Black in AI CVPR23 Social

Black-in-AI-CVPR23-Social

Africa has the second-largest population in the world with around 1.4 billion people as of 2022.

Empowering Black and African origin researchers in CVPR.
Providing mentorship and guidance to early career researchers.
Allowing Black, African-origin researchers and allies to network.
Celebrating African grassroots in AI.

Our main goal is to create a platform where Black researchers are comfortable meeting with other people without feeling out-of-place and to enforce a strong connection of like-minded individuals.

Social Event Schedule

Venue: 1055 Canada Pl, Vancouver, BC V6C 0C3, Canada.
The West building in the evening, Vancouver Convention Centre, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

Date: June 20th, 2023.

Time: 6:30pm - 8:30pm PST.

Registration / Enquiry

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact the CVPR23 BAI Social Organizers.

Diversity Commitment

Diversity, Equity and inclusion are the core values of the Black in AI community. Similar to previous events, we are committed to those values in every aspect of the event.

Organizers and Program Committee

Our organizers consist of the following; 9/9 organizers are Africans, 4/9 organizers are female, 9/9 organizers are people of color. Organizers have a diverse mix of academic and industry experience, including policy experience. They also have diverse affiliations with institutions in Canada, Africa and Europe.

Invited Speakers / Mentors

Our invited speakers include Africans, and noble experts who support the African community. They are in affiliations with institutions in Canada and the United States (US). Our speaker list consists of diverse groups, both in identity and professional focus, of academic and industry representatives who support the African AI/ML community.

Meet Our Mentors!

Prof. Richard Souvenir

Professor and Vice Provost @Temple University, Academic Mentor (Confirmed)

A professor in the Department of Computer and Information Sciences. Previously, he was on the faculty in the Department of Computer Science at UNC Charlotte, and received his doctorate in computer science at Washington University in St. Louis. His research involves the application of machine learning techniques to computer vision problems. Specifically, he focuses on providing intuitive methods for querying video data, with applications to biomedical image analysis and human activity understanding.

Prof. Greg Mori

Senior Research Director @RBC's Borealis AI, Academic Mentor (Confirmed)

Was a Visiting Scientist at Google in Mountain View California (2014-2015), served as Director of the School of Computing Science (2015-2018), and now Senior Research Director for RBC's Borealis AI. He conducts research in computer vision and machine learning, and teaches classes in data structures and programming, artificial intelligence, computer vision, and machine learning. He received the Canadian Image Processing and Pattern Recognition Society (CIPPRS) Award for Research Excellence and Service in 2008.

Prof. Richard Wildes

Professor @York University, Academic mentor (Confirmed)

A Professor, member of the Centre for Vision Research, and a Tier I York Research Chair in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at York University, Toronto since 2001. His honors include receiving a Sarnoff Corporation Technical Achievement Award, the IEEE D.G. Fink Prize Paper Award and twice giving invited presentations to the US National Academy of Sciences. His main areas of research interest are computational vision, especially video understanding, and artificial intelligence.

Nene Azu

Product Manager @RBC's Borealis AI, Industry mentor, (Confirmed)

He specializes in building end to end AI models for the bank. Nene has over half a decade of experience in personal and commercial banking at the Toronto Dominion Bank & Canadian Western Bank (CWB), as well as AI product management previously at Judi AI. Nene holds a B.Sc. in Economics, Math and Statistics from the University of British Columbia. Nene hails from Accra, Ghana and is also a naturalized Canadian.

Samson Kirk-Koffi

ML Infrastructure Engineer @RBC's Borealis AI, Industry mentor (Confirmed)

He received his BA.Sc. in Computer Engineering from the University of Toronto. He is one of the founding members of the Let’s Solve It (LSI) Initiative; a biannual undergraduate mentorship program run by Borealis aimed towards giving students from underrepresented communities exposure to ML/AI. Prior to Borealis, he worked as a Senior Backend Engineer at ADA Support, a Canadian unicorn startup that leveraged NLP for building Automated Customer Experience (ACX) via chatbots. Samson was born in Toronto and grew up in Akosombo, Ghana.

