1150 students participate in UmojaHack Africa 2021 ML hackathon

1150 students participate in UmojaHack Africa 2021 ML hackathon

UmojaHack Africa hackathon university

More than 1000 students from 126 universities across Africa have participated in the UmojaHack Africa 2021 virtual machine learning hackathon. The hackathon organized by Zindi took place on the weekend of 27-28 March.

1150 Students from 21 African countries joined the event participating in three different machine learning challenges. They represent Algeria, Benin, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Egypt, Ethiopia, Ghana, Guinea, Kenya, Malawi, Morocco, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, South Africa, Sudan, Tanzania, Tunisia, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

Data science students from 9 African countries won a total competition price of more than $10000 USD in prizes. 8500 submissions were made to solve three real-world machine learning challenges on Zindi.

A financial resilience prediction challenge, a logistics challenge for African B2B service provider Sendy, and a computational biology challenge using the DeepChain™ platform developed by InstaDeep.

The winning solutions developed by Zindi data science users will be shared with these organisations and deployed in real-world applications.

Winning words

In winning second place in the Sendy Delivery Rider Response Challenge, Tony Mipawa, a data science student from the University of Dodoma, Tanzania, epitomised the spirit of Zindi and of UmojaHack. A year ago, Tony was a data science novice until he participated in Zindi’s first-ever Mentorship Programme in 2020. He has grown in leaps and bounds since then. As evidenced by his prize-winning submission in this hackathon, less than a year later.

“I’m very happy with the outcome,” Tony said at the awards ceremony. “My advice is, whenever there is an opportunity to learn, you should take it. Learning is all about passion; whenever there is an opportunity to learn, put your whole effort into it, do it well. Try to learn from anyone you meet. I would like to thank Zindi for what that mentorship programme gave me.”

UmojaHack Africa Global support

Some of the leading names in the global and African tech, AI and financial sectors made UmojaHack Africa 2021 possible. These include InstaDeep, Standard Bank Group, Microsoft, DeepMind, NVIDIA, and Old Mutual. They were integral in making the event a success. By offering financial and professional development prizes, contributing their expertise and excitement to the event, and supporting UmojaHack Africa 2021 through their own channels.

We are incredibly excited about this event spanning over 100 African universities and helping thousands of African students leverage their data science and AI skills to solve African problems,” says Chris Lwanga, Principal Director for Software Partnerships at Microsoft. “At Microsoft, we believe in empowering every organisation and person to do more.”

Standard Bank is deeply invested in funding and implementing critical data science skills development programmes, such as Zindi’s UmojaHack Africa 2021 hackathon, to position Africa as a serious competitor in the world’s rapidly emerging data-driven sector,” says Adrian Vermooten, Chief Innovation Officer, Standard Bank Group.

We are delighted to support UmojaHack Africa again, an incredible initiative close to our hearts. Seeing students from more than 120 universities come together to collaborate on real-world machine learning challenges is truly inspiring,” says Karim Beguir, Co-Founder and CEO of InstaDeep. “This is, in our opinion, the best way to accelerate AI growth on the continent. Hackathons like UmojaHack bring us one step closer to achieving InstaDeep’s mission: building an AI-first world that benefits everyone.”

According to Celina Lee, CEO of Zindi, “UmojaHack Africa has proven to be a game-changing event, especially when so many young people have been impacted by the global pandemic. This is a chance for students from across the continent to come together to learn, compete, and have fun. UmojaHack is about building skills, creating new machine learning applications to solve problems that really matter while forging new connections among the students as well as with industry. We are incredibly excited to see what the students come up with in just one weekend.”

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Check out other stories making the news in the technology ecosystem in Africa and the Middle East.

Udacity, Microsoft announce Machine Learning Scholarship Program

Udacity, Microsoft announce Machine Learning Scholarship Program

Machine Learning Scholarship Program Udacity Microsoft

Online learning platform, Udacity and Microsoft are introducing a new training program collaboration. The collaboration will see Udacity host various courses on Microsoft’s Azure cloud services. The partnership will start with a Machine Learning Scholarship Program for Microsoft Azure.

The Machine Learning scholarship program will start with a two-month-long low-code experience introduction to machine learning on Azure course. Followed by a four-month full Udacity Nanodegree program. The first phase will see 10,000 scholarships spots awarded. However, only 300 spots will be available in the Nanodegree program. Top performers from the foundation level who meet the selection criteria will make it.

AI is driving transformation across organizations and there is increased demand for data science skills,” says Julia White, Corporate Vice President, Azure Marketing, Microsoft. “Through our collaboration with Udacity to offer low-code and advanced courses on Azure Machine Learning, we hope to expand data science expertise as experienced professionals will truly be invaluable resources to solving business problems,” she continues.

