Hundzula NLP<>Linguistics Retreat: A Celebration of Research, Collaboration, and Innovation
Interdisciplinary Retreat on African NLP and Linguistics
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AI4D Workshop #2 Report: Advancing NLP for African Languages
UP Academic Awards 2024
Prof. Vukosi Marivate Wins Young Researcher Award
UP Academic Awards 2024
UP<>Sweden AI Workshop Panel: AI, Industry and R&D
UP<>Sweden AI Workshop Panel: AI, Industry and R&D
UP<>Sweden AI Workshop Panel: Low Resource Languages and LLMs
UP<>Sweden AI Workshop Panel: Low Resource Languages and LLMs
Prof Marivate's ICML 2024 Keynote/Invited talk now available for viewing
Titled: “Gondzo - Charting a Path for African Low-Resource Languages: A Multifaceted Approach to Research and Development”
[Dissertation] Learning industrial descriptions : NLP tasks for acronym expansion
Masters dissertation by Shaun Johnson, Faculty of Engineering, Built Environment and Information Technology University of Pretoria, Pretoria
[Dissertation] Analysing public transport user sentiment
Masters dissertation by Rozina Myoya, Faculty of Engineering, Built Environment and Information Technology University of Pretoria, Pretoria
[Dissertation] Exploring Cross-Lingual Learning Techniques for advancing Tshivenda NLP coverage
Masters dissertation by Ndamulelo Nemakhavhani, Faculty of Engineering, Built Environment and Information Technology University of Pretoria, Pretoria
[Dissertation] An investigation of the effectiveness of using Twitter data for predicting South African protests with Graph Neural Networks
Masters dissertation by Derwin Ngomane, Faculty of Engineering, Built Environment and Information Technology University of Pretoria, Pretoria
University of Pretoria <> Sweden AI Workshop - 30 September 2024
AI Workshop Schedule
Prof. Vukosi Marivate will deliver the 2024 Bernard Price Memorial Lecture on Thursday, 26 September 2024 @ Wits University
Prof. Vukosi Marivate will deliver the 2024 Bernard Price Memorial Lecture on Thursday, 26 September 2024. His talk, titled “Charting a Path for African Low-Resource Languages – A Multifaceted Approach to Research and Development,” will explore the challenges and opportunities of advancing Artificial Intelligence in Africa, specifically in language development. Prof. Marivate will emphasise the need for multidisciplinary approaches beyond technical solutions to address the cultural and human aspects essential to language innovation.
DSFSI at the 2024 Deep Learning Indaba: A Journey of Learning, Innovation, and Community
DSFSI at the 2024 Deep Learning Indaba: A Journey of Learning, Innovation, and Community Last week, the Data Science for Social Impact (DSFSI) team had the incredible opportunity to attend the 2024 Deep Learning Indaba (DLI) in Dakar, Senegal. Bringing together over 600 passionate attendees from across the continent and beyond, the Indaba once again proved to be a cornerstone event for Africa’s thriving AI community. In this post, some of our team members—Fiskani Banda, Seani Rananga, and Matimba Shingange—shared their unique experiences, highlighting the event’s profound impact on their academic and professional journeys.
Celebrating Excellence at Data Science for Social Impact: Fiskani Banda Wins the Alele-Williams Masters Award
We are pleased to announce that Fiskani Banda, a graduate from the Data Science for Social Impact research group at the University of Pretoria, South Africa, has won the Deep Learning Indaba 2024 Alele-Williams Masters Award. This award recognizes outstanding research and writing by masters candidates at African universities in the field of computational and statistical sciences.
Welcome DSFSI Postdoc Dr Hope Mogale
Please welcome Dr. Hope Mogale to the Computer Science department at University of Pretoria. He has joined our team as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pretoria. This role is supported by Microsoft Research Africa, UP & DSFSI.
Prof. Vukosi Marivate at ICML 2024: Addressing Challenges in Low-Resource African Languages in NLP
Introduction
Thank You for Joining the Design Justice AI Institute! [Recordings available]
As we conclude the Design Justice AI Institute, we want to extend our heartfelt thanks to each of you for your active participation and contributions over the past two weeks. Your insights, discussions, and engagement have made this event a remarkable success.
