#3 The Opportunities to Discuss Research and Get Feedback

While it is just impossible to talk to everyone, the organization and structure of the conference provided numerous opportunities for this. Daily poster sessions (12.00–14:00) during lunch period, two social evenings, short interactive activities (discuss concepts with your neighbor) during talks/labs etc. This setup allowed me get some excellent feedback and meaningful discussions while presenting my

In addition, I got to have a serendipitous (and very nice) discussion with two Reinforcement Learning experts at breakfast on Day 4 — Katja Hofmann from Microsoft Research Cambridge and David Silver, head of Reinforcement Learning at Deepmind, where they graciously shared their stories and recent work on RL.

They encouraged me to read the book by Sutton and Barto “Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction”. David credits this book as an inspiration for his interest in Reinforcement Learning and Katja mentioned she recommends it to all who are interested in RL.

I will certainly be going through the book over the next few months and if you are interested in RL … do so too! The book is available as a

The closing social event on Day 5 was also very well organized — additional opportunities to discuss, network, enjoy good food and music …. and dance!

#4 Learning about Compelling Projects in Africa

I was really happy to learn about several research labs conducting research across Africa and also learn about compelling AI projects by students and researchers across universities in Africa. I learned about the SKA telescope hosted in South Africa (one of the largest telescopes in the world) and research which it enables. I learned about H3ABionet — a Pan African Bioinformatics network comprising 32 Bioinformatics research groups distributed amongst 15 African countries and 2 partner Institutions based in the USA. These units support H3Africa researchers and their projects (genomic , demographic, disease, data collection etc) while developing Bioinformatics capacity within Africa. I also got to see numerous interesting student/researcher posters spanning applications in Deep Learning for plant disease detection, Reinforcement Learning for addressing bin packing problems (instadeep), Generation of drug molecules for curing diseases using GANs etc.

It was also inspirational to see the award winning projects (Kambule and Maathai award) and all the other research projects that got awards from Google, NVIDIA, IBM and Microsoft. Huge congratulations to all the winners