We study the analysis of all the movements of the population on the basis of their mobility from one node to another, to observe, measure, and predict the impact of traffic according to this mobility. The frequency of congestion on roads directly or indirectly impacts our economic or social welfare. Our work focuses on exploring some machine learning methods to predict (with a certain probability) traffic in a multimodal transportation network from population mobility data. We analyze the observation of the influence of people's movements on the transportation network and make a likely prediction of congestion on the network based on this observation (historical basis).

This paper presents the proof-of-concept of the first automatic voice assistant ever built in Wolof language, the main vehicular language spoken in Senegal. This voicebot is the result of a collaborative research project between Orange Innovation in France, Orange Senegal (aka Sonatel) and ADNCorp, a small IT company based in Dakar, Senegal. The purpose of the voicebot is to provide information to Orange customers about the Sargal loyalty program of Orange Senegal by using the most natural mean to communicate: speech. The voicebot receives in input the customer's oral request that is then processed by a SLU system to reply to the customer's request using audio recordings. The first results of this proof-of-concept are encouraging as we achieved 22\% of WER for the ASR task and 78\% of F1-score on the NLU task.

This work is part of the Kallaama project, whose objective is to produce and disseminate national languages corpora for speech technologies developments, in the field of agriculture. Except for Wolof, which benefits from some language data for natural language processing, national languages of Senegal are largely ignored by language technology providers. However, such technologies are keys to the protection, promotion and teaching of these languages. Kallaama focuses on the 3 main spoken languages by Senegalese people: Wolof, Pulaar and Sereer. These languages are widely spoken by the population, with around 10 million of native Senegalese speakers, not to mention those outside the country. However, they remain under-resourced in terms of machine-readable data that can be used for automatic processing and language technologies, all the more so in the agricultural sector. We release a transcribed speech dataset containing 125 hours of recordings, about agriculture, in each of the above-mentioned languages. These resources are specifically designed for Automatic Speech Recognition purpose, including traditional approaches. To build such technologies, we provide textual corpora in Wolof and Pulaar, and a pronunciation lexicon containing 49,132 entries from the Wolof dataset.

Cormas is an agent-based simulation platform developed in the late 90s by the Green research at CIRAD unit to support the management of natural resources and understand the interactions between natural and social dynamics. This platform is well-suited for a participatory simulation approach that empowers local stakeholders by including them in all modelling and knowledge-sharing steps. In this short paper, we present the Cormas platform and discuss its unique features and their importance for the participatory simulation approach. We then present the early results of our ongoing study on managing pastoral resources in the Sahel region, identify the problems faced by local stakeholders, and discuss the potential use of Cormas at the next stage of our study to collectively model and understand the effective ways of managing the shared agro-sylvo-pastoral resources.

Explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) provides explanations for not interpretable machine learning (ML) models. While many technical approaches exist, there is a lack of validation of these techniques on real-world datasets. In this work, we present a use-case of XAI: an ML model which is trained to estimate electrification rates based on mobile phone data in Senegal. The data originate from the Data for Development challenge by Orange in 2014/15. We apply two model-agnostic, local explanation techniques and find that while the model can be verified, it is biased with respect to the population density. We conclude our paper by pointing to the two main challenges we encountered during our work: data processing and model design that might be restricted by currently available XAI methods, and the importance of domain knowledge to interpret explanations.

DRAGGIN' DRAGON: Shelby is selling 5 new classic Cobras for an astonishing price. RACY RANGER: Ford is taking on the Dakar Rally with a Ranger pickup. The Toyota Land Cruiser will return to the U.S. soon. COMEBACK KID: The Toyota Land Cruiser is returning to the USA. AI BIKES: Lightning Motorcycles is using artificial intelligence to build'organic' motorcycles.

Epidemic models are powerful tools in understanding infectious disease. However, as they increase in size and complexity, they can quickly become computationally intractable. Recent progress in modelling methodology has shown that surrogate models can be used to emulate complex epidemic models with a high-dimensional parameter space. We show that deep sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) models can serve as accurate surrogates for complex epidemic models with sequence based model parameters, effectively replicating seasonal and long-term transmission dynamics. Once trained, our surrogate can predict scenarios a several thousand times faster than the original model, making them ideal for policy exploration. We demonstrate that replacing a traditional epidemic model with a learned simulator facilitates robust Bayesian inference.

Former winners England will take on African champions Senegal in the second knockout match on Sunday. Despite star player Sadio Mane's absence, Senegal have been impressive in the World Cup. The Lions of Teranga have scored five goals this tournament and finished behind leaders Netherlands in Group A. England sit on top of the tournament scoring charts with nine goals and finished top of Group B. Kashef, our artificial intelligence (AI) robot, has analysed more than 200 metrics, including the number of wins, goals scored and FIFA rankings, from matches played over the past century to see who is most likely to win. Prediction: England and Senegal have never met. However, based on comparable performance metrics, Kashef has given England, ranked fifth, a 68 percent chance of beating Senegal, ranked 18th.

A scholarship programme seeking to nurture talent in technological research in Africa's public universities has been launched. The three-year programme aims to meet the rising demand for expertise in responsible artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) in the continent. While machine learning encompasses the study of computer algorithms and use of data, artificial intelligence involves the simulation of human intelligence by machines, usually computer system. The scholarship programme will support selected scholars to undertake PhD research in AI and ML in African universities, and early career academics to strengthen their research and development capacities in the two areas. Murang'a County to give dairy firm to farmers Sacco What Matiang'i didn't reveal on deployment of police officers The initiative, dubbed the A14D Africa scholarship, is implemented by the African Centre for Technology Studies (ACTS) based in Kenya in partnership with Kwame Nkrumah University in Ghana, University of Linkoping, Sweden, University Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar, Senegal, University of California, Human Sciences Research Council and Institute for Humanities in Africa based in South Africa and the University of Eduardo Mondlane, Mozambique.

Extreme E, the pioneering electric off-road racing series, is teaming up with WSC Sports, the global leader in artificial intelligence (AI)-driven sports video technology ahead of its second X Prix from 29-30 May 2021 at Lac Rose in Dakar, Senegal. Extreme E will have access to WSC Sports' cloud-based live-clipping platform Clipro, allowing the series to create and publish near-live and post-race highlights in a matter of seconds, as well as WSC Sports' innovative Graphics Engine, which automatically adds stunning visuals to videos to help brand and monetise content. During the series Extreme E and WSC Sports will work closely to apply WSC Sports' state-of-the-art AI technology to automatically generate real time highlights for this new sport. WSC Sports has already adapted its technology to support car racing working in 2020 with its partner NASCAR to automatically produce real-time race highlights. WSC Sports will also assist Extreme E in distributing race highlights to all its media partners, as well as drivers' social channels thanks to WSC Sports' partnership with Socialie.