Training
RobotsMali has developed several training coursesand curricula to enableuniversitiesregion offer their students courses on artificial intelligence and robotics.
Date: October-December2019
Participants : 50 students from several universities in the Bamako region
Location: African Institute of Technology and Management (ITMA)
RobotsMali's first university-level artificial intelligence program in 2019 trained 50 Malian students in artificial intelligence projects around the automatic processing of natural language (NLP).
This programme lasted six weeks. covered topics such as text classification, linguistic and thematic modelling, semantic vectors, machine translation, text synthesis, chatbots, dialogue systems, and sentiment analysis.
This 120-hour course (2 semesters)offers a practical introduction to artificial intelligence and its use in robotics and other intelligent systems. The course deals first with the basic knowledge needed before exploring in depth examples of applications.for connected objects designated by the name « TinyML » (small machine learning).
Practical work includes laboratories on Google Colab using Juypter Notebook, Python, and TensorFlow, as well as the construction of electronic systems with Arduino BLU Sense Nano 33 cards and microcameras.
Designed and developed entirely by RobotsMali, this Python course aims to strengthen the programming skills necessary for learning artificial intelligence. The concepts of computer science at the basis of artificial intelligence are introduced with the elements of the Python language as well as several libraries used for machine learning.
This distance training has the particularity of being perfectly adapted to an audience with only very limited access to the Internet, since it can be followed largely in offline mode.
The course is built around the use of Jupyter Notebooks, the preferred environment of artificial intelligence scientists, and WhatsApp for exchanges with the trainer. Composed of 13 online modules over a 15-week period, the training can also be followed independently according to the pace of each student.
Research projects
RobotsMali invests in many research projects in areas related to artificial intelligence in collaboration with internationally renowned universities and researchers. Our goal is to develop a regional competence hub capable of delivering smart solutions to local issues.
The projectBay aims to apply automatic processing of natural language — Natural language processing (NLP) — Bambara and other national languages of Mali to support education, health care and entrepreneurship programmes.
Although Mali ' s national policy strongly promotes education in national languages such as Bambara, literacy remains low due to the lack of written material and learning resources. For example, the project is implementing new techniques adapted to local constraints, such as crowdsourcing, to acquire and clean the necessary Bambara translated data.
Bayis a collaborative project between researchers fromRochester Institute of TechnologyandOrangein the United States, as well as linguistsAMALAN(Malian Academy of Languages) and technologists of RobotsMali and the Ministry of National Education, Higher Education and Scientific Research of Mali.
Yelenkoura («New Light» in French) is an electronic torch-shaped device that allows a blind person to move among the rest of the population without the help of another person.
The device, developed after several years of research within RobotsMali, is now marketed by the young company Yelenkoura Technologie SARL, created by Michael Leventhal, director of RobotsMali, Malick Traoré, and Drissa Diarra, himself unsightly.
In the field of new technology and artificial intelligence, the company's aim is to make available to people with physical or sensory disabilities innovative products that can help them in their daily lives, and wishes to become a reference company in Africa by offering innovative solutions adapted at a lower cost.
Education and public awareness
RobotsMali regularly intervenes at educational and public events to raise awareness among young people (and the least young) of the opportunities offered by new technologies, artificial intelligence, and robotics.
From 8 to 12 March 2021 RobotsMali offered a robotics initiation course for 22 young girls in partnership with the Agency for Information and Communication Technologies (AGETIC), UN Women, and the Ministry of Communication and Digital Economy.
In 2020, in partnership with the associationTech Writers Without BordersRobotsMali launched a major STEM quiz project. As part of this project, we have published online many quiz education on science and technology for young people in francophone African countries. Since the traditional RobotsMali summer camp had to be cancelled in 2020 due to the VOCID-19 pandemic, these quizzes were used to maintain children's taste for science and allow them to continue learning from home, pending the resumption of the class.
Between October and December 2019, RobotsMali's Director, building on his long experience in artificial intelligence technology, has scheduled a series of conferences around different themes and with several partner structures. The aim was to ask a question of reflection on the importance of this subject in modern digital technology.
Theme 1: Business opportunities around artificial intelligence for African entrepreneurs.
- Date : 4 October 2019
- Partner/Location : ImpactHub Bamako
- Participants: 83 (entrepreneurs, students, business employees)
The improvement of customer service thanks to chatbots, the understanding of text for automatic product recommendation, business intelligence, and machine translation are some importance drawn by the participants mainly entrepreneurs.
Impact Hub Bamako (IHB) being the first location in French-speaking Africa of Impact Hub (considered as the largest network of incubators and centres for social and technological innovation in the world),the place was conducive to meeting entrepreneurs and a directly concerned public.