Congratulations to all DSFSI Graduates at the May Graduations @ University of Pretoria
Congratulations to all DSFSI members & alumni graduating at University of Pretoria! Enjoy this special day with family, friends, & celebrate your achievements. We are immensely proud and honoured to have been part of your journey. Here’s to soaring even higher in your future endeavours!
Standford HAI: African AI Realities and Potential on the Africa Continent
Recorded at the AI+Policy Symposium: A Global Stocktaking on 16 April 2024
AI as Our Mirror: Exploring Ourselves Through AI Empowerment | Vukosi Marivate | TEDxPretoria
Recorded on Monday 4 Dec 2023
Monitoring Social Media activity during elections meets a right to research
Vukosi Marivate and Seani Rananga touch on the challenges of monitoring social media acticity for election misinformation in 2024
Language by the Beach: Post Hundzula 2024
DSFSI@Hundzula 2024 - Dr Idris Abdulmumin
Prof Vukosi Marivate's Personal Reflections on Annual World Economic Forum Meeting in Davos 2024
The World Economic Forum Annual Meeting is an experience like no other.
Insights from the Multi-Sectoral Workshop on Battling Misinformation Ahead of the 2024 South African Elections
26 January 2024, Akananyan Building, University of Pretoria <> The #BattlingMisinformationZA workshop, hosted by the Data Science for Social Impact group focused on strategies to combat misinformation ahead of South Africa's 2024 elections.
Combating Online Misinformation @ Data Science for Social Impact
Work advised by Vukosi Marivate and Seani Rananga
DSFSI @ SACAIR 2023 - Muldersdrift, South Africa: 4-8 December 2024
We thrilled to have the opportunity to participate in and contribute to SACAIR 2023 in South Africa
DSFSI @ AfriCHI 2023, South Africa: November 27, 2023 - December 1, 2023
We thrilled to have the opportunity to participate in and contribute to AfriCHI 2023
Welcome DSFSI Postdoc Dr Idris Abdulmumin
Welcome Dr Idris Abdulmumin to the Computer Science department at University of Pretoria. He is joining Data Science for Social Impact Research Group as a Postdoctoral Fellow through the ABSA UP Chair of Data Science.
Harnessing African AI for the World
A session at the 2023 World Economic Forum Young Global Leaders Sumit in Dubai hosted by Dr. Abdigani Diriye and Prof. Vukosi Marivate
Announcing PuoBERTa: a tailor-made masked language model for Setswana
Work by Vukosi Marivate, Valencia K. Wagner, Moseli Motsoehli, Richard Lastrucci, Isheanesu Dzingirai
#DS4SocietySeminar 2023 <> Digital Resources for Code-Switching in Under-Resourced Languages
Thipe Modipa
[Publication] Integrating Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory with Subword Embedding for Authorship Attribution
Paper by Abiodun Modupe and Vukosi Marivate
#DS4SocietySeminar 2023 <> Lost in Translation: Large Language Models and Non-English Content Analysis
Aliya Bhatia and Gabriel Nicholas
#DS4SocietySeminar 2023 <> Data Science Needs Law
Chijioke Okorie
[Publication] Exploring COVID-19 public perceptions in South Africa through sentiment analysis and topic modelling of Twitter posts
Paper by Temitope Kekere and Vukosi Marivate
#DS4SocietySeminar 2023 <> Towards Evaluating and Understanding the Multilingual Performance of Generative Language Models
Maxamed Axmed/Mohamed Ahmed
DSFSI @ Deep Learning IndabaX 2023 - Cape Town, South Africa: 12-14 July 2023
We thrilled to have the opportunity to participate in and contribute to Deep Learning IndabaX 2023 in Cape Town, South Africa
The DSFSI Large Language Models Primer <> AI and Language: A Mirror to Ourselves - Understanding how we got to ChatGPT and what it actually means
Primer/Tutorial by Prof. Vukosi Marivate
Welcome DSFSI Postdoc Dr Kayode Olaleye
Welcome Dr Kayode Olaleye to the Computer Science department at University of Pretoria. He is joining DSFSI as a Postdoctoral Fellow sponsored through the JP Morgan Research Faculty award received by Prof Vukosi Marivate.
