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 2024 workshop will focus on Generative AI (LLM) opportunities towards providing developmental solutions, with particular emphasis on the advancement of AI with regards to LLMS in Africa. Breakout sessions will be led by Experts to discuss LLMs and their applications in the African context. Panel discussion will explore the ethics, methods, education and skills of adopting state-of-the-art LLM methods to enhance AI capabilites in Africa.
Topics:
The topics of interest will include but are not limited to:
Applied AI methods for addressing social, economic, educational, and environmental challenges faced in Africa.
AI methods to assist in poverty reduction and increasing foreign investments in Africa.
Data extraction techniques for documents including low-resourced languages
Natural Language Processing (NLP) research 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 help researchers applying AI methods for 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: