2020 Black in AI Workshop

Gelyn C. Watkins
CEO

Call For Papers Black in AI Workshop 2020

Black researchers in AI, ML and related application areas (health, agriculture, politics, economics, law etc.) are welcome to submit their work. We invite submissions for the 4th Black in AI Workshop (co-located with NeurIPS). The workshop will be held virtually on Monday, December 7 2020. We encourage individuals from Black, African, and Diasporic communities to submit their work. Submission deadline has NOW PASSED! Authors of accepted papers will be notified after November 6th 2020.

We're addressing the diversity crisis in AI

If you are in the field of AI and self-identify as Black, please fill out the Google Form, to request to join and we will add you to various platforms that we maintain. We also welcome allies to join our group using the Google form. Allies will be added to our email lists, where we send out group updates and requests for assistance.

Black in AI 2020 Workshop Organizers

Charles Earl

Charles Earl
Automattic.com

Charles Earl currently lives near Atlanta, Georgia (US) and works at Automattic.com -- the company behind WordPress and tumblr -- as a data scientist. He is passionate about building technology that is transparent, equitable, and just. Charles grew up in Atlanta and is a graduate of Morehouse College, Georgia Tech, UC Berkeley, and the University of Chicago


Victor Silva

Victor Silva
University of Alberta

Victor Silva (He/Him) is a PhD student in Computing Science at the University of Alberta under supervision of Eleni Stroulia and Joerg Sander. His interest lies broadly in the field of Artificial Intelligence with focus on Data Mining. He is originally from Brazil and identifies himself as multi-racial.


Ignatius Ezeani

Ignatius Ezeani

Lancaster University

Ignatius is a Senior Teaching/Research Associate with the Data Science Group at Lancaster University. He's interested in the application of NLP techniques in building resources for low-resource languages especially African languages, but his interests span other related areas like corpus linguistics, distributional semantics, machine learning, deep neural models and general AI


Foutse Yuehgoh

Foutse Yuehgoh

Coexel

Foutse is a Machine learning researcher, Co-founder of WPSYG association, who likes to volunteer on data science-related projects. She holds 2 master's degrees one in Machine learning and Big data from the African Institute for mathematical sciences (AIMS) and the other in information and data processing from the University of Paris Saclay, France. She is currently a Data Analyst at Coexel, France. She uses NLP to optimise news search and recommendations.


Flora Tasse

Flora Tasse

Streem Inc

Flora is the Head of CV/AR at Streem. She specialises in AI applied to Computer Graphics and Vision problems faced in AR/VR. Her team at Streem is making the mobile phone's camera more intelligent, by building AI agents that can understand images/videos and augment them with relevant interactive virtual content. She joined Streem, after it acquires her startup Selerio, which was spun out of her PhD work at Cambridge University. At Cambridge, Flora research focused on 3D shape retrieval using different query types such as 3D models, images/sketches and range scans. This work was awarded the 2013 Google Doctoral Fellowship in Computer Graphics and published in various top-tier venues, including ICCV and SIGGRAPH Asia.

She served on several international program committees such as ICML, ICLR and Eurographics. Notably she was Paper Chair of the 2019 Black in AI workshop, co-located with NeurIPS. She was recently named one of the Rework Top 30 UK Women in AI and appeared on Computer Weekly Most Influential women in UK Tech longlist.


Tobi Olatunji

Tobi Olatunji

enlitic.com

Tobi, an unusual mix of doctor and scientist, transitioned out of a full-time clinical role to focus on building intelligent applications for clinical care because it became clear that clinician-led engineering had the potential to transform the entire health system at a scale far greater than a number of clinic visits. Gradual but thoughtful context-driven changes would lead to millions of lives saved, happier patients, clinicians, and a healthier health system overall.

Tobi has a Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery (MBBS) degree from the College of Medicine, University of Ibadan; a Master of Science in Medical Informatics from the University of San Francisco, and currently leads Clinical Natural Language Processing at Enlitic, an artificial intelligence startup in San Francisco, California. His passion for building healthcare in his home country, Nigeria, is focused on developing technology infrastructure for successful digital transitions in large public hospitals.


Salomey Osei

Salomey Osei

African Masters of Machine Intelligence (AMMI)

Salomey Osei holds a Bachelor, a Master of Philosophy (Submitted Thesis) in Applied Mathematics from the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) and an Msc in Industrial Mathematics from the African Institute for Mathematical Science. She is wrapping up her thesis on ML with applications to Finance with the African Masters of Machine Intelligence sponsored by Google and Facebook. She is also a recipient of the MasterCard Foundation Scholarship among others. She is a team lead for Ghana NLP and a co-organizer for the Women in Machine Learning and Data Science(WiMLDS) Accra chapter.

She is interested in leveraging her interest in machine learning in the field of finance and also to help bring African languages to the NLP map. She is passionate about mentoring students, especially females in STEM and her long term goal is to share her knowledge with others by lecturing.


Nwamaka Okafor

Nwamaka Okafor

University College Dublin

Nwamaka Okafor is currently a PhD Student in the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University College Dublin. Her research is supported by Schlumberger and TETFUND-Nigeria and is focused on the application of IoTs and AI in ecological sensing. She works under the supervision of Prof. Declan Delaney on the EPA funded SmartBog research project on Irish peatlands where she develops and deploys cost-effective IoT systems and AI solutions to corroborate remote and satellite-based surveillance. Nwamaka holds a masters degree in Computer Forensics and Cyber Security with Distinction from the University of Greenwich, London. She is also a mentor and Judge in Technovation Girls and a member of the Elsevier's Advisory Panel.

She is a receipient of several awards including the Google Women Techmaker Award, ACM Student Research Competition Award, Young Researcher, Heidelberg Laureate Forum and so on. Nwamaka is also a lecturer in the department of Computer Science, Federal Polytechnic Nekede Nigeria and she is married with children.


Mírian Silva

Mírian Silva

IBM

Mirian (She/Her) is a Software Engineer at IBM Brazil. She is a producer and instructor at Coursera, where she teaches Guided Projects. She holds a B. Sc. in Computational Mathematics from Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil. Her research interests include broadly Artificial intelligence and Machine Learning, with a special focus on Optimization and Computational Biology. She is an advocate and promotes women in STEM, having founded Girls Support Girls, a stem support for women in Brazil.


Krystal Maughan

Krystal Maughan

University of Vermont

Krystal is a second year PhD student at the University of Vermont, where she is reaching Provable fairness, privacy and machine learning. She is an active member of Black in AI and has previously served as co-organizer for the lunch at Black in AI at AAAI and the Black in AI at ACL social.

Related Organizations

Black Girls Code
Data Science Africa
Deep Learning Indaba

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Women in Machine Learning
Queer in AI

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Mission and Vision

We aim to shift the power dynamics across the AI Ecosystem to help visionaries, creators, thought leaders and builders maximize the multifaceted future of artificial intelligence. We envision a barrier-free field that empowers our community to contribute and accelerate their best, most brilliant work for themselves, fellow practitioners, and their global ecosystems.