Our one-month Research Cohort this November runs over five Saturday and it is open to anyone interested in research. Our audience encompases individuals that wants to learn how to effectively read, present, and extend technical research papers.
The cohort will provide an opportunity to:
- Learn how to critically read and analyze research papers.
- Present research findings to both technical and non-technical audiences.
- Re-implement or extend a selected research paper.
- Interact with seasoned researchers from academia, industry and research institutes
While all applicants are invited to participate in discussions, give feedback, and attend the presentations, 10 research scholars are selected to present their chosen papers and demonstrate an extension or re-implementation of the work. Application form
Key Dates:
Notification of Selection as presenter: October 23rd 2024 (on rolling basis)- Application Deadline: November 1st 2024
- Cohort starts: November 2nd, 2024
- Cohort ends: November 30th, 2024
We meet every Saturday from November 2nd to November 30th (10am - 12pm WAT).
For all Participants
- How to read a research paper
- Understand the research process
- Gain the knowledge to participate in research paper reading and writing
For Presenters
In addition to the above,
- Interpret and reproduce experiments in a paper
- Present paper to both technical and non-technical audiences
- 5 weeks meeting discussions and engaging with fellow researchers
- Workshop series and round-table discussions in week 1, 2, and 4 delivered by seasoned researchers from academia, industry and research institutes
- Participation in research paper discussions in week 3 and 5
- Certificate of participation
In addition to the above,
- Participate in research paper presentation in week 3
- Reproduce the result of the chosen research paper and/or extend the work
- Present the reproduced and/or extension results in week 5
- Certificate of participation as AI Saturdays Lagos Research scholar
- To be eligible for certificate of attendance, you need to achieve 100% attendance rate. Participation is monitored by taking attendance after each week's class.
- To be eligible for certificate of participation as AI Saturdays Lagos Research Scholar
- you need to achieve 100% attendance rate
- you need to be a presenter
- you need to participate in paper presentation in week 3
- you need to present the reproduced and/or extended results of your chosen research paper in week 5
Goal: To equip the audience with knowledge to effectively read, and understand a technical research paper
- Welcome and cohort overview
- Workshop: Introduction to reading research paper
- Speaker: Odumakinde Ayomide, Research Scholar at Cohere
- Topics covered
- Recommended Read
- Round table discussions
- Panelist:
- Tejumade Afonja, Co-founder of AI Saturdays Lagos and Doctoral Researcher at CISPA
- Tobias Lorenz, PhD Student at CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security
- Odumakinde Ayomide, Research Scholar at Cohere
- Moderator:
- Jeremiah Fadugba, Doctoral Researcher at African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS)
- Potential topics to discuss
- What are your process to reading a technical research paper
- How do you address challenges in reading and understanding papers
- How do you stay updated in a fast-moving field like machine learning
- Do you have any tips and tricks that you have found useful in your research journey
- Panelist:
- Open up the floor for Questions
- Interactive session
- Goal: audience to briefly share their areas of interest and interact with fellow attendees
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- Moderator:
- Oluwaseun Ajayi, Machine Learning Engineer at Cuvris
Goal: To equip the audience with knowledge to choose research topic, formulate research question, form hypothesis, validate through experiments, write up their results and publish at top-tier Computer Science venues
- Welcome
- Workshop: The research process – from ideation to publication
- Speaker: Orevaoghene Ahia, Computer Science (CS) PhD student at University of Washington
- Topics covered
- Choosing exciting and significant research topics
- Choosing your supervisor / mentors
- From idea to publication
- Presenting your ideas (before and after working on them)
- The highs and lows of research
- Slide , YouTube
- Recommended Read:
- Check Oreva's last slide.
- Writing a good scientific paper
- Round table discussions
- Panelist:
- Khadija Iddrisu, PhD Researcher at Insight SFI Research Centre for Data Analytics
- Joscha Cüppers, PhD Student at CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security
- Orevaoghene Ahia, CS PhD student at University of Washington
- Moderator:
- Shadrack Adeyemi, ML Engineer at Voltrox HQ
- Potential topics to discuss
- How did you choose your topic and/or your supervisor
- How did you discover your first idea that led to publication
- How did you deal with your first rejection (if any)
- How do you stay motivated
- What skills did you develop during your PhD (so far) that you have found very useful in your research journey
- Panelist:
- Open up the floor for Questions
- Interactive session
- Goal: small groups break-out sessions to look a sample paper together and present their findings
-
- Moderator:
- Tejumade Afonja, Co-founder of AI Saturdays Lagos and Doctoral Researcher at CISPA
Goal: Presenters give 10mins presentation about their chosen research paper
- Welcome
- Presentations:
- Each presenter presents their assigned paper
- Peer feedback on clarity, depth, and structure of presentation
- YouTube
Group discussionsPotential topics to discuss:Research questions explored in presented papersNoticeable gaps in the presented papers and potential area of extensionOpen discussions on presentation challenges, and potential area of improvements
Goal: To gain in-depth understanding of how researchers design experiments, choose baseline methods, evaluation metrics, and test different hyperparameter choices
- Welcome
- Workshop: Implementation and Evaluation of Research Paper
- Speaker: Sewade Ogun, AI Researcher in Speech and Language Technologies, previously PhD student at Inria
- Topics covered
- How to identify a research question
- How to consider the feasibility of the research prject
- How to know what resources are available to execute the project
- How to examine how to publish your findings
- Slide , YouTube
- Round table discussion on implementation and evaluation of research paper
- Panelist:
- Olumide Okubadejo, PhD, Head of Product at Sabi, previously Machine Learning Engineer at Spotify
- Sahar Abdelnabi, AI Security Researcher at Microsoft, previously PhD student at CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security
- Sewade Ogun, AI Researcher in Speech and Language Technologies, previously PhD student at Inria
- Moderator:
- Tejumade Afonja, Co-founder of AI Saturdays Lagos and Doctoral Researcher at CISPA
- Topics discussed
- How do you decide when an experiment or finding is significant enough to be published?
