Over the course of 2024, we had the pleasure of finding out more about a whole range of AI topics from researchers around the world. Here, we highlight some of our favourite interviews from the past 12 months. Please note: we have not included our interviews with AAAI/ACM SIGAI Doctoral Consortium participants – these are highlighted in this dedicated collection. Christopher Chandler tells us about model checking and how it is used in the context of autonomous robotic systems, specifically looking at creating multi-step plans for a differential-drive wheeled robot so that it can avoid immediate danger. Bo Li and colleagues won an outstanding datasets and benchmark track award at NeurIPS 2023 for their work DecodingTrust: A Comprehensive Assessment of Trustworthiness in GPT Models.

Welcome to our monthly digest, where you can catch up with any AIhub stories you may have missed, peruse the latest news, recap recent events, and more. This month, we hear from AfriClimate AI co-founder Amal Nammouchi, learn about the kidney exchange problem, and find out how to improve the interpretability of logistic regression models. This month, we had the pleasure of chatting to Amal Nammouchi, co-founder of AfriClimate AI, a grassroots community focused on using artificial intelligence to tackle climate challenges in Africa. Amal told us about the inspiration behind the initiative, some of their activities and projects, and plans for the future. In this blog post, Danial Dervovic writes about work presented at IJCAI 2024 on improving the interpretability of logistic regression models.

AfriClimate AI is a grassroots community focused on leveraging artificial intelligence to tackle climate challenges in Africa. We spoke to Amal Nammouchi, one of the co-founders of AfriClimate AI, about the inspiration behind the initiative, some of their activities and projects, and plans for the future. Everything started last year at the Deep Learning Indaba in Ghana. The Deep Learning Indaba is the largest African AI community gathering and it happens once a year. The spark for AfriClimate AI came from a workshop with the work of one of our co-founders Rendani Mbuvha.

The Deep Learning Indaba 2024 was not just another event for us--it was a reunion. For AfriClimate AI, the Indaba represents our birthplace. It was at the Indaba 2023 in Accra, Ghana, that a pivotal conversation ignited a movement, sparking the creation of AfriClimate AI. "Last year, I was invited to give a talk about my work on Uncertainty, AI, and Climate Science at the Deep Learning Indaba in Accra, Ghana. As is usual with invited talks, one tends to focus on the successful parts of the work. But for some reason, that morning, I decided to add a slide about the challenges of working in AI and sustainability in Africa, primarily driven by the pervasive data scarcity issues. It turned out that almost everyone in the room identified with these issues. This was the birthplace of AfriClimate AI, a grassroots research community dedicated to tackling these issues head-on through capacity building, open datasets, representative benchmarks, and state-of-the-art weather forecasting models for Africa."

Welcome to our monthly digest, where you can catch up with any AIhub stories you may have missed, peruse the latest news, recap recent events, and more. This month, we learn about a framework to evaluate diversity in datasets, find out how banks may strategically mitigate their risk from fraud in real-time payment systems, and hear about the AfriClimate AI workshop at the Deep Learning Indaba. Don't Just Claim It, Jerone Andrews and colleagues propose using measurement theory from the social sciences as a framework to improve the collection and evaluation of diverse machine learning datasets. We spoke to Jerone about this work, which won a best paper award at ICML 2024. Real-time payments offer a fast processing time (of around 10 seconds), allowing for near-immediate receipt of funds.

Welcome to our monthly digest, where you can catch up with any AIhub stories you may have missed, peruse the latest news, recap recent events, and more. This month, we learn about causality and natural language, find out about the grassroots initiative AfriClimate AI, and discuss what responsible and trustworthy AI really means. In a series of interviews, we're chatting to some of the AAAI/SIGAI Doctoral Consortium participants to find out more about their research. We caught up with Salena Torres Ashton and found out about her work focusing on causality and natural language. Salena was a professional genealogist and historian for 25 years before deciding to return to University and study for a PhD.

Africa, with its diverse ecosystems and rich natural heritage, is not just a continent; it's a tapestry of vibrant cultures deeply intertwined with the environment. From the lush rainforests of the Congo Basin, serving as the planet's lungs, to the Sahara Desert's arid expanses, the beauty and uniqueness of Africa's ecosystems are a source of pride and integral to the African way of life. However, like all others, we as a continent face the imminent threat of climate change, which poses challenges that demand people-centric and context-aware solutions. Against this backdrop, AfriClimate AI, a grassroots community, was born with the vision to harness the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for a sustainable, prosperous, and climate-resilient Africa. The idea for AfriClimate AI emerged in September 2023 at the Deep Learning Indaba, Africa's largest annual gathering of AI researchers that took place in Accra, where we collectively realised the many opportunities for community-driven AI efforts in addressing this imminent threat.