Thanks for being part of our extraordinary journey in 2023
Let us reflect on our breathtaking journey together
Dear DSN family and friends,
It is with great excitement and fulfillment that we share this with you.
As we gear up for 2024 and bid 2023 farewell, let's hit the brakes and soak in the awesomeness of our shared journey.
Indeed, this year was a rollercoaster of wins, strategic partnerships, and engagement. Here is a sneak peek at some of those moments (Click here for more awesomeness that we created together in 2023)
January kicked off with ecosystem enablement through the visit of the leadership team of Datadotorg USA. This provided a platform to build a local network of partners across government, hubs, and researchers on data science for social impact at scale.
February came with our partnership with Meta to organize the Nigeria Geospatial Mobility Data for Health workshop across 4 African countries: Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal, and South Africa.
In March, we participated in the yearly Umoja Hack organized by Zindi, where more than five of our campus communities topped the leaderboard in their various categories and also organized the DSN-NVIDIA GTC Watch Party.
In April, we partnered with Microsoft to organize free AI classes across 50 cities in Nigeria, which have trained a cumulative number of 20,000+ learners, while in May, we hosted the Microsoft Responsible AI Demo workshop with over 800 people in attendance.
In May, we showcased our works at the world's foremost Artificial Intelligence conference, the International Conference on Learning Representations 2023 (ICLR), where we presented our work at the intersection of Natural Language Processing and Reproductive Health.
June was a high-paced month when we participated at the inaugural AfricAI conference in Kigali, Rwanda, and also attended the 2023 IndabaX in Nigeria, where we won the best paper award, making it DSN’s third consecutive win of this award back-to-back.
In July, we launched the first-ever female-oriented learning intervention in Northern Nigeria, Arewa Ladies4Tech, to support data science capacity building for women in Northern Nigeria. We also ran the 2023 DSN AI Bootcamp Hackathon, with over 1000 participants sweating it out to dominate the leaderboard.
August was the month we hosted our high-impact hybrid AI Bootcamp, with over 30 speakers in attendance and over 1600 participants.
In September, we won the highly competitive global Grand Challenges grant on AI applications in Education and Financial Inclusion, an initiative funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to demonstrate the application of large language models in solving problems. We were part of the top 50 across the world!
In October, we participated at the famous AI Conference in Indaba, Ghana, where 10 of our papers got accepted, while in November, we also partnered with Microsoft to organize an exceptional 8-week masterclass on Generative AI for Educators with attendance from different countries.
November offered a great opportunity to share world-class knowledge across various conferences and events across the world, including the ACM Africa AI Conference on Finance, GoMyCode Career Masterclass, the Nigerian Academy of Engineering, the Lagos Business School African Retail Congress, and the IEEE Data-Driven Analytics conference in Morocco.
In December, we participated at the famous AI Conference in NeurIPS, USA, where 4 of our papers got accepted and also won the 2023 Art of Technology (AOT) 5.0 Excellence Award in the AI/ML Category. We also won the Nigerian Artificial Intelligence Research Grant for our work in Artificial Intelligence for Education.
Thanks for being part of these amazing success stories that we created together.
Here's to riding the momentum, breaking barriers, and more in the coming year!
Cheers to a festive season full of joy, and may 2024 be a year of Generative Possibilities.