- How do you determine which baselines to include in your paper? What criteria makes a baseline "fair"?
- Does poor performance in a different setting invalidate a method's contributions? Why or why not?
- How should negative results be presented? What role do they play in driving research forward?
- What are some good research practices you believe should be more widely adopted?
- Panelist:
- Open up the floor for questions
Interactive group activitiesGoal: participant discuss findings from changing different hyper-parameter setting of a certain paper’s results
Goal: researchers tend to present settings where their method works well and probably don’t show the setting where their method struggles. Try to identify a setting that was not considered in the paper and test how well it works
- Welcome
- Presentations:
- Presenters present re-implemented projects, discuss any extension they have made
- Peer feedback on clarity, depth, and novelty
- Next steps, and networking
- Closing remarks
- Tejumade Afonja, Co-founder of AI Saturdays Lagos and Doctoral Researcher at CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security
- Oluwafemi Azeez, Co-founder of AI Saturdays Lagos and Head of Data Science at Pastel
- Kenechi Dukor, Core organizer of AI Saturdays Lagos and Product Management Consultant at Motorola Solutions
- Shadrack Adeyemi, ML Engineer at Voltrox HQ
- Joscha Cüppers, PhD at CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security
- Ejiro Onose, Technical Writer for Bazara Tech Inc
- Oluwaseun Ajayi, Machine Learning Engineer at Cuvris
- Adetola Adetunji, Data Analyst at XNStatPipe
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Wang, Yufei, Yi Yu, Wenhan Yang, Lanqing Guo, Lap-Pui Chau, Alex C. Kot, and Bihan Wen. "Exposurediffusion: Learning to expose for low-light image enhancement." In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision, pp. 12438-12448. 2023. Link
Presenter: Zion Oladiran
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Trinh, Trieu H., Yuhuai Wu, Quoc V. Le, He He, and Thang Luong. "Solving olympiad geometry without human demonstrations." Nature 625, no. 7995 (2024): 476-482. Link
Presenters: Hassan Zainab Mosunmola
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Fareed, Mian Muhammad Sadiq, Shahid Zikria, Gulnaz Ahmed, Saqib Mahmood, Muhammad Aslam, Syeda Fizzah Jillani, Ahmad Moustafa, and Muhammad Asad. "ADD-Net: an effective deep learning model for early detection of Alzheimer disease in MRI scans." IEEE Access 10 (2022): 96930-96951. Link
Presenter: Olusola Aremu
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Wu, Zhaoxuan, Mohammad Mohammadi Amiri, Ramesh Raskar, and Bryan Kian Hsiang Low. "Incentive-Aware Federated Learning with Training-Time Model Rewards." In The Twelfth International Conference on Learning Representations. 2024. Link
Presenter: Olumide Buari
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Keselman, Ariel, Sergey Ten, Adham Ghazali, and Majed Jubeh. "Reinforcement learning with A* and a Deep Heuristic." arXiv preprint arXiv:1811.07745 (2018). Link
Presenter: Adesola Josiah Taiwo
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Park, Robin Y., Rhydian Windsor, Amir Jamaludin, and Andrew Zisserman. "Automated spinal mri labelling from reports using a large language model." In International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention, pp. 101-111. Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland, 2024. Link
Presenter: Bakare Kaosara
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Xu, Lei, Maria Skoularidou, Alfredo Cuesta-Infante, and Kalyan Veeramachaneni. "Modeling tabular data using conditional gan." Advances in neural information processing systems 32 (2019). Link
Presenter: Uthman Rasheed
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He, Tairan, Zhengyi Luo, Xialin He, Wenli Xiao, Chong Zhang, Weinan Zhang, Kris Kitani, Changliu Liu, and Guanya Shi. "OmniH2O: Universal and Dexterous Human-to-Humanoid Whole-Body Teleoperation and Learning." arXiv preprint arXiv:2406.08858 (2024). Link
Presenter: Isaac Thani
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