The global AI landscape has been drastically changed by the disruption caused by ChatGPT. This new development has the potential for advancing AI in Africa and changing the overall economic outlook of the continent. However, countries in Africa who hope to adopt this will have to innovate solutions to overcome issues involving limited availability and/or massive costs associated with the use of different large language models (LLMs) among others.    

The application of AI in the Finance sector has seen much growth over the years prompting significant investments in these areas. These research efforts have been predominantly led by the developed world whose solutions might not fit well given the complexity in African nations.  The AIA initiative is backed by a group of AI researchers whose focus is to extend these AI capabilities to the Finance sector and foster collaboration in Africa. 

The main theme of the 2023 workshop will focus on Generative AI (LLM) opportunities with regards to the advancement of AI in Africa. Breakout sessions will be led by Experts to discuss various aspects with regards to Generative AI Applications. Panel discussion will focus on the good, the bad and the ugly concerning the adoption of Generative AI in Africa

Topics: 

The topics of interest will include but are not limited to:

• Demystifying the myths around LLMs

• Optimizing LLM output 

• Data extraction techniques for documents including low-resourced languages

• Natural Language Processing (NLP) for African languages.

• AI solutions focused on the banking sector covering areas such as fair lending, fraud detection, financial inclusion, and tools to establish creditworthiness with limited data.

• New benchmark datasets to facilitate AI Research in Africa.

• Synthetic Data techniques for enhancing data availability

• AI methods for secured data storage

• Design pipelines for multiple data silos

This is the fourth workshop on AI in Africa for Sustainable Economic Development. Previous workshops featured diverse speakers and panelists mainly from the African continent. These workshops can be accessed through the links below:

• AI in Africa Workshop 2022

• AI in Africa Workshop 2021

• AI in Africa Workshop 2020

Keynote Speakers