Recap: Nairobi WiDS Conference 2018
Happy belated Women’s day!
tl;dr
As people celebrated women all over the world last week, I decided to spend the day with incredible women in the tech industry especially those in the field of Machine Learning and Data Science at the Nairobi Women in Data Science Conference.
The Women in Data Science (WiDS) Conference is an annual global conference that is aimed at inspiring and educating data scientists all over the world regardless of gender and support the women in the field. This year’s global WiDS conference was held at Stanford University together with over 100 regional events all over the world where of course, included Nairobi.
The conference was hosted by the Biosciences eastern and central Africa hub at the International Livestock research Institute (ILRI) here in Nairobi and its aim was to give attendees the opportunity to learn, network and explore the avenues for collaboration and partnerships.
Nairobi WiDS conference kicked off at 9:00 am with a Keynote address from Dr. Aisha Walcott-Bryant who is a research scientist and manager at IBM Research Africa — Nairobi, Kenya. Dr. Aisha went ahead and discussed how IBM Research Africa is focusing on leveraging data to reduce traffic in Nairobi.
We all know that this is one of the major challenges in our cities due to the rapid urbanization over the past years. This challenge according to Dr. Aisha tends to be difficult to tackle mostly due to lack of transportation data and of course the traffic in our cities especially in Nairobi is really hard to predict (I relate, coming from someone who travels from Thika to Nairobi almost daily!)
So, for this reason, IBM’s solution was to employ smartphones with sensors that are mounted on waste collection vehicles to gather real-time data about the condition of Nairobi’s streets and the location of traffic delays due to the existence of potholes, speed-bumps, flooding and other obstructions that are on the road.
This reminded me of an ongoing project #whatisaroad that maps out potholes in Nairobi using information they get from Twitter. You can also check out this post by Chris Orwa to find out what exactly causes the formation of potholes in Nairobi.
I think what IBM Research is doing is an awesome step towards reducing traffic in Nairobi considering the fact that there are various other factors that tend to also influence traffic such as the weather, the quality of the road, accidents and also the time of day. Someone should also take the initiative to find out what exactly causes traffic when it rains. That has always been something that I am yet to understand.
Going on, Dr.Aisha also pointed out some Cautions of Data Science which included:
- AI programs excluding African American Voices — For those using Siri or Alexa, I guess you can relate. Sometimes these AI systems due to lack of enough training data with different examples of accents, tend to have a hard time understanding some people i.e. if you have an unusual accent.
- False classification of Images
This photo just tells it all.
- Facial recognition — Facial recognition is becoming a common tool in the biometric identification industry. There’s a ton of research that is being done around facial recognition where some people have already attempted to use AI facial recognition for purposes of identifying terrorists and potential lawbreakers.
Another point that Dr. Aisha pointed out as I conclude her session was: “We are the future of data science”. The volume of data is increasing at a very high rate and the potential value of data to the society is increasing rapidly. It’s our role to make good use of this data and build systems that will be of benefit to the society.
The next speaker was Linet Kwamboka. She is the CEO of Data Science Limited in Nairobi, Kenya. Her talk was on Data Protection and Privacy.
“Data is the currency you use to access free services”
-Linet Kwamboka
I liked the above statement. Wonder why Twitter, Facebook and Instagram are free? Well, there’s your answer. These social media platforms use information they get from you to make tons of money. The Data Science LTD sent a survey to 200 respondents to understand whether people generally knew about data protection. The survey revealed that a lot of people know about Data Privacy and also surprisingly, more people read the terms and conditions. Funny right? I personally don’t read the Terms and Conditions because, one, they are too long or two, if I don’t click yes to having read and understood them, I won’t be able to use the service so I might as well just skip through. You can find out what else the survey entailed from this post.
Another thing she talked about was Identity Theft where she mentioned coming across an Instagram photo where the same individual had cloned himself 6 times on 6 different national identity cards. You’d think that the ID numbers on those six fake identity cards are made up but from further research she found out that those numbers actually belonged to registered voters of Kenya. Surprise!
We tend to give out so much information about ourselves without even knowing. From our fingerprints (yes, you who thinks that unlocking your phone using your finger is convenient, think twice), to those forms we fill out during events, when we give out our ID’s while entering a building and so much more.
You can read more about data protection on Linet’s medium account which you can find here. Did you also know that there’s a Data Protection Bill? Neither did I. You can find it here.
“Security starts with you!”
The other Speaker that graced the occasion was Victoria Okoth from Safaricom. Her talk was on the now, before and future of analytics in Telecommunication, where she talked about how Safaricom is leveraging data and analytics to provide better and affordable services to their customers.
After that, we watched a clip from the WiDS Conference that happened in Stanford University by Maria Klawe the President of Harvey Mudd College. You can find the video here. She talks about why we need women in Data Science and why women should want to be in Data Science. So, if you’re in tech and still not sure whether to get into data science or not, I hope this video helps you make your decision.
The next speaker was Lorna Maria Aine who is the Data Lead at Pollicy. Pollicy is a company in Uganda that works with governments, civil societies, NGO’s and the private sector to improve and re-design services around citizen needs and demands. She went ahead and discussed how Pollicy uses data and how they collaborate with the government to improve services around their citizens.
Other than the speaker sessions, we also had a very informative panel discussion on Education/Career tracks for women in data science and finally, round table discussions where we were divided into groups to discuss some of the African challenges data science can help solve.
To conclude, I’d like to thank the Nairobi Women in Data Science & Machine Learning Community together with the Biosciences eastern and central Africa hub who were the Nairobi WiDS ambassadors this year for organizing this very informative and mind opening event. Also, the ILRI employees for sharing tea and cake with us as we celebrated International Women’s Day.
