The Leeds-Africa Hub on Data Science and AI across mathematics and sciences serves as a platform for exchanging knowledge and insights in research areas profoundly impacted by advancements in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Data Science. Our primary goal is to foster collaboration by bringing together experts from both the UK and across Africa, facilitating new partnerships and encouraging researchers to share their work with diverse communities.
“The Hub,” which aims to foster collaborations between the University of Leeds (UoL) and less developed countries (LDCs) to address global challenges using physical and mathematical sciences. The main objective is to develop collaborative research projects that tackle sustainable development challenges, including climate science, bioinformatics, ecosystem functioning, and industrial and technological advancement. By combining expertise from the UoL and overseas partners, the Hub seeks to promote the growth of LDCs while ensuring the preservation of their local environment and the global environment.
Planned Activities
Workshops: The Hub plans to organize initial workshops in South Africa during September 2023. These workshops will facilitate connections with international partners and facilitate the exchange of knowledge. Hackathons on data science challenges related to Hub themes will be proposed during the workshops, focusing on areas like bioinformatics and climate science.
Research Exchanges: The Hub aims to conduct research exchanges where academics will travel between the UoL and partner countries for approximately one week each. Additionally, longer-term exchanges will involve around six PhD students in the first year, traveling between the UoL and partner countries. These exchanges will strengthen collaborations, explore cutting-edge scientific problems, and broaden the horizons of participating students. The goal is to enable joint supervision of master’s and PhD projects, further solidifying research partnerships with LDCs.
Long term:
The Hub envisions hosting a summer school on data analytics in a partner country, potentially the University of Pretoria, during the second year of the initiative. This summer school would involve around 50 students from both the UK and African countries, providing training in machine learning and data analysis at MSc/PhD level. The school would foster research capacity for researchers in LDCs and offer valuable training to students from Leeds and other UK institutions. It would also help to establish connections that could lead to joint PhD supervision and strengthen research collaborations.
Areas of Anticipated Research Collaboration
The Hub aims to collaborate on various research areas, including:
Machine learning for the characterization and classification of objects and patterns in multi-wavelength imaging datasets, applicable in Earth observation, medical imaging, and astronomy.
Methods for data analysis in bioinformatics, specifically focusing on single cell genomic denoising and sparsity modeling. This would contribute to resolving challenges in trajectory analysis, pseudotime estimation, and network inference.
Analysis of animal tracking data and ecosystem function modeling in collaboration with the Department of Statistics. The Hub presents an opportunity for researchers to collaborate in analyzing animal population data in African countries alongside local researchers and institutes.
Applications of machine learning and AI in fluid dynamics, where Leeds Institute for Fluid Dynamics and its Machine Learning/Data group with over 100 members offer opportunities for collaboration in data analysis for fluids and future funding bids.
Machine Learning and AI applications in the environment and finance, aiming to explore the synergy between statistics and machine learning for environmental prediction, ML methods for insurance pricing, and interpretability of ML/AI models.
Primary Investigators and Funding Details
The primary investigators for the Hub are Dr. Richard Mann and Dr. John Ilee. The project is scheduled to commence on 1 February 2023 and conclude on 31 December 2023, with a total value of £100,000.
The African Research (AR) Index is a comprehensive scholarly directory and database focused explicitly on journal publishers that publish and disseminate African research.
