, all-expenses-paid Artificial Intelligence Bootcamp and Hackathon on emerging trends in machine learning and deep learning and will run between 19 and 23 November 2019. The intent of the bootcamp and hackathon is to build world-class capacity in advanced data analytics, upskill financial inclusion data analysts and researchers in emerging best practices, and to support the development of contextually relevant algorithm and tech innovation.

The bootcamp will include face-to-face teaching, virtual online classes, and a hands-on hackathon using the Zindi.com platform. Distinguished data scientists from leading institutions including the Google AI Lab, Stanford AI Research, GitHub and Bankable Frontiers Associates will facilitate the sessions. An ongoing pan-Nigeria selection competition will select the 150 best-performing students/researchers/practitioners that will be accepted into this free bootcamp. The bootcamp will also serve as the final test of the Inter-Campus Machine Learning Competition, sponsored by BlueChip Technologies. Over 10,000 students from 90 universities and polytechnics participated in the preliminary phase. The bootcamp will also include a very competitive hackathon using Nigeria-centric data to explore, extrapolate and explain emerging possibilities in algorithms.

The bootcamp is driven by a broader strategic intent to accelerate Nigeria’s development through a solution-oriented application of machine learning in solving social/business problems and to galvanize data science knowledge revolution for employability, technology innovation and sustainable socio-economic development.

The bootcamp learning sessions will be enriched by leading experts from different parts of the world, including Dr. Dumebi Okwechime, Chief Decision Scientist, RenMoney; Kris Sankaran, PhD, MILA Canada; Prof. Thomas G. Dietterich,Emeritus Professor of Computer Science, USA; Prof Anima Anandkumar, Professor of Computing, CalTech; Ike Okonkwo, Data Scientist Zynga Games, California; Kathleen Siminyu, Head of Data Science, Africa’s Talking; Dr. Stephen G. Odaibo, CEO, RetinaAI, USA; Samuel Edet, Joint PhD, Student IMT, Italy and Ku Leuven, Belgium; Wale Akinfaderin, PhD, Senior Data Scientist, Duke Energy; Emmanuel Doro, PhD, Principal Data Scientist, Jet.com, USA; Uzo Mkparu, Group Head, CRM, Customer Analytics & Insights FCMB; Pascal Bernard, Head of Data Science, OneFi; Elaine Nsoesie, PhD, Assistant Professor, Botson University; Prof. Kunle Oluktun, Professor of EE and CS at Stanford University; Dr. Nnana Orieke, Cloud Solution Architect, Data and AI, Microsoft; Nicholas Litombe, PhD, Data Scientist, Physicist; Robert John, Data Science Officer, EnterFive; Dr. Sakinat Folorunsho, Lecturer, Computer Science, OOU; Olubayo Adekanmi, Convener, Data Science Nigeria, Chief Transformation Officer, MTN Nigeria.

Microsoft, BlueChip Technologies, Terragon Group, AXA Mansard, FCMB, InstaDeep AI, ProShare Nigeria, The Guardian, Guardian TV, OneFi, KPMG and Zindi South Africa are the sponsors and partners of the bootcamp and summit.

Participation in the 6 days Artificial Intelligence Bootcamp is based on a pre-qualification competition on “Staff Promotion Algorithm” on Kaggle, the global Machine Learning competition platform. click here.

 


Schedule

 

Tuesday 19 November 2019: Welcome Session

TIME FOCUS/SPEAKERS TOPICS
3:00 – 4:00 Welcome Refreshment, Registration
4:00 – 5:30 Welcome session, Camp Rules and Welcome
Prof Thomas Dietterich,Masterclass by BigML’s
Chief Scientist & Emeritus Professor of Computer
Science at Oregon State University.
Robust Artificial Intelligence and
Trustworthy Machine Learning
5:30 – 6:00 Welcome Quiz and wins
6:00 – 7:00 Terragon Group Masterclass on AI emerging trends
Babatunde Adeniran & Esemeje Omole
Data Scientists, Terragon Group, Nigeria
Masterclass on Emerging Trends in Machine Learning/Artificial Intelligence in the business space
7:00 – 8:00

Dinner and check-in into rooms

Wednesday 20 November 2019: Tools, Concepts and Frameworks

TIME FOCUS/SPEAKERS TOPIC
8:00 – 8:30 Breakfast
8:30 – 10:00 Alina Game, GRID3 Nigeria Data Analyst
Edith Darin, GRID3 Nigeria Researcher
Michael Harper, GRID3 Nigeria Data Analyst
Wole Ademola Adewole, GRID3 Nigeria GIS consultant
Sophie Delaporte, GRID3 Nigeria Communications Manager
Introduction to Geospatial Data Analytics with GRID3

