Six UKZN computer science students doing their MSc degrees attended the prestigious Deep Learning Indaba at Kenyatta University in Nairobi, Kenya.

Mr Asad Jeewa, Mr Bradley Pillay, Mr Divyan Hirasen, Ms Verosha Pillay, Ms Yuvika Singh and Ms Jane Oruh, were all funded by the Deep Learning Indaba and the UKZN node of the Centre for Artificial Intelligence Research.

The Indaba is the largest annual meeting of the African Machine Learning (Artificial Intelligence) community. The meeting is a ‘week-long event of teaching, research, exchange, and debate around the state of the art in machine learning and artificial intelligence’ and hosts machine learning enthusiasts from across the globe.

More than 700 students, researchers and academics attended the event which had as its theme: Strengthening African Machine Learning. Attendance was by invitation only with strong competition for places.

Sponsors included DeepMind, Kenyatta University, Microsoft, Google and the South African Department of Science and Technology.

Lectures from experts took place throughout the week as well as interactive tutorial sessions and keynote speeches from global AI leaders.

These events gave participants an opportunity to learn practical and theoretical advances directly from the researchers and developers, including researchers from Google, DeepMind, Facebook and InstaDeep.

The conference was an excellent opportunity for participants to showcase their research and share ideas as well as being an excellent networking opportunity with some of Africa’s “brightest minds” in attendance

Said Singh: ‘Attending this conference and interacting with delegates has opened a direct portal to Machine Learning in Africa. This conference has connected a lot of us – we can now collaborate, and continue to learn from each other by exchanging ideas.’

Words: Yüvika Singh and Anban Pillay