[Publication] Emotionally driven fake news in South Africa
Paper by Marc Gagiano and Vukosi Marivate
[Publication] Unsupervised Cross-lingual Word Embedding Representation for English-isiZulu
Paper by Derwin Ngomane and Vukosi Marivate
[Publication] MasakhaPOS: Part-of-Speech Tagging for Typologically Diverse African Languages
Paper by Thapelo Sindane and Vukosi Marivate
[Publication] Combating Hate: How Multilingual Transformers Can Help Detect Topical Hate Speech
Paper by Trishanta Srikissoon and Vukosi Marivate
NSTF-South32 Awards 2022/2023 Finalist Announcement
We are pleased to announce that the Coronavirus COVID-19 (2019-nCoV) Data Repository for South Africa project led by the Data Science for Social Impact (DSFSI) Research Group at University of Pretoria is a finalist for the NSTF-South32 Awards 2022/2023
DSFSI @ ICLR 2023 - Kigali, Rwanda: 1-5 May 2023
We thrilled to have the opportunity to participate in and contribute to ICLR 2023 in Kigali
Vukosi Marivate - NLP and TDM in Africa [The Right to Research in International Copyright Law Seminar 2023]
From Data Engineering to Natural Language Corpora - The DSFSI 2022/2023 Summer Internship
Richard Lastrucci and Isheanesu Dzingirai - The main focus was collection, processing and creation of parallel corpora in the 11 official languages of South Africa. We collected multilingual data by building web scrapers, we processed and cleaned this and other extracted data before performing sentence alignment to produce the parallel corpora. We also improved and documented Masakhane Web.
[Dissertation] Interpretable Machine Learning in Natural Language Processing for Misinformation data
Masters dissertation by Yolanda Nkalashe, Faculty of Engineering, Built Environment and Information Technology University of Pretoria, Pretoria
[Dissertation] BantuBERTa: Using Language Family Grouping in Multilingual Language Modeling for Bantu Languages
Masters dissertation by Jesse Parvess, Faculty of Engineering, Built Environment and Information Technology University of Pretoria, Pretoria
[Dissertation] South African isiZulu and siSwati News Corpus Creation, Annotation and Categorisation
Masters dissertation by Andani Madodonga, Faculty of Engineering, Built Environment and Information Technology University of Pretoria, Pretoria
DSFSI Summer Research Experience: Fine-tuning Multilingual Pre-trained African Language Models
Rozina Myoya and Fiskani Banda - The aim of the research was to explore the application of Pre-trained Language Models(PLMs) on a multilingual classification task. The study concluded that PLMs perform best on downstream tasks on the languages they were pre-trained on, thus emphasising the importance of including low resource languages in the pre-training process of LMs.
Vukosi Marivate - AfricanML: Where to next? [IndabaX South Africa 2022]
Hundzula Retreat 2023
By Vukosi Marivate
Augmenting the Data: Vukosi Marivate on African Natural Language Processing (NLP) – Critical AI
By Eleni Coundouriotis. The event was organized and co-sponsored by Critical AI @ Rutgers, DIMACS, the Rutgers Department of Computer Science, and the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice
Call for Low Resource Natural Language Processing Postdoctoral fellowship applications
Data Science for Social Impact (DSFSI) Research group calls for interested parties
DSFSI @ 2022 UP School of IT Research Colloquium
Our contributions to the Colloquium on 11 Nov 2022
[Publication] Conversational Pattern Mining using Motif Detection
Paper by Nicolle Garber, Vukosi Marivate
[Publication] Estimating the COVID-19 Help Offering Retention Training (COHORT19) Group Transitioning into Higher Education from South African Basic Education
Paper by Herkulaas MvE Combrink, Vukosi Marivate, Benjamin Rosman
#DS4SocietySeminar 2022 <> Localising the Mozilla Common Voice platform for South Africa’s official languages
Febe de Wet
[Publication] Reinforcement Learning in Education: A Multi-Armed Bandit Approach
Paper by Herkulaas MvE Combrink, Vukosi Marivate, Benjamin Rosman
DSFSI @ 18th African Investigative Journalism Conference #AIJC2022
Our contributions at AIJC 2022
#DS4SocietySeminar 2022 <> From Human to Social-Centric Tech & AI: Interdisciplinarity in Massively Multilingual Machine Translation.
