AI in Africa: A Focus on Natural Language Processing Technologies

10. April 2025, 12.00 Uhr Kunstuniversität Linz, Domgasse 1, Lecture Room Interface Cultures

Interface Cultures lädt zum Gastvortrag von Kathleen Siminyu.

This talk explores the AI landscape in Africa, highlighting i) grassroots efforts in capacity building, ii) important research contributions from the NLP community in Africa and iii) key questions and challenges on ownership and governance that the ecosystem is grappling with.

Kathleen Siminyu is a Natural Language Processing researcher at the Distributed AI Research Institute. She focuses her research on African languages as a form of activism and from a desire to see these languages better represented on digital platforms. Kathleen has been involved in various efforts to build language datasets. Her experiences in building open datasets has inspired a desire to explore data governance and licensing models that address power and resource imbalances. Kathleen also works with African AI communities to enable ecosystem capacity building and research relevant to Africa. She continues to organise with communities as part of the Deep Learning Indaba, where she is a trustee and the Masakhane Research Foundation, where she is a director.