Responsible AI: from Africa to the World
Third IJCAI Symposium in Africa
Date: Friday 22 August 2025
Hosted by: Deep Learning Indaba, Kigali, Rwanda
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Abstract
The Third IJCAI Symposium in Africa consolidates as the annual discussion table on Responsible AI research from Africa to the world. International stakeholders from academia, industry, non-governmental and governmental organizations, sit as equals with Indaba participants, in Africa, to learn from and with the unique African AI community.
The grassroots AI research conducted across Africa, supported by Deep Learning Indaba, is changing the rules of the game in the global AI research ecosystem, contributing both to fundamental AI state of the art and to solving the local challenges. This is partly due to the community-based engagements of AI researchers in the continent, focusing on specific research areas such as NLP, Computer Vision, Geospatial ML. The AI research community in Africa is leading the responsible AI efforts globally.
However, there is still a big gap between the African AI research landscape and the international AI research ecosystem, where conferences, journals and publication venues are not designed according to the characteristics of the research context in the continent. There are growing efforts to address the gap, such as special tracks and dedicated committees, but a lot more needs to be done.
This workshop aims to generate a discussion and build effective bridges between the unique AI research agenda across Africa and the international AI key stakeholders, to learn about Responsible AI from Africa to the world.
Programme
Programme
10:00 - 10:15 Introduction to the workshop goals by organizing team.
10:30 - 11:30 Discussion panel. The grassroots AI community in Africa is leading the global landscape of impactful AI research. How can this leadership from the continent grow to the next level? What lines of collaboration can be established with the international AI ecosystem? Can the international AI research community learn from the African impactful approach to AI research?
11.30 - 12:00 Coffee break.
12:00 - 12:45 Open discussion between panel speakers and Indaba poster presenters: how can international stakeholders support the home-grown impactful AI research projects led from Africa.
12:45 - 1:45 Poster presentations. Selected authors from the main Indaba poster session will be invited to present their poster during the workshop. Authors will also e invited to submit an article after the Indaba, which will go through peer review. Accepted articles will be published in a special volume of the International Joint Conference of AI (IJCAI) proceedings. Selected participants are offered grants to participate in follow-up research events and / or fellowships, aligned with their research interests.
1:45 - 2:00 Agreements and definition of an action plan of bidirectional lines of collaboration between the international AI community and grassroots African research landscape, to lead responsible AI from Africa to the world.
Panel of speakers:
Prof. Benjamin Rosman, Professor of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics, University of the Witwatersrand, Director of the Wits Machine Intelligence & Neural Discovery Institute (MIND) and of the Robotics, Autonomous Intelligence, and Learning (RAIL) Laboratory, co-founder of the Deep Learning Indaba and of Lelapa AI. (Confirmed in-person participation).
Dr. Aisha Walcott-Bryant, Head of Google Research Africa and Senior Staff Research Scientist. (Confirmed in-person participation)
Prof. Virginia Dignum, Professor of Responsible AI and Director of AI Policy Lab at Umea University, Chair of the Technology Policy Council at ACM, member of the European High Level Expert group on AI and of the World Economic Forum AI Board. (Confirmed in-person participation).
Dr. Girmaw Abebe Tadesse
Principal Research Scientist and Manager at Microsoft AI for Good Research Lab. (Confirmed in-person participation).
Dr. Magdalena Skipper, Editor in Chief at Nature. (Confirmed online participation).
Prof. Tshilidzi Marwala, Rector of the United Nations University and UN Under-Secretary-General. (Confirmed online participation).
Prof. Yannis Ioannidis, President of Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), Professor of Informatics and Telecom at the University of Athens. (Confirmed online participation)
Dr. Sibusisiwe (Khuluse) Makhanya
Senior Research Manager, IBM Research Africa. (Confirmed in-person participation).
Organizers
Organizers
Girmaw Abebe Tadesse, Principal Research Scientist and Manager at Microsoft AI for Good Research Lab.
Sibusisiwe Makhanya, Senior Research Manager, IBM Research Africa.
Frank Dignum, Full Professor and Director of TAIGA at Umea University, Distinguished Chair in AI focusing on Agent based social simulation for policy making.
Georgina Curto, Senior AI Researcher and Team Lead, United Nations University Institute in Macau.
This symposium is conducted with the support of IJCAI (International Joint Conference of AI), the UN University Institute in Macau, Microsoft AI for Good Research Lab, IBM Research Africa and the Center for Interdisciplinary AI (TAIGA) at Umea University.
Please note that participation in the workshop is only possible for Deep Learning Indaba attendees
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