Applications start from June 10  to 30th. Find out more details and apply here.

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Microsoft to power Africa data science competition platform in new partnership with Zindi

Microsoft to power Africa data science competition platform in new partnership with Zindi

In a new partnership, Zindi will use Microsoft’s cloud computing service Azure to power their platform.

Social enterprise Zindi is on a mission to build the data science ecosystem of Africa. Building Africa’s first data science competition platform in the process. Microsoft is partnering with Zindi. Offering to power Zindi’s data science competition platform on their Azure cloud.

As part of the partnership Microsoft is sponsoring two Agritech competitions. Wazhihub soil humidity prediction challenge using sensor data from IoT and FarmPin a crop detection challenge using Sentinel-2 satellite imagery.

Currently it hosts an entire data science ecosystem of scientists, engineers, academics, companies, NGOs, governments and institutions focused on solving Africa’s most pressing problems.

https://youtu.be/okQRbB4tyOc

Click to find out more about their ecosystem and competitions.

Using AI, Edge, IoT for Agriculture, Microsoft FarmBeats addresses the challenges of farmers in Africa, starting in Kenya

Using AI, Edge, IoT for Agriculture, Microsoft FarmBeats addresses the challenges of farmers in Africa, starting in Kenya

An area of focus in Microsoft’s research is Agriculture. Microsoft research scientists are focusing on unleashing the future of agriculture using data driven techniques called precision farming. The process involves using broadband connectivity through TV whitespaces, connected to IoT sensors that enable data driven farming. These data when collected over time will help farmers improve their yields and lower costs. This initiative from Microsoft is called FarmBeats.

Piloting FarmBeats in Africa

Microsoft is expanding the pilot program of FarmBeats to Africa, starting in Kenya. The program in Nairobi will be focused on addressing the specific challenges of farming in Africa with the intent of expanding to other African countries.

Data-driven digital agriculture

FarmBeats

AI doesn’t replace human knowledge; it augments it

Satya Nadella

Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO says “AI doesn’t replace human knowledge, it augments it. Talking about Microsoft FarmBeats initiative he shares that “Data from low-cost sensors in soil and drones with machine learning algorithms work with farmers’ knowledge and intuition to help them gather and parse data about their farms. Informing what, when, and where to plant in order to drive the highest-possible yields and reduce costs”.

Microsoft FarmBeats will help farmers benefit from technology innovation at the edge. Microsoft says although technology could help the farmer, its adoption is limited. This is majorly due to farms not having power, Internet connectivity on the farms and farmers not technology savvy.

To address this Microsoft says “We are working towards an end-to-end approach. From sensors to the cloud, to solve the problem. As part of the FarmBeats project, we are building several unique solutions to solve these problems using low-cost sensors, drones and vision and machine learning algorithms“.

Bill Gates visited a pilot site and shares his experience in the video below.

If you are a student, there is a Student Kit that will help you learn about precision agriculture.

Now on Azure Marketplace

Microsoft releases FarmBeats on the Azure Marketplace to help farmers with low-cost agtech solutions. Azure FarmBeats in the Azure marketplace will be a business-to-business offering. Offered at no additional charge and users will only pay for the Azure resources used. It will include a Datahub. (An API layer that enables aggregation, normalization, and contextualization of various agriculture datasets across providers). As well as an Accelerator. (A sample solution, built on top of Datahub, that jumpstarts your UI and model development).

Microsoft supports Machine Learning in Africa

Microsoft supports Machine Learning in Africa

machine learning

Deep Learning Indaba 2018 is taking place at Stellenbosch University in South Africa. The event put together by a group of researchers who realized the machine learning landscape in Africa was non existant. They share that “the African continent has been absent from the contemporary machine learning landscape the last decade”.

At the 30th conference on Neural Information Processing in 2016, one of the world’s foremost gatherings on machine learning, there was not a single accepted paper from a researcher at an African institution.
In fact, for the last decade, the entire African continent has been absent from the contemporary machine learning landscape. 

This landscape is surely changing with the announcement of a Google AI research center in Africa, which will open later this year in Accra. Microsoft has joined this ecosystem in the region by sponsoring Deep Learning Indaba 2018. Microsoft talks about its commitment to strengthening Machine Learning in Africa by supporting the event. 

Deep Learning Indaba is a weeks event of teaching, sharing and debate around machine learning and artificial intelligence. It aims to be a catalyst for strengthening machine learning in Africa. The conference will offer keynote sessions, hands on workshops, poster sessions, networking and mentoring sessions.

Microsoft engineers and researchers will speak at the event. They will also host a Women in Machine Learning session to encourage, support and unite women. Microsoft also said “as there will be a high number of students in attendance, our panel also highlights diverse career paths, from academia to industrial research, to applied machine learning, to start-ups”.