Data Science Nigeria hosts Artificial Intelligence for financial inclusion summit and bootcamp

Data Science Nigeria will next month host its annual summit and bootcamp focused on the application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in financial inclusion strategy, with specific focus on understanding the financially excluded segment, use of alternative data (geospatial, social media, mobile footprint, psychographics) in developing credit risk scoring algorithm, and building simpler AI-enabled financial delivery interfaces.

The summit is scheduled to hold on Wednesday, 10 October 2018 at the Oriental Hotel, Victoria Island, Lagos and with the theme, “New Algorithms for the Financially Excluded Segment”.

This is a broad based stakeholder session focused on understanding emerging trends and advanced data analytics use cases applied to issues of financial inclusion. Leading the plenary and discussions are leading local and international experts like Adebisi Shonubi, MD/CEO, NIBSS; Dr (Mrs) Yinka David-West, Director, Lagos Business School; Matt Grasser, Director, Inclusive Fintech, Bankable Frontiers Associate, USA; Temitope Akin-Fadeyi and Head Financial Inclusion Secretariat, Central Bank of Nigeria; Ekow Duker.

The one-day Summit will be followed by a five-day residential, all-expenses-paid Artificial Intelligence bootcamp and hackathon on emerging trends in machine learning and deep learning between 10 and 14 October 2018. The goal is to build world-class capacity in advanced data analytics, upskill financial inclusion data analysts and researchers in emerging best practices, and to support the development of contextually relevant algorithm and tech innovation.

The boot camp will include face-to-face teaching, virtual online classes, and a hands-on hackathon using the Kaggle.com platform. Distinguished data scientists from leading institutions including the Google AI Lab, Stanford AI Research, GitHub and Bankable Frontiers Associates will facilitate the sessions. An ongoing pan-Nigeria selection competition will select the 150 best-performing students/researchers/practitioners that will be accepted into this free boot camp. The boot camp will also serve as the final test of the Inter-Campus Machine Learning Competition, sponsored by BlueChip Technologies as part of its 10th anniversary celebration.

Over 10,000 students from 90 universities and polytechnics have participated in the preliminary phase. This year’s boot camp will include a very competitive hackathon using Nigeria-centric data to explore, extrapolate and explain emerging possibilities in financial inclusion algorithms.

The boot camp is driven by a broader strategic intent to accelerate Nigeria’s development through a solution-oriented application of machine learning in solving social/business problems and to galvanize data science knowledge revolution for employability, technology innovation and sustainable socio-economic development.

The boot camp learning sessions will be enriched by leading experts from different parts of the world, including Matt Grasser, Director, Inclusive Fintech, Bankable Frontiers Associate, USA; Moustapha Cisse PhD, Google AI Lab; Sara Hooker, Google AI Lab; Prof Tom Dietterich, Distinguished Professor & Director Oregon State University & Founder BigML; Dr Emmanuel Doro, Principal Data Scientist, Jet.com, USA; Dr Sulaimon Afolabi, Argility South Africa.
Microsoft, BlueChip Technologies, Terragon Group, AXA Mansard, FCMB, InstaDeep AI, ProShare Nigeria, The Guardian, Guardian TV, OneFi, KPMG and Zindi South Africa are the sponsors and partners of the bootcamp and summit.

Participation in the one-day summit is free and interested participants are required to pre-register at www.datasciencenigeria.org/aisummit while the 5-day AI bootcamp is based on pre-competition qualification at https://www.datasciencenigeria.org/inter-campus-ml-competition.
Data Science Nigeria is a non-profit initiative of MTN’s Chief Transformation Officer, Bayo Adekanmbi. It is spurred on by a compelling drive to raise a new generation of data scientists and knowledge entrepreneurs who will lead high-impact artificial intelligence research for socio-economic development, transformational innovation and economic prosperity of Nigeria and the African continent at large.