Lacuna Fund

LACUNA FUND IS HEADED TO NYC! Over 25 Lacuna Fund grantees are making their way to New York for the 2024 Lacuna Fund Grantee Convening, ahead of #ClimateWeek2024. Attendees will join Lacuna Fund staff and partners at our annual convening to participate in workshops, exchange ideas, and present impactful projects spanning #Climate and #Energy, #Health, and #Forests. We can't wait to share #OurVoiceInData! #LFNYC2024 #LacunaFund, #FillingDataGaps, #ClosingDataGaps

Big congratulations to Jade Abbott on this achievement! 👏 #LacunaFundGrantee #NLP #Language #ML #AI

Register for the Lacuna Malaria Detection Challenge webinar! Join Amy Bray, and Darius Moruri, Zindi data scientists; Jennifer Pratt Miles, Practice Director at Meridian Institute and Rose Nakasi, PhD, Lecturer at Makerere University, for an introduction to the challenge, starter notebook walkthrough and Q&A. Thursday, 26 September, 5pm GMT. Lacuna Fund RSVP👉https://lu.ma/mc6mqojy #malaria #detection #webinar #healthcare #machinelearning #AI

Thinking Machines Data Science will be participating in the following events at #ClimateWeekNYC from Sept 19 to 26: - The Lacuna Fund Grantee Convening from Sept 20-21. We'll be meeting other grantees and exchanging learnings from our experience in building a training dataset for applications of ML on climate and health challenges! - Climate Change AI's two events on Sept 23 and 24, both about the role of AI in climate action! Especially excited to share about our project with Conservation International that used AI and earth observation data to identify locations for sustainable shrimp farming and mangrove restoration -- a proud CCAI Innovation Grantee 2021. I'll be joined by my colleagues Anica Araneta, Project Manager for our Climate and Sustainability Projects Joshua Cortez, our Geospatial ML Lead Please message if you will be in NY for climate week and would like to connect.

I had so much fun, learned so much, and connected with so many friends at Deep Learning Indaba at Université Amadou Mahtar MBOW in Dakar, Senegal this week! Thanks to Vukosi Marivate and Dr. Chijioke Okorie, and also Chris Emezue for sharing new thinking about licensing to foster both data sharing and community benefit/sustainability. Amazing to see and hear talks by so many Lacuna Fund partners on African NLP, Climate resilience, and health data. Great to strategize with Leonida Mutuku and International Development Research Centre (IDRC) colleagues, as well as Balthas Seibold and Christian Resch about how to promote the use of ML datasets and facilitate networking among African policy makers, dataset creators, and developers. The Voices of Africa: Building the Infrastructure for African NLP workshop organized by Howard Lakougna stimulated new ideas and conversations about scaling dataset creation, dataset use cases and impact, and data governance. I feel so lucky to work with Albert Kahira, Datawise Africa, who laid out a path forward for compute for Africa. 

👌🏾👌🏾👌🏾 This adventure was electic , the energy , the people💕💕💕 ,the connection everything!!!. I am very grateful for all of this journey and thank all WFP innovation accelerator team for their support. A big Kudos to all my team members for their hard work: let’s keep growing and impact more farmers’ live with JOKALANTE .

Reminder: Lacuna Malaria Detection Challenge is still ongoing! 🦟🔬 Can you develop a model that can accurately identify and classify malaria parasites in blood slide images? 🔗-https://lnkd.in/deMtmMwT 🤝In collaboration with Zindi & Lacuna Fund

“Like the dung beetle, which moves 250 times its weight, InkubaLM exemplifies the strength of smaller models.” Lelapa AI introduces #InkubaLM 🪲 “To address the need for lightweight African language models, we introduce a small language model, InkubaLM-0.4B,trained for the five African languages: IsiZulu, Yoruba, Hausa, Swahili, and IsiXhosa. InkubaLM-0.4B has been trained from scratch using 1.9 billion tokens of data for the five African languages, along with English and French data, totalling 2.4 billion tokens of data.” Congratulations to the team! #AfricanNLP #NLP #AI #ML #machinelearning

I’m excited to go to Deep Learning Indaba 2024 in Dakar and participate in the workshop “𝗩𝗼𝗶𝗰𝗲𝘀 𝗼𝗳 𝗔𝗳𝗿𝗶𝗰𝗮: 𝗕𝘂𝗶𝗹𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗶𝗻𝗳𝗿𝗮𝘀𝘁𝗿𝘂𝗰𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗔𝗳𝗿𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗻 𝗡𝗟𝗣” on Friday, 6 September 2024. In the workshop, we will explore state-of-the-art Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies for African languages and their role in fostering social impact through research and collaborations across the African continent. If you’re at DLI, come join me in the session - and let us work with leading experts in African NLP to determine the most promising approaches for promoting African language AI infrastructure. For more information, visit: https://lnkd.in/dxczmGid The workshop is co-organised by Masakhane, DSNai - Data Science Nigeria, CLEAR Global, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and GIZ “FAIR Forward - Artificial Intelligence for All.

Mila is in Dakar for the Deep Learning Indaba! This weekend, a delegation of Mila representatives is flying to Dakar, Senegal, to take part in the prestigious Deep Learning Indaba. Nicole O., MSc student at McGill University, Chris Emezue from Université de Montréal, Brice NANDA, MSc student at Polytechnique Montréal, Afaf Taïk, postdoctoral researcher at Université de Montréal and Sékou-Oumar Kaba, PhD student at McGill University will attend the week-long event where they will present their innovative research and participate in a mentorship program. #DLI2024 #Indaba2024