
Africa Is Building an A.I. Industry That Doesn’t Look Like Silicon Valley - imartin2k
https://onezero.medium.com/africa-is-building-an-a-i-industry-that-doesnt-look-like-silicon-valley-72198eba706d
======
taliesinb
Great to see interest in the Indaba from the HN community! This year was a
_lot_ of fun; we had some amazing students, speakers, and tutors.

While the practical notebooks we used in 2018 were already amazing, my
colleagues and I worked hard on expanding and improving them for the 2019
Indaba. In case anyone wants to check them out, here's a full list of the
practicals (the links go to Google Colab notebooks)

1a: Machine Learning Fundamentals,
[http://bit.ly/2nfeu4W](http://bit.ly/2nfeu4W)

1b: Build your own TensorFlow, [http://bit.ly/2obD1rK](http://bit.ly/2obD1rK)

2a: Deep Feedforward Networks, [http://bit.ly/2oQSjSQ](http://bit.ly/2oQSjSQ)

2b: Optimization for Deep Learning,
[http://bit.ly/2nqkyHB](http://bit.ly/2nqkyHB)

3a: Convolutional Networks, [http://bit.ly/2nqdQRX](http://bit.ly/2nqdQRX)

3b: Deep Generative Models, [http://bit.ly/2nnkisU](http://bit.ly/2nnkisU)

4a: Recurrent Neural Networks, [http://bit.ly/2ncgYkx](http://bit.ly/2ncgYkx)

4b: Reinforcement Learning, [http://bit.ly/2oO4lMK](http://bit.ly/2oO4lMK)

They're also available on the official github page: [https://github.com/deep-
learning-indaba](https://github.com/deep-learning-indaba)

We'd love any feedback on the practicals to improve them for next year!

If you have some ML expertise and would like to volunteer to be a tutor at
next year's Indaba, which will be held in Tunisia in late August 2020, drop me
a mail at contact (at) taliesin.ai. I also encourage anyone to apply to attend
as a student!

~~~
light_hue_1
That's great!

I don't understand the rather negative introduction in the article. Indaba
seems to be about getting people up to speed with the basics of ML, NeurIPS
and other ML conferences are about cutting-edge research. Both have an
importance place. Why the distinction about Western vs non-Western AI?

This isn't an alternative, it's a way to bootstrap research in Africa. And
that's amazing. But the narrative that there's tension between the two and
that somehow African AI is "other" and won't find a place in "Western AI" when
the research is world-class is totally absurd and does African researchers a
massive disservice.

Yes, Africa is under-represented at international AI conferences. But that's a
consequence of many things (imperialism, oppression, economics, etc.), not the
somewhat-impartial double-blind review system we have.

I wish people would tell a more inclusive and positive story rather than
manufacture some conflict where there is none.

~~~
thewarrior
Visa policies create exclusion by their very existence. So its not entirely an
unfair assumption.

For those who are unaware visa policies are extremely discriminatory to people
from African countries. You will not even be granted a tourist visa or even be
allowed to attend a tech conference. You are stuck where you are born.

~~~
LunaSea
I'm guessing that is done to prevent people from overstaying their visa.

~~~
mandelbrotwurst
You're saying that governments create visas to prevent people from overstaying
their visas? Lol.

~~~
LunaSea
No, I'm saying that people from certain countries have a tough time getting
visas because their co-nationals have a habit of overstaying their visa as a
form of immigration. Thus making the host country clamp down on issuing visas.

~~~
yourbandsucks
Certain countries like Ireland? Hmmm... I wonder when that clampdown on Irish
visa grants is coming..

------
username90
What makes it different from silicon valley? I read the whole article but
couldn't find it mentioned except for the headline. Is there something I'm
missing? Is it just that they aim to limit sponsorship from silicon valley
giants?

~~~
losvedir
That was my question, too! I was wondering if they were developing some
qualitatively different form of AI that's not just, e.g., matrix
multiplication or something like that. That'd be neat, but I didn't notice
anything in the article about that.

It did mention a few African-specific projects: controlling malaria and
identifying African wildlife. So, perhaps, it means not that the tech is
different, but the applications.

~~~
visarga
Exactly, it's more about applying existing AI techniques to specific African
problems and bootstrapping a vibrant community.

------
steev
This is great for researchers in Africa and the surrounding area, but it seems
a simpler solution would be for the CS community to move towards placing
greater weight on journals, rather than conferences (like just about all other
disciplines). It's not just researchers in the poorer countries of Africa that
struggle. Even graduate students in the US can be put in difficult situations
where a paper is accepted but they have no travel support from their advisor,
department, or institution.