Prof. Helge Rhodin

Assistant Professor @University of British Columbia, Academic mentor (Confirmed)

Assistant Professor at UBC working towards non-intrusive computer-human interaction by advancing 3D computer vision, machine learning, computer graphics, and augmented reality. The latest VR and AR devices offer incredible display capabilities; my contributions complement them by enabling high-quality dynamic reconstructions of our everyday environment from plain video input. Prior to UBC, I was a lecturer at EPFL and postdoctoral researcher in the Computer Vision Lab of Pascal Fua, and PhD candidate in the GVV group of Christian Theobalt at the Max-Plack-Institute for Informatics

Dr. Naila Murray

Senior Research Engineering Manager @META AI Research, Industry Mentor (Confirmed)

Joined Xerox Research Centre Europe in 2013 as a research scientist in the computer vision team. (2015 - 2019) she led the computer vision team at Xerox Research Centre Europe, and continued to serve in this role after its acquisition and transition to becoming NAVER LABS Europe. In 2019, she became the director of science at NAVER LABS Europe. 2020, she joined META AI Research where she is a senior research engineering manager for EMEA. She has served as area chair for ICLR 2018, ICCV 2019, ICLR 2019, CVPR 2020, ECCV 2020, and program chair for ICLR 2021. Her current research interests include representation learning and multi-modal search.

Prof. Leonid Sigal

Professor in the Department of Computer Science @University of British Columbia (Confirmed)

An NSERC Canada Research Chair (CRC II) in Computer Vision and Machine Learning and a CIFAR AI Chair at the Vector Institute for AI in Toronto. In addition, he serve as an Academic Advisor to Borealis AI. Prior to this, he was a Senior Research Scientist at Disney Research Pittsburgh and an Adjunct Faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University. His research focuses on statistical and machine learning models for problems of visual inference, understanding and reasoning.

Team of Organizers

Dr. Mennatullah Siam

Postdoctoral Researcher @York University, Co-Founder of Ro’ya-CV4Africa

Mennatullah Siam is a Postdoctoral researcher in the department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in York University, Toronto, Canada and a Vector Institute research affiliate. She obtained her Ph.D. degree from Computing Science department in University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada in 2021. Her major fields of interest are few-shot segmentation, video object segmentation, few-shot video understanding, and spatiotemporal models interpretability. She is a co-founder of Ro'ya-CV4Africa community that focuses on Computer Vision for Africans and by Africans.

Daniel Ajisafe

Ph.D. Student @University of British Columbia, Co-Founder @Lautech Data Science Community

Daniel Ajisafe is a doctoral student at The University of British Columbia (UBC) and a research assistant with focus on computer vision under the Visual AI for Humans group. He was previously a scholar at the African Masters in Machine Intelligence (AMMI) program. His research interest lies in general computer vision and is not limited to human motion learning, neural human body models, and 3D reconstruction. Before this time, he worked as a data scientist at KPMG Nigeria and co-founded the Lautech Data Science Community, a learning-based group that has grown to empower more than 100 students till date.

Oluwabukola Grace Adegboro

Graduate of Ontario Tech University, MASc. Electrical & Computer Engineering

Oluwabukola Grace Adegboro is a graduate of Ontario Tech University with a master's degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering. She has a background with specialization in Machine Intelligence (AMMI), a program fully funded by Google and Facebook, and is passionate about the field of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence. She is currently a co-organizer for the Computer Vision Workshop at the upcoming Deep Learning Indaba (DLI) conference, and is also a part of the Accessibility, Safety and Inclusion team involved in setting up a safe and accessible space for the DLI 2023 conference.

Salomey Osei

Ph.D. student / Research Assistant @University of Deusto

Salomey Osei is a Ph.D. student / research assistant at University of Deusto. She is also a researcher at Masakhane and the research lead of unsupervised methods for Ghana NLP. She has been involved with a number of organizations such as Black in AI, Women in Machine Learning (WiML) and Women in Machine Learning and Data Science (WiMLDS) as a co-organiser. She is also passionate about mentoring students, especially females in STEM and her long-term goal is to share her knowledge with others by lecturing.

