The organising team for this workshop has rich and varied collective experience in the African data ecosystem, and in working with African communities. Team members have worked on many technical and socio-technical aspects of data for AI, spanning data collection, crowdsourcing and annotation, data publishing, management, sharing and governance.
Dr Wiebke Hutiri
Research Scientist, Sony AI, Switzerland
Siobhan Mackenzie Hall
DPhil Student, University of Oxford
Raesetje Sefala
PhD Student at McGill University and Mila, Research Fellow at DAIR Institute, Canada
Thapelo Andrew Sindane
PhD Candidate, Computer Science, University of Pretoria
Jessica Ojo
Research Engineer, Lelapa.ai; Research Student at McGill University and Mila, Canada
Aremu Anuoluwapo
Lead Data Officer, Lelapa.ai; MSc. Student at University of Trento, Italy
Chris Emezue
Lanfrica Labs; Researcher at Mila
Prof Shaimaa Lazem
Associate Research Professor, City of Scientific Research and Technological Applications (SRTA-City), Egypt
Shaimaa Lazem is an Associate Research Professor at the City of Scientific Research and Technological Applications (SRTA-City), Egypt. Her PhD in Computer Science from Virginia Tech, USA, fueled her passion for understanding how technology design can transcend Western perspectives. Dr. Lazem champions the development of inclusive and impactful technologies. She leverages participatory design methods and critical approaches like decolonial and feminist theories to ensure technology serves everyone effectively. She is working on developing human-centered approaches to design Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications in Africa with support from Google 2020 Award for Inclusion Research and Google AI 2021 Award. She was Recognized as People of ACM in 2023 and a Leaders-in-Innovation Fellow with the Royal Academy of Engineering in London since 2018.