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 look back at our week attending NeurIPS, hear about work localising illegal mining sites using machine learning and geospatial data, and discover how a group of agents can minimise their journey length whilst avoiding collisions. We were lucky enough to attend the thirty-eighth Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2024) which took place in Vancouver, Canada, from Tuesday 10 December to Sunday 15 December. On the first day of the event we held a session on science communication for AI researchers. It was great to see so many people there, and so many thoughtful questions following our presentation.

Andrews Ata Kangah is a team leader and researcher working on democratizing AI and AI solutions for environmental problems. We spoke to him about his research, attending the AfriClimate AI workshop at the Deep Learning Indaba, and what inspired him to work in AI and on climate-related projects. My name is Andrews Ata Kangah. I also double as a researcher at Armtos, which is a non-profit. At Armtos, our current goal is to build a solution to solve the illegal mining problem that's going on in Ghana. The mining is destroying the lands that are within mining areas.