10:00 – 11:30 PARALLEL SESSION – different topics in different classes based on participants’ level and interest

Basic Tool Mastery: Quick run through, short cuts and fast-track expert knowledge

Olawale Wahab, Data Science Engineer Tensorflow
Blessing Oladeji, CEO, Octave Analytics

SQL

Wuraola Oyewusi, Research Lead, Data Science Jupyter/Python
Nigeria
Jupyter/Python

11:30 – 1:30 PARALLEL SESSION – different topics in different classes based on participants’ level and interest
Conceptual Exploration of Maths for Machine and Deep Learning
Maths and Concepts in Machine Learning:
Samuel Edet, Doctoral Researcher , Economics,
Networks and Business Analytics at IMT School
for Advanced Studies, Italy
ML – Defining a Model Cost /
Loss / Error Function,
Mathematical Optimization,
Gradient Descent, Stochastic
Gradient Descent etc.
Maths and Concepts in Deep Learning:
Dr Stephen Odaibo, CEO/Founder Retina-AI,
Houston, USA
DL: Introduction to Deep
Learning, Core Maths concepts,
Common Activation Functions ,
Deep Neural Network, Forward
and Back-Propagation etc.

2:00 – 5:00 PARALLEL SESSION – different topics in different classes based on participants’ level and interest
Hands-on Machine Learning and Deep Learning via mini-projects
Samuel Edet, Doctoral Researcher , Economics,
Networks and Business Analytics at IMT School
for Advanced Studies, Italy & band Ku Leuven,
Belgium
Key Concepts in Machine
Learning
Dr Stephen Odaibo, CEO/Founder Retina-AI,
Houston, USA
Key Concepts in Deep Learning
5:00 – 6:00 Women in AI Session
Dr Sakinat Folorunso, Computer Science Lecturer/Researcher, OOU & Lead for WIDS
6:00 – 7:00 Daily Book Prize wins

Industry Engagement Session
Uzo Mkparu HCIB, Assistant Vice President/Group Head, CRM, Customer Analytics & Insights, First City Monument Bank Limited

What industries are looking for in a Data Scientist
7:00 – 8:00 Dinner
8:00 – 9:00 Masterclass on Artificial Intelligence Engineering
Prof Kunle Olukotun,Professor of Electrical
Engineering and Computer Science at Stanford
University and Director of the Pervasive
Parallelism Laboratory, USA. Founder of
Mines.io
Future Computer Systems for
Software 2.0

Thursday 21 November 2019 : Theoretical Depth and Exploration

TIME FOCUS/SPEAKERS TOPIC
8:00 – 8:30 Breakfast
8:30 – 9:30 Sabrina Smai,
Software Engineer – Microsoft, Canada
Problem-solving and Solution Approach in Artificial Intelligence
9:30 – 11:00 PARALLEL SESSION – different topics in different classes based on participants’ level and interest
Practical AI in use
Elaine Nsoesie PhD, Assistant Professor at
Boston University School of Public Health/
Institute for Health metrics and Evaluation,
Boston, USA
Artificial Intelligence for Health –
use for non-traditional data for
health risk prediction
Pascal G. Bernard, Head of Data Science, CARBON/ One Finance & Investment Ltd., London

Jacobo Varela, Data Scientist, CARBON/ One Finance & Investment Ltd., London

Artificial Intelligence for Financial Inclusion

9:00-10:00 Alternative Data and Risk Prediction

10:00-11:00 Graph Databases: A key to addressing Financial Services challenges.

Margaryta Ostapchuk,Technical Evangelist, Commercial Software Engineering team, Microsoft Canada Cognitive Solutions Development in Microsoft Azure
11:00 – 4:00 PARALLEL SESSION – different topics in different classes based on participants’ level and interest
PARALLEL SESSIONS ON AI THEORIES IN PRACTICE
(1) Anomaly Detection with BigML – theory and
application
Prof Thomas Dietterich and Guillem Vidal
(2) Computer Vision CNN: Convolutional Neural
Networks
Dr Emmanuel Doro, Director, Data Science at
Walmart, USA
(3)Natural Language Processing:
Kathleen Siminyu, AI for Development Network,
Kenya & Ayodele Olabiyi, Product Researcher
and NLP Project Lead, Data Science Nigeria & Wuraola Oyewusi, Research/Innovation Lead, Data Science Nigeria
4:00 – 5:30 PARALLEL SESSION – different topics in different classes based on participants’ level and interest
AI PhD Research or Running an AI-first start-up
Kris Sankaran ,PhD, postdoc at MILA, Montreal, Canada
&
Elaine Nsoesie PhD, Assistant Professor at Boston University School of Public Health/ Institute for Health metrics and Evaluation
Writing scientific Research paper and PhD readiness
Osayi Igharo, Managing partner, Ripple VC, USA