As an anecdote, I recently had to put up $1,500 of my own money to travel to a
conference in Italy because my advisor doesn't have any funding and my
department only paid for registration. Luckily my wife works and it wasn't an
issue paying for the trip, but it was still a frustrating experience.

~~~
Vinnl
If it was easy to get academics to disseminate their work in a different way,
we'd have far fewer problems in academia...

------
Avalaxy
Let's hope silicon valley doesn't get their hands on them. We need more people
fixing real problems for the third world instead of solving uninteresting
first world problems.

------
mark_l_watson
Good stuff! As part of a tour in Kenya my wife and I spent a day in a village
and in addition to people’s kind generosity inviting us into their homes, the
other strong impression from that day was how very happy the kids were to be
in school.

I took a remote class on globalization from Wharton Business School several
years ago and one of the messages was that Africa would become an economic
superpower.

While much of the world has benefited from globalization, I like to see each
country and region strongly maintain their own culture and national identity.
I would find a world that was more or less the same to be a sad thing.

Viva Indaba!

------
bo1024
The recent surge of ML research in various parts of Africa is awesome. But
from what I've seen (including this article), it is not much of an A.I.
_industry_ yet -- most activity is in research with an academic focus. (So, no
wonder it looks different from Silicon valley.) Hopefully this helps solve the
chicken-and-egg problem needed to get industry going.

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rashthedude
There should be a ban on medium articles being published on hacker news.

~~~
unixhero
I'd like to know why. Has it got something to do with yet another corporate
entity consolidating market position and power?

~~~
sgt
Medium is encouraging people to put their articles behind a paywall, so many
Medium stories are inaccessible unless you log in. Many feel this goes against
the spirit of blogging.

~~~
gtirloni
Yes but the romantic era of blogging is over. Content creators have to get
paid.

I'd rather have paywalls than widespread ads. At least it's the normal
arrangement that way: you create something valuable, I pay for it. Very clear
cut. With ads that relationship is blurry.

~~~
simion314
>Yes but the romantic era of blogging is over. Content creators have to get
paid.

IMO most bloggers are not living by writing blogs, the blogs post are used
usually for promotion or other reasons and not to make a few cents.

Newspapers are a different thing.

~~~
gtirloni
Sure, but we're talking about bloggers than want to profit. Otherwise, they
wouldn't have paywalls, right?

In that case, if their content is just self-promotion and doesn't have a lot
of value, fewer people will pay.

EDIT: Really puzzled by the downvotes, care to elaborate?

~~~
simion314
I did not downvote, I was under the wrong impression that all medium posts are
under paywall but I checked now ( [https://help.medium.com/hc/en-
us/articles/360018834314-Stori...](https://help.medium.com/hc/en-
us/articles/360018834314-Stories-that-are-part-of-the-metered-paywall) ) and
it seems the blogger must opt-in into it, so maybe the downvoters also had
same impression as me.

Still weird that some person wants to promote some conference and fine
volunteers and puts it under a paywall.

~~~
verdverm
Medium still requires login after so many visits to the site, regardless if
the content is behind the paywall

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dwoozle
Statistical machine learning is one of the fields where diversity really does
matter. A CPU from Silicon Valley works just as well in Africa. But models
trained in the West and with hyperparameters tweaked by western people will
contain all kinds of biases that make it dangerous even in the west and
downright lunatic in a very different culture.

~~~
timbaboon
I can't imagine a self-driving car managing to drive on South African (or many
other African) roads. It seems like these cars are trained to drive in
countries with different types of driver (and pedestrian) behaviour, and
probably wouldn't generalise well to places with little regard for rules of
the road. Mini-bus taxis here pretty much do whatever they want and are far
from rational in their decision making...

------
holstvoogd
High time, tech needs some desperately needs to diversify from the silicon
valley culture.

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MoroCode
How fantastic is this. I am Egyptian working in North America. This sounds
like something I would love to attend

------
nof1
I wouldn't be surprised if Africa eventually surpassed the West in AI. Often
it's easier for countries and companies with less existing technological
infrastructure (or baggage from the previous dominant paradigm) to ramp up on
something new.

~~~
lilfrost
Do you have an example?

~~~
inimino
This is sometimes called "leapfrogging" and one example was cell phone
technology (when countries that came later to the game adopted newer and
better standards).

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leapfrogging](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leapfrogging)

------
proc0
Yeah and they will use all the deep learning research, probably open source
tools like TensorFlow, and then deploy to AWS? I think what's happening is
that SV is democratizing IT tools for some years now and has been expanding
globally. Bit weird to frame it as a competitor when most likely it's probably
a child of silicon valley, and cannot really compete unless they come up with
a COMPLETELY NEW infrastructure and AI technology from the ground up, which is
possible but obviously not the case.

------
ineedasername
It's good to get away from the Silicon Valley mold. Sure it has produced many
great successes, but it's only one method of going about things, with various
trade-offs and failure modes. There's no reason for the model of _seed- >
angel-> venture-> IPO_ has to be repeated everywhere, a robust ecosystem of
technological advancement should have more diversity than that.

------
adrianN
Offtopic: This article contains four pictures that contribute nothing to the
content and weigh around 10MB. The first one takes up a whole screen of space.
Why do people do this?

~~~
jessriedel
Besides the SEO redact207 mentioned, readers are often driven away by a block
of text.

~~~
Yetanfou
I'd rephrase that into _skimmers are often driven away by a block of text
while readers are driven away by page-filling images_. There is an optimum
between these two which attracts people from both sides of the divide - a few
targeted images can enhance a text and make it look less imposing to skimmers.