Dr. Issam Laradji

Research Scientist @Servicenow

Issam Laradji is a Research Scientist at Servicenow. He did his postdoc at McGill University under the supervision of Dr. Derek Nowrouzezahrai, and completed his Ph.D. at the University of British Columbia under the supervision of Dr. Mark Schmidt in 2020. During his Ph.D. he worked on weakly supervised learning and optimization for computer vision applications. Before that, he obtained both his masters and bachelors in Computer Science at King Fahd university. His main research interests are in weakly supervised and few-shot learning. He has experience organizing workshops in CVPR'2020, CVPR'2022 and CVPR’2023.

Blaise Appolinary

B.Sc. Student @University of British Columbia (UBC)

Blaise Appolinary is an undergraduate Mathematics student at the University of British Columbia (UBC) who is currently focusing on computer vision at Visual AI for Humans lab as a research intern. He is also the analytics lead at UBC Bionics, a student-led engineering design team focused on the advancement of bionics.

Dr. Esther Odunayo Oduntan

Researcher and academia in Computer Science, @Federal Polytechnic Ilaro

Dr. Esther is a researcher and academic in Computer Science. She obtained her PhD from Ladoke Akintola University of Technology (LAUTECH), M.Sc. with specialization in Machine Intelligence from the African Institute of Mathematical Sciences (AMMI), M.Sc. Computer Science from University of Lagos, UNILAG and B.Sc. in Computer Science from Olabisi Onabanjo University. She is a Chief Lecturer in the Department of Computer Science and the Pioneering Director, Open Distance and Flexible eLearning (ODFeL) at the Federal Polytechnic, Ilaro, Ogun State. Her research interest is in machine learning, natural language processing, and computer vision. She is a member of Women in Machine Learning (WiML), Black in AI (BAI), Data Science Nigeria (DSN), Women in Data Science (WiDS), African Directory of Science, Web of Science Scholar, Computer Professionals of Nigeria (CPN), Professional member of Nigerian Women in Information Technology (NIWIIT) and the Nigeria Computer Society (NCS). In addition, Dr. Esther has facilitated a workshop with the theme: Data Science for Curious Minds at Federal Polytechnic Ilaro, Nigeria, and also organized a National Conference in 2019 for the School of Pure and Applied Science while taking on the role of the Chairperson for the organizing committee.

Nene Azu

Product Manager @Borealis AI

Nene Azu is a Product Manager at Borealis AI (RBC’s AI Research Lab). He specializes in building end to end AI models for the bank. Nene has over half a decade of experience in personal and commercial banking at the Toronto Dominion Bank & Canadian Western Bank (CWB), as well as AI product management previously at Judi AI, a Canadian startup focused on AI in SMB lending. He is a founding member of the SurfClub Finance team, a venture focused on empowering the next generation of Africans towards sustainable wealth. Nene holds a B.Sc. in Economics, Math and Statistics from the University of British Columbia. Nene hails from Accra, Ghana and is also a naturalized Canadian.

Samson Kirk-Koffi

Infrastructure Engineer @Borealis AI

Samson Kirk-Koffi is a Machine Learning Infrastructure Engineer at Borealis AI. He received his BA.Sc. in Computer Engineering from the University of Toronto. He is one of the founding members of the Let’s Solve It (LSI) Initiative; a biannual undergraduate mentorship program run by Borealis aimed towards giving students from underrepresented communities exposure to ML/AI. Prior to Borealis, he worked as a Senior Backend Engineer at ADA Support, a Canadian unicorn startup that leveraged NLP for building Automated Customer Experience (ACX) via chatbots. Samson was born in Toronto and grew up in Akosombo, Ghana.

1st Member-led Black in AI
Social, at CVPR 2023

Increasing diversity by empowering Black and African
researchers in the AI & CV community