Wale Akanbi, Co-Founder & CTO – Aella Credit, Nigeria

Pitching ideas & running an AI Start-up

6:00 – 7:00 Masterclass with Dr Stephen Odaibo, CEO/Founder Retina-AI, Houston, USA Generative Adversarial Network – Key concepts
Meet-Up on the Nigeria Natural Language agenda setting as part of Masakhane.io

Kathleen Siminyu, AI for Development Network,
Kenya & Ayodele Olabiyi, Product Researcher
and NLP Project Lead, Data Science Nigeria & Wuraola Oyewusi, Research/Innovation Lead, Data Science Nigeria

Agenda-setting for Nigeria NLP workstream
7:00 – 8:00 Dinner
8:00 – 9:00 Masterclass on Artificial Intelligence At Scale
Anima Anandkumar, Professor of Computing at
California Institute of Technology & Director of
Machine Learning research at NVIDIA
Trinity of AI (Data, Cloud,
Algorithm) – imperatives of AI at
scale

Friday 22 November 2019 : Real-world Application Enablers and Use cases

TIME FOCUS/SPEAKERS TOPIC
7:30 – 8:00 Breakfast
8:00 – 9:00 Microsoft Azure DevOps Best practice:
Dara Oladapo, Customer Success Manager, Microsoft4Afrika
9:00 – 10:00 Eric Sodomka PhD, Research Scientist, Facebook Research

Introduction to Mechanism Design
10:00 – 3:30 PARALLEL SESSION – different topics in different classes based on participants’ level and interest
Methodologies for real-world application
Eric Sodomka PhD, Research Scientist,
Facebook Research
Introduction to Mechanism Design
Geospatial Analytics for Nigeria
GRID3 team
GRID3 for GeoSpatial Analytics for
Nigeria
Machine Learning best practices for Digital Media and Programmatic Advertising Analytics Mohit Rawan Terragon Dial-in session Project-based immersion into Machine Learning best practices for Digital Media and Programmatic Advertising Analytics
4:00 – 5:30 Open House: Building a world-class
career in AI& Data Science
Dumebi Okwechime PhD, Chief
Decision Scientist – Renmoney, Lagos
Nicholas Litombe PhD, Senior Data
Scientist at Unacast, USA
Margaryta Ostapchuk, Technical Evangelist, Commercial Software Engineering team, Microsoft Canada
Sabrina Smai, Software Engineer – Microsoft, Canada
5:30 – 7:00 Introducing Malaria competition and dataset (24 hour Hackathon)
Prof Delmiro Fernandez-Reyes
Reader in Digital Health, University College London Hackathon break and work

Introduction to the Insurance Dataset for recruitment by Axa Mansard

Introduction to the Max.ng Challenge

7:00 – 8:00 Dinner
8:00 – 12:00 Hackathon Individual work session

Saturday 23 November 2019: Real-world Application Enablers and Use cases

TIME FOCUS/SPEAKERS TOPIC
8:00 – 8:30 Breakfast
8:30 – 9:30 Artificial Intelligence for Good AI Poster session
9:30 – 11:00 Statistical Best Practice Masterclass
Kris Sankaran PhD, postdoc at MILA,
Montreal, Canada

Nicholas Litombe PhD, Senior Data Scientist at Unacast, USA

11:00 – 1:00 Deep Learning with Microsoft Azure
Dr Nnanna Orieke, Cloud Solution
Architect Data and AI at Microsoft

Margaryta Ostapchuk, Technical Evangelist, Commercial Software Engineering team, Microsoft Canada

Sabrina Smai, Software Engineer – Microsoft, Canada

Dara Oladapo, Customer Success Manager, Microsoft4Afrika

1:00 – 4:00 Hackathon Focus
4:00 – 6:00 Recording of Intercampus AI competition
6:00 – 7:00 Award Night/ Dinner

Sunday 24th November 2019: Departure

AWARDS
Softcom Eyowo Daily Quiz Book Prize
Microsoft Best Student in Deep Learning application via the Malaria Hackathon – Use of Data to solve social problems
Bluechip Technologies – Best students in InterCampus Machine Learning competition
Terragon Mr. and Mrs Algorithm & Best School on the Leaderboard
Retina-AI Best Poster on Artificial Intelligence for Social Good
MainOne Best Female Data Scientist
Axa Mansard – 3 Best student in special insurance hackathon for internship
Xlytics Innovation Award for community – promotion of DSN and campus ambassadors, community leaders and volunteers
Carbon/OneFi Award for Industry Support and Promotion of DSN