Taye Girma (PhD) is the Deputy Director General at Ethiopian Artificial Intelligence Institute. He is also an Assistant Professor at the Addis Ababa Science and Technology University and has a demonstrated history of working in the information technology, services industry and with a lot of publications in the area of machine learning, deep learning, image processing and computer vision. He's skilled in Assembly Language, Matlab, Computer Vision, Image Analysis, and Image Processing. He is a strong business development professional with a Doctor of Philosophy focused on Computer Engineering-Specialization on AI (Machine Learning and Deep Learning) from University of Ulm, Germany and Addis Ababa Science and Technology University.

Joyce Nakatumba-Nabende (PhD) is a lecturer in the Department of Computer Science. She heads the Makerere Artificial Intelligence Lab, a research lab in the Department of Computer Science. She is a board member of Data Science Africa which aims to grow Data Science professionals in Africa. Her research interests are the use of Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, and Responsible AI and their application in health and agriculture. Through the Makerere Artificial Intelligence lab, she provides an environment to nurture and build institutional data science research training capacity for masters and PhD researchers.

Abdelrahman Mohamed is a research scientist at Facebook AI Research (FAIR). His research focuses on speech processing and representation learning, where he published extensively with more than 30,000 citations. Before joining FAIR, Abdelrahman worked at Amazon Alexa and Microsoft Research. He received his Ph.D. from the CS department at the University of Toronto, working with Geoffrey Hinton and Gerald Penn as part of the team that started the Deep Learning revolution in Spoken Language Processing in 2009.

Aisha Walcott is a Senior Staff Research Scientist at Google, Nairobi, Kenya with a decade of experience working in Africa. She works with and has led teams that develop innovative technologies that leverage the state-of-the-art in AI and computing, to create novel solutions to some of Africa’s most pressing challenges. Aisha has worked on a range of projects including in healthcare, transportation, and climate. Prior to her time at Google, she led a number of efforts at IBM Research Africa, most notably developing AI tools for global health with a focus on malaria control, maternal newborn and child health, family planning, and COVID-19. Dr. Walcott is passionate about working with clients and collaborators to drive advancements in science and computing, which will ultimately transform the African continent. Aisha earned her PhD in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at MIT with a focus on robotics. Currently, she serves on the board for the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS) doctoral research program in data science, is a Workshops co-chair for the International Conference on Learning and Representations 2023 (ICLR’23) hosted in Kigali, Rwanda, and was a program co-chair for the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA’22) in 2022.

Dr. Bubacarr Bah has recently been appointed as Associate Professor and Head of Data Science in the Medical Research Council (MRC) Unit – The Gambia, at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. He is the Head of the Data Science Research Group at the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS) in South Africa, where he holds the German Research Chair in Mathematics of Data Science, which is a Senior Researcher position with an adjunct Senior Lecturer (Asst. Prof.) position at the Division of Applied Mathematics, Stellenbosch University. Prior to this he held post-doctoral fellowship positions at University of Texas in Austin, U.S.A. and the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland. He gained his PhD in applied and computational mathematics at the University of Edinburgh, UK, his MSc in Mathematical Modelling and Scientific Computing at the University of Oxford, UK and a BSc in Mathematics and Physics (suma cum laude and valedictorian) at the University of The Gambia.

Somkele Awa-Kalu is the Special Assistant to the President of Nigeria on Economic Research and Data Analytics. In this role, Somkele has provided in-depth evidence based policy advisory on macroeconomic issues, multidimensional poverty, and futures analysis. As part of a multinational bank, Somkele championed the use of AI and Robotics in areas around cash management, customer acquisition and retail product creation. Somkele holds a BSc in Economics with Politics from Loughborough University and an MSc from the University of Sheffield in Business Finance and Economics. Somkele has specific interests in upskilling analysts in advanced data analytics and behavioural economics.

Yvonne has over 5 years' experience in Big Data Analytics dealing with high volume of data and combining a variety of data sources. She holds a master’s degree in Information Technology from Carnegie Mellon University where she concentrated on Data Science. During that time, she was a Teaching Assistant for the Big Data Analytics course. She was involved in several Big Data projects such as creating a predictive analytic algorithm that was used for classifying taxpayers using more than 5 million records, developing a credit risk score model for airtime loans using more than 1 million transactions. Prior to her graduate degree, she worked as a software engineer developing payment gateways for agency banking systems that are being used in African financial institutions such as banks. She has experience in creating data pipelines, setting up Big Data Analytics environment, deep learning, database management, API development and data analytics. She is now concentrating on designing modern data stack for African platforms.