K4A is a partner in the HumanE AI network of excellence which has been running a program of micro-projects and there is a potential to link this with the Network for AI and Knowledge for Sustainable Development (NAiXUS) established jointly by the International Research Centre on AI under the Auspices of UNESCO, the DataPop Alliance, Knowledge 4 All Foundation, ELLIS Alicante UNIT and Regional Center for Studies on the Development of the Information Society (Cetic.br). The Humane AI has funds reserved to finance the involvement of external partners and this call is concerned with micro-projects that would like to leverage these funds to include NAiXUS partners. Check here for the opportunity.
A K4A co-funded project with the University of Nova Gorica (UNG) and the UNESCO Chair of Open Technologies for OER and Open Learning at the Jožef Stefan Institute (JSI) organized the Open Education for a Better World Eduscope 2022, which took place from 20 to 22 September 2022 in a hybrid format in Vipava, Slovenia.
OER projects developed through the 2022 OE4BW Mentoring Programme were be presented with short pitches and received direct feedback in a panel discussion. The program was complemented by keynote presentations on the role of Open Education in Emergencies like COVID 19, Best practices in open pedagogy, Open Education and inclusive knowledge society – Leadership and Language Issues, Open Source Authoring Tools to Create Open Educational Resources, Visual Communication Technologies and Their Applications in Education.
During the 3-day event, the participants became familiar with open education design processes, methods, and tools. They learned from OER experts and practitioners how to align open education with developmental and strategic goals. This event built on the last four successful OE4BW Eduscopes, held as live conferences in Vipava, Slovenia, and online in 2020 and 2021. The conference’s aim was to share ideas and experiences, create new opportunities for people to network and create together, promote diversity of goals, backgrounds, and cultures, and contribute to implementing the UNESCO recommendation on open educational resources while addressing various sustainable development goals.
After the HumaneAI project setup phase, initiating the internal and external collaboration mechanisms the first 18 months were focused on engaging with the research questions posed in the proposal within WPs 1-5 and conducting a series of concrete high-impact activities to connect to the community. Nearly 70 micro projects spanning the large majority of the project partners have been initiated resulting in 82 project publications, incl. Nature, PNAS, Phys.Rev, Artificial Intelligence etc papers.
A major result of this work has been the updated research agenda which includes a novel conceptual framework for human-AI collaboration, a notion of shared representations centered around of narratives and the expansion of the definition of AI trustworthiness and explainability in terms of human-computer interaction (systems that humans (both individually and as a society) feel they understand and are comfortable trusting rather than systems that “only” fulfill certain hard technical specification).
After not taking place these past two years, K4A personnel is excited to return to the Deep Learning Indaba 2022 as attendees and sponsors in Tunis, Tunisia, from the 21st to the 26th of August.
The Deep Learning Indaba is the annual meeting of the African machine learning community with the mission to Strengthen African Machine Learning.
In 2022, the Indaba managed to see 350 members of Africa’s artificial intelligence community for a week-long event of teaching, research, exchange, and debate around the state of the art in machine learning and artificial intelligence.
As of August 2021, Lacuna Fund has selected 29 projects for funding in the Agriculture, Natural Language Processing, and Equity & Health domains. Project teams from the first rounds of funding in Agriculture and Natural Language Processing have either completed or are nearly finished with their datasets. Those project teams were invited to attend the 2022 Lacuna Fund Grantee Convening.
Society is undergoing a revolution in artificial intelligence (AI), with huge potential benefits, but also major risks for individuals and society. Increasingly, trust in the development, deployment, and the use of AI and autonomous systems concerns not only the technology’s inherent properties, but also the socio-technical systems of which they are part of, that is, the people, organisations, and societal environments in which systems are developed, implemented, and used. Currently, major challenges include the lack of fundamental theory and models to analyse and ensure that systems are aligned with human values and ethical principles, accountable, open to inspection, and understandable to diverse stakeholders. Furthermore, there is no doubt that this technological shift will have revolutionary effects on human life and society.
The goal of this Dagstuhl Perspectives Workshops was to contribute to shape that revolution, to provide the scientific and technological foundations for designing and deploying AI systems that work in partnership with human beings, to enhance human capabilities rather than replace human intelligence. Fundamentally new solutions are needed for core research problems in AI and human-computer interaction (HCI), especially to help people understand actions recommended or performed by AI systems and to facilitate meaningful interaction between humans and AI systems.
June 26 – July 1 , 2022, Dagstuhl Perspectives Workshop 22262
The ENCORE+ project consortium met at the end of the 2022 edition of Open Education Global Conference in Nantes on 26th May. Project personnel was involved in the organisation of the conference in the role of programme chairs, with a great turnout of almost 300 opened practitioners. The project is related to innovation and entrepreneurship with OER, and aims to bring academia and business together, by creating a network of European OER repositories and formulate value propositions for both sectors into a Knowledge Alliance.
The networks founding members also include the UNESCO Chair in Analytics and Data Science at University of Essex (ES), UNESCO Chair in AI & Data Science at The Hague University of Applied Sciences (THUAS), and the Regional Center for Studies on the Development of the Information Society – CETIC (Brazil) under the auspices of UNESCO.
The initial partners are coming from Slovenia, Australia, Andorra, Brazil, Chile, Finland, France, Ghana, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Kenya, Mexico, Netherlands, Nigeria, Pakistan, Senegal, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Tanzania, UK and USA.
NAIXUS was launched as multi-stakeholder initiative with the goal of bridging the gap between AI and sustainable development at the side event of the STI 2022 Forum on May 4, 2022. Speakers at the event included Ambassador Boštjan Malovrh, Permanent Representative of Slovenia to the UN in New York, Marielza Oliveira, Communications and Information Sector, IFAP Secretary, UNESCO, and John Shawe-Taylor, IRCAI Director.
The main part of the agenda consisted of short presentations introducing the history, goal, objectives, composition, activities, programmes and technological focus of the network with supporters and initial partners of the initiative to build this global network of excellence centres in sustainable development. The recording of the event is available here.
Launching a Global Network of AI Excellence Centres in Sustainable Development – Side Event At The Sti Forum – 7th Multi-Stakeholder Forum On Science, Technology And Innovation For The Sustainable Development Goals
The Knowledge 4 All Foundation is proud to have been acknowledged by the Masakhane Research Foundation in their recent influential publications advancing Natural Language Processing (NLP) for African languages. These publications highlight the Foundation’s pivotal contributions to developing datasets and fostering AI innovation across the continent.
“A Few Thousand Translations Go a Long Way! Leveraging Pre-trained Models for African News Translation” (NAACL 2022) This paper explores how a small number of translations can significantly enhance pre-trained models for African news translation, addressing the scarcity of African-language datasets. Read the full paper here.
“MasakhaNER 2.0: Africa-centric Transfer Learning for Named Entity Recognition” (EMNLP 2022) This work presents MasakhaNER 2.0, a model leveraging Africa-centric transfer learning techniques for Named Entity Recognition (NER) in African languages, providing a vital resource for African NLP tasks. Read the full paper here.
“MasakhaPOS: Part-of-Speech Tagging for Typologically Diverse African Languages” (ACL 2023) This research introduces MasakhaPOS, which addresses the challenges of Part-of-Speech (POS) tagging in the diverse and underrepresented African linguistic landscape. Read the full paper here.
These projects, made possible through collaborative efforts and the contributions of Knowledge 4 All Foundation, have significantly advanced NLP for African languages, paving the way for inclusive and representative AI solutions.
The Foundation expresses its gratitude to Masakhane Research Foundation and remains committed to supporting initiatives that promote linguistic diversity, inclusivity, and technological progress for African communities. Together, these partnerships exemplify the power of global collaboration in driving impactful AI research and development.
We are very happy to announce that one of our Lacuna funded projects titled Named Entity Recognition and parts of Speech Datasets for African Languages has been successfully finished. At the start of our work, none of the languages associated with this project had a manually prepared NER dataset. Also, only a very small subset of languages in South Africa, and Yoruba, Naija, Wolof, and Bambara had Part-of-speech (POS) datasets. This project has therefore provided the first carefully prepared NER and POS datasets for 20 African languages. The project initially achieved new parallel texts (up to 8000 parallel sentences) for at least 8 low-resourced languages. The parallel texts are a very valuable resource for bilingual NLP applications. The results will be uploaded to the Masakhane Github repository.