Skyler Wang
[Publication] A Framework for Undergraduate Data Collection Strategies for Student Support Recommendation Systems in Higher Education
Paper by Herkulaas Combrink, Vukosi Marivate, Benjami Rosman
[Publication] Comparing Synthetic Tabular Data Generation Between a Probabilistic Model and a Deep Learning Model for Education Use Cases
Paper by Herkulaas MvE Combrink, Vukosi Marivate, Benjamin Rosman
Mintirho ya Vulavula: Deep Learning Indaba #4 - An Indaba deferred, but one that will shape our collective destiny
Reflecting on the 2022 Deep Learning Indaba held in Tunis, Tunisia - Prof Vukosi Marivate
DSFSI is looking for a part-time research assistant(s) for the Summer break.
DSFSI Paid Positions
#DS4SocietySeminar 2022 <> Why language technologies for African languages are important.
Mukondleteri Dumela
#DS4SocietySeminar 2022 <> Overcoming Digital Gravity when using AI in Public Health Decisions
Dr. Sekou L. Remy
DSFSI @ Deep Learning Indaba 2022 #DLI2022
Our contributions as DLIndaba 2022
#DS4SocietySeminar 2022 <> Disinformation and covid what can we learn from the disinformers and doorknobs?
William Bird and Nomshado Lubisi
UP Expert Lecture Series: ‘Riendzo ri lehile: Tackling Natural Language Processing for African languages to make better sense of our world’
presented by Professor Vukosi Marivate
#DS4SocietySeminar 2022 <> Algorithms on Trial: Interrogating Evidentiary Statistical Software
Rediet Abebe
[Publication] Improving the Predictive Power of Historical Consistent Neural Networks
Paper by Rockefeller Rockefeller, Bubacarr Bah, Vukosi Marivate, and Hans-Georg Zimmermann , *African Institute for Mathematical Sciences, Cape Town, South Africa; *Department of Mathematical Sciences, Stellenbosch University, Cape Town, South Africa; Department of Computer Sciences, University of Pretoria, Pretoria, South Africa; Fraunhofer Society, 200703 Munich, Germany, Germany
[Publication] LiSTra Automatic Speech Translation: English to Lingala Case Study
Paper by Salomon Kabongo Kabenamualu, Vukosi Marivate, and Herman Kamper, African Masters of Machine Intelligence, University of Pretoria, Stellenbosch University
[Publication] Discriminatory Gleason grade group signatures of prostate cancer: An application of machine learning methods
Paper by Mpho Mokoatle, Faculty of Engineering, Built Environment and Information Technology University of Pretoria, Pretoria
[Publication] Semi-Supervised Learning Approaches for Predicting South African Political Sentiment for Local Government Elections
Paper by Mashadi Ledwaba and Vukosi Marivate, Faculty of Engineering, Built Environment and Information Technology University of Pretoria, Pretoria
SAAIR Learner Analytics Institute Day 2 Workshop 5
Herkulaas MvE Combrink, Prof Vukosi Marivate & Prof Benjamin Rosman
[Dissertation] Using Machine Learning to Detect Solar Panels in Aerial Images
Masters dissertation by Palesa Rachael Lepamo, Faculty of Engineering, Built Environment and Information Technology University of Pretoria, Pretoria
[Dissertation] Inventory Stock Prediction and Deep Anomaly Detection
Masters dissertation by Khutso Kgabo Sepuru, Faculty of Engineering, Built Environment and Information Technology University of Pretoria, Pretoria
[Dissertation] Using NER and Doc2Vec to cluster South African criminal cases
Masters dissertation by Carel Kagiso Nchachi, Faculty of Engineering, Built Environment and Information Technology University of Pretoria, Pretoria
[Publication] Training Cross-Lingual embeddings for Setswana and Sepedi
Paper by Mack Makgatho, Faculty of Engineering, Built Environment and Information Technology University of Pretoria, Pretoria
[Policy Brief] More Than Just a Policy - Day to Day Effects of Data Governance on the Data Scientist
Prof Vukosi Marivate,
INL (text) Processing for Classification of Misinformation data
Yolanda Nkalashe
A Journey Through the Opportunity of Low Resourced Natural Language Processing — An African Lens [NeurIPS Tutorial]
Vukosi Marivate , David Adelani
nbgrader and streamlit for Data Science Teaching and Learning [Workshop]
Vukosi Marivate
#DS4SocietySeminar 2021 <> Anti-Asian COVID-related Hate Speech and Stigma on Twitter: Dataset Creation to Algorithmic Detection
Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed
4IR IN AFRICA CANNOT TAKE PLACE IN ENGLISH ONLY[Article]
Vukosi Marivate
AI To the Future <> Why African Leaders Matter[Panel]
Vukosi Marivate, Uzodinma Iweala, Mutale Nkonde, & Jackie Mwaniki
#DS4SocietySeminar 2021 <> On the dangers of stochastic parrots
Timnit Gebru
Imagining Innovations 2021 <> The Covid Dashboard: AI & 'Information' in Pandemic times[Panel]
Vukosi Marivate & Barry Dwolatzky
Call for SDGs and Data Science Postdoctoral fellowship applications
Albert Luthuli Leadership Institute (ALLI), South African SDG Hub, Data Science for Social Impact (DSFSI) Research group
#DS4SocietySeminar 2021 <> Measuring the urban environment using street view imagery
Emily Muller
Business Day TV - Talk to the Bot
Dr Vukosi Marivate talking about NLP on Business Day TV
#DS4SocietySeminar 2021 <> Environmental urban noise prediction for Kampala city
Ernest Mwebaze
#DS4SocietySeminar 2021 <> Pattern Extraction in Marketing
Felipe Melo
NRF Call [Honours and MSc] for 2022 Students @ DSFSI
Introducing Masakhane WEB - A Machine Translation Web Platform for African Languages
A new milestone for Masakhane NLP and DSFSI
#MSG 2021 <> Coming to grips with the reality of Data Science - It's people all the way down
Vukosi Marivate
[Dissertation] THE DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF A DOMAIN-ADAPTIVE DEEP REINFORCEMENT LEARNING TEXT CLASSIFICATION ARCHITECTURE
Masters dissertation by Andreas Bayer, Faculty of Engineering, Built Environment and Information Technology(Big Data Science) University of Pretoria, Pretoria
[Publication] Training Cross-Lingual embeddings for Setswana and Sepedi
Mack Makgatho, Vukosi Marivate, Tshephisho Sefara, Valencia Wagner
[Publication] Investigating Statistical and Machine Learning Techniques to Improve the Credit Approval Process in Developing Countries
Publication by Moses, Faculty of Engineering, Built Environment and Information Technology University of Pretoria, Pretoria
[Publication] Call Centre Shift Schedule Optimisation using Local Search Heuristics
Publication by Liketso, Faculty of Engineering, Built Environment and Information Technology University of Pretoria, Pretoria
[Dissertation] Thuto: Depth Analysis of South African and Sierra Leone School Outcomes using Machine Learning
Masters dissertation by Henry Wandera, Faculty of Engineering, Built Environment and Information Technology University of Pretoria, Pretoria
[Dissertation] Identifying Financial Risk through Natural Language Processing of Company Annual Reports
Masters dissertation by Jacques Lamont Theron, Faculty of Engineering, Built Environment and Information Technology University of Pretoria, Pretoria
[Dissertation] Financial Sentiment Analysis: an NLP approach towards reputation management
Masters dissertation by Michelle Terblanche, Faculty of Engineering, Built Environment and Information Technology University of Pretoria, Pretoria
[Dissertation] Unsupervised Anomaly Detection of Healthcare Providers using Generative Adversarial Network
Masters thesis by Krishnan Naidoo, Faculty of Engineering, Built Environment and Information Technology University of Pretoria, Pretoria
[Dissertation] Conversational Pattern Mining using Motif Detection
Masters dissertation by Nicolle Garber, Faculty of Engineering, Built Environment and Information Technology University of Pretoria, Pretoria
[Dissertation] Finding Suitable Locations of Wind Farms in South Africa
Masters dissertation by Shané, African Institute for Mathematical Sciences
[Deadline Extended to 31 January 2021] Call for PhD Student at DSFSI
Data Science for Society Seminar <> Lacuna Fund - Mobilizing funding for labeled datasets that solve urgent problems in low- and middle-income contexts globally
Lacuna Fund - NLP RFP
Data Science for Society Seminar <> Approximating the convolutional filters in the feature map of a radio interferometer
Marcel Atemkeng - The sky that a radio telescope such as the SKA observes (the feature map) is the true sky involved with a convolutional filter (the weighted sampling function). This convolution filter varies across the feature map and is different at each pixel.