Theme 2: Basic technical concepts on NLP or automatic natural language processing.
- Date: 18 October 2019
- Partner/Location: AGETICInformation and Communication Technology)
- Participants: 59 (mostly students)
This conference was purely technical andaddressed to software developers, computer scientists and students or related subject matter. Managers of companies managing or potentially managing a NLP project and members of the general public with sufficient motivation also participated.This was an overview of the NLP at the fundamental level. Understanding machine learning is normally an essential prerequisite, but we touched upon these fundamental concepts before entering the raw material.
Topics covered include text classification, linguistic and thematic modelling, semantic vectors, machine translation, text synthesis, chatbots, dialogue systems, and sentiment analysis.
Theme 3: artificial intelligence, threat or opportunity?
Date : November 2019
Partner/Location : ITMA (African Institute of Technology and Management).
Participants: ITMA students and guests, media and the general public
She was the occasion forto discover the opportunities of artificial intelligence to future development actors. She said:We have been working on ways of thinking about how to turn threats into opportunities in order to put this technological revolution at the service of humanity in general and Mali in particular.
Issue 4: Why is artificial intelligence important in Mali?
- Date: from 5 to 7 December 2019
- Partner/LocationFscience in Mali –National School of Engineers Abderhamane Baba Touré (ENI-ABT)
- Participants : Hundreds of students from all regions of Mali
Mali is now seeking to digitize itself while the world has already moved into the era of massive deployment of artificial intelligence. There is no competitive digital economy without artificial intelligence. Our entrepreneurs and scientists must take this evolution into account.This is the subject developed by Michael Leventhal on the occasion of the 2019 edition of the Science Day in Mali.
Scientific conferences and publications
RobotsMali regularly participates in international conferences and symposia to advance the reflection on new technologies and development.
RobotsMali offers a paper at the workshop AfricaNLP 2021 which takes place online on 19 April 2021 as part of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL).
Paper: Domain-specific MT for Low-resource Languages: The case of Bambara – English(pending publication)
The 3rd LoResMT workshop (4 December 2020), organized by AACL-IJCNLP, provided a panel discussion for researchers working on machine translation systems/methods for low-resource and underrepresented languages in general.
Paper: Neural Machine Translation for Extremely Low-Resource African Languages: A Case Study on Bambara
26 BCril 2020,Allahsera Auguste Tapo, Research Manager of RobotsMali led a workshop on Data Science as part of thePML4DC (Practical Machine Learning for Developing Countries)a International Conference on Apprenticeship in Representations (ICLR 2020). ICLR is the first gathering of professionals dedicated to the advancement of the artificial intelligence branch called performance learning (or deep learning).
Workshop:Developing Machine Learning Competence in Africa in the Francophone Sahel Region
Workshop « AI for Social Good » (13 November 2020) as part of the AAAAI Fall Symposium 2020.
Presentation (video): Health Care Information: An artificial intelligence challenge for low-resource languages
The Eighth Autumn Conference of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) on Human Computing and Crowdsourcing,HCOP 2020, took place from 25 to 29 October 2020. HCOPis a privileged place to present the latest discoveries from research and practice involving man and artificial intelligence.
Paper:Towards a Crowdsourcing Platform for Low Resource Languages — A Semi-Supervised Approach
RobotsMali offered a paper at the workshopAfricaNLP 2020which took place online on 26 April 2020 as part of the 8th International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2020.
Paper: Assessment Human Translations from French to Bambara for Machine Learning: a Pilot Study
Our experts and partners
- Michael Leventhal (Director of RobotsMali)
- Allahsera Auguste Tapo (RobotsMali)
- Sarah K. Luger (Orange Silicon Valley)
- Christopher Holman (Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences- Rochester Institute of Technology)
- Marcos Zampieri (Computational Linguistics College of Liberal Arts, Rochester Institute of Techno)
- Seydou Traoré (AMALAN)
What is artificial intelligence?
Artificial intelligence (AI) is the ability of a computer program or machine to think and learn. The term « artificial intelligence » means a program that mimics human cognition by interpreting external data, learning from these data and using these learnings to achieve specific objectives and tasks through flexible adaptation.
Applications of theAI
LAI Today serves to understand human speech and interpret complex data in many fields such as computer science, mathematics, linguistics, psychology, neurosciences and philosophy.
In the long run, researchers hope to create a « General artificial intelligence » able to solve many problems instead of focusing on one. Researchers are also trying to create a AI creative and emotional that can eventually show empathy or create art.
LearningAI
Test your knowledge of artificial intelligence and other scientific and technological subjects with our online quiz !
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