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29 Apr 2025

African nlp and design justice

šŸŒ Advancing African NLP and Design Justice: DSFSI at NAACL 2025 & Global Humanities Collaborations

We’re proud to share that DSFSI researchers Prof. Vukosi Marivate and Dr. Idris Abdulmumin are co-authors on two papers accepted at the Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL 2025).

22 Apr 2025

Global Ai Summit

DSFSI at the Global AI Summit on Africa 2025

DSFSI at the University of Pretoria was proud to participate in the Global AI Summit on Africa 2025 (GAISAfrica2025), held in Kigali, Rwanda (hosted by the Rwanda Center for the Fourth Industrial Revolution). The summit brought together researchers, policymakers, funders, and innovators to chart the future of AI across the continent—with a focus on sovereignty, inclusion, and shared infrastructure.

26 Mar 2025

Dr Hope Mogale

Join Us for an Exciting Seminar on Designing Automatic Speech Recognition Systems that perform well and Scale on African Low-Resource Languages.! - Dr Hope Mogale

sšŸŒ Topic: Designing Automatic Speech Recognition Systems that perform well and Scale on African Low-Resource Languages.
šŸŽ¤ Speaker: Dr. Hope Mogale
šŸ“… Date: 26 March 2025
ā° Time: 14:00 - 15:15 SAST

04 Mar 2025

Dr. kayode olaleye

Join Us for an Exciting Seminar on Code-Switched Translation for African Languages! - Dr Kayode Olaleye

šŸŒ Topic: Bridging the Language Gap: Exploring Code-Switched Translation for African Languages
šŸŽ¤ Speaker: Dr. Kayode Olaleye
šŸ“… Date: 12 March 2025
ā° Time: 12:00 PM - 1:15 PM SAST

18 Sep 2024

Prof. Vukosi Marivate will deliver the 2024 Bernard Price Memorial Lecture on Thursday, 26 September 2024 @ Wits University

Prof. Vukosi Marivate will deliver the 2024 Bernard Price Memorial Lecture on Thursday, 26 September 2024. His talk, titled ā€œCharting a Path for African Low-Resource Languages – A Multifaceted Approach to Research and Development,ā€ will explore the challenges and opportunities of advancing Artificial Intelligence in Africa, specifically in language development. Prof. Marivate will emphasise the need for multidisciplinary approaches beyond technical solutions to address the cultural and human aspects essential to language innovation.

17 Sep 2024

DSFSI at the 2024 Deep Learning Indaba: A Journey of Learning, Innovation, and Community

DSFSI at the 2024 Deep Learning Indaba: A Journey of Learning, Innovation, and Community Last week, the Data Science for Social Impact (DSFSI) team had the incredible opportunity to attend the 2024 Deep Learning Indaba (DLI) in Dakar, Senegal. Bringing together over 600 passionate attendees from across the continent and beyond, the Indaba once again proved to be a cornerstone event for Africa’s thriving AI community. In this post, some of our team members—Fiskani Banda, Seani Rananga, and Matimba Shingange—shared their unique experiences, highlighting the event’s profound impact on their academic and professional journeys.

28 Aug 2024

Celebrating Excellence at Data Science for Social Impact: Fiskani Banda Wins the Alele-Williams Masters Award

We are pleased to announce that Fiskani Banda, a graduate from the Data Science for Social Impact research group at the University of Pretoria, South Africa, has won the Deep Learning Indaba 2024 Alele-Williams Masters Award. This award recognizes outstanding research and writing by masters candidates at African universities in the field of computational and statistical sciences.

09 Nov 2023

Welcome DSFSI Postdoc Dr Idris Abdulmumin

Welcome Dr Idris Abdulmumin to the Computer Science department at University of Pretoria. He is joining Data Science for Social Impact Research Group as a Postdoctoral Fellow through the ABSA UP Chair of Data Science.

30 May 2023

NSTF-South32 Awards 2022/2023 Finalist Announcement

We are pleased to announce that the Coronavirus COVID-19 (2019-nCoV) Data Repository for South Africa project led by the Data Science for Social Impact (DSFSI) Research Group at University of Pretoria is a finalist for the NSTF-South32 Awards 2022/2023

31 Mar 2023

From Data Engineering to Natural Language Corpora - The DSFSI 2022/2023 Summer Internship

Richard Lastrucci and Isheanesu Dzingirai - The main focus was collection, processing and creation of parallel corpora in the 11 official languages of South Africa. We collected multilingual data by building web scrapers, we processed and cleaned this and other extracted data before performing sentence alignment to produce the parallel corpora. We also improved and documented Masakhane Web.

27 Jun 2022

[Publication] Improving the Predictive Power of Historical Consistent Neural Networks

Paper by Rockefeller Rockefeller, Bubacarr Bah, Vukosi Marivate, and Hans-Georg Zimmermann , *African Institute for Mathematical Sciences, Cape Town, South Africa; *Department of Mathematical Sciences, Stellenbosch University, Cape Town, South Africa; Department of Computer Sciences, University of Pretoria, Pretoria, South Africa; Fraunhofer Society, 200703 Munich, Germany, Germany