Data Science for Society Seminar <> Massive vs. Curated Embeddings for Low-Resourced Languages: the Case of Yorùbá and Twi
Jesujoba Alabi
Data Science for Society Seminar: Scientific Writing Workshop
Dr. Elaine Nsoesie - Participants will get a high-level introduction to writing and publishing scientific papers
Data Science for Society Seminar: AI and Data in South Africa's Health Sector
Vedantha Singh, HSRC, UP
Data Science for Society Seminar: Using Machine Learning to Extract Key Meta-Data from Legal Text in Malawi
Amelia Taylor
Data Science for Society Seminar: The process of creating satellite image ground-truth datasets for machine learning
Raesetje Sefala
Mapping the South African health facility landscape in response to COVID-19
N Mtsweni, H Combrink, A Van der Walt, V Marivate
A few weeks in, Data Science thoughts on COVID-19 in SA
Dr Vukosi Marivate, ABSA UP Chair of Data Science, Data Science for Social Impact Research Group.
Sharing our work on COVID-19 Data and Analysis
Dr. Vukosi Marivate
[Dissertation] USE OF MACHINE LEARNING TECHNIQUES TO BETTER UTILISE MULTIPLE UNDERWRITING FACTORS IN MORTALITY PRICING AND RESERVING OF LIFE INSURANCE RISK PRODUCTS
Masters dissertation by Collin, Faculty of Engineering, Built Environment and Information Technology University of Pretoria, Pretoria
[Dissertation] Anomaly detection in the open financial market: A Case for the Bitcoin Market
Masters dissertation by Monamo, Faculty of Engineering and Electronics, University of Johannesburg
[Dissertation] Why is this an Anomaly? Explaining Anomalies using Sequential Explanations
Masters dissertation by Mokoena, Faculty of Science, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.
[Dissertation] Road Traffic Accident Analysis Using Machine Learning Techniques for Soshanguve, Pretoria
Masters dissertation by Mokoatle, North West University
[Dissertation] Ukhetho: A Text Mining Study Of The South African General Elections
Masters dissertation by Avashlin Moodley, Faculty of Engineering, Built Environment and Information Technology University of Pretoria, Pretoria
An Effort to Collate COVID-19 Case Data Across Africa
An Effort to Collate COVID-19 Case Data Across Africa - Elaine Nsoesie, Vukosi Marivate
A repo and dashboard for COVID-19 in South Africa
How and why we built the dashboard. Dr. Vukosi Marivate - Dept. Computer Science
The Fourth Industrial Revolution and the provision of service delivery in South Africa
Dr. OS Madumo - School of Public Management and Administration, University of Pretoria
Data Science & Salone - Visiting Sierra Leone
Through an NRF Knowledge Interchange and Collaboration grant, I was able to visit some collaborators in Sierra Leone
Go Tsamaya Ke Go Bona: Deep Learning Indaba #3 - A journey just beginning.
Go Tsamaya Ke Go Bona: Deep Learning Indaba #3 - A journey just beginning. By Vukosi Marivate
We should all be Data Scientists: Why SOCIAL and SOCIETY are the missing links.
We should all be Data Scientists: Why SOCIAL and SOCIETY are the missing links. By Vukosi Marivate
Nawa oh! A week on atlantic ocean in Sierra Leone.
I suppose should have met President Bio...🤦 By Henry Wandera
[Dissertation] Improving forecast accuracy of wind power output using multi-input LSTM model.
Masters dissertation by Phillemon, African Institute for Mathematical Sciences
[Dissertation] Power Output Prediction For Wind Farms With Machine Learning
Masters dissertation by Nkosinathi, African Institute for Mathematical Sciences