Research & Innovation

Advancing AI for African contexts

Our research lab develops AI technologies that understand and serve African languages, cultures, and needs.

Publications

Our research

Peer-reviewed papers and technical reports from our research team.

Year:
Topic:
2024NeurIPS 2024

AfroLM: A Self-Supervised Language Model for African Languages

Okonkwo, A., Mensah, K., et al.

We present AfroLM, a multilingual language model pre-trained on 50 African languages, achieving state-of-the-art results on AfriSenti and other benchmarks.

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2024CVPR 2024

Computer Vision for Crop Disease Detection in Sub-Saharan Africa

Moyo, T., El-Amin, F., et al.

A mobile-optimized deep learning model for detecting 15 common crop diseases with 94% accuracy on smartphone images.

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2023FAccT 2023

Ethical AI Frameworks for African Contexts

Benali, N., Adebayo, O., et al.

A comprehensive framework for responsible AI development that incorporates African values, communal ethics, and local contexts.

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Focus Areas

What we research

Key areas where we're pushing the boundaries of AI for Africa.

African Language NLP

Building language models and NLP systems for over 100 African languages.

Computer Vision

Developing vision models for healthcare, agriculture, and infrastructure.

Responsible AI

Creating frameworks for ethical AI development in African contexts.

Edge AI

Optimizing models for deployment on low-resource devices.

Open Data

Datasets for the community

Freely available datasets to support AI research and development in Africa.

AfriSpeech

Multi-accent African English speech corpus with 2,000+ hours.

200GB15 accents

AfriSenti

Sentiment analysis dataset for 14 African languages.

50K samples14 languages

CropDiseaseAfrica

Images of crop diseases common in sub-Saharan Africa.

100K imagesAnnotated

Collaborate with us

We're always looking for research partners, visiting researchers, and collaborators from academia and industry. Join us in advancing AI for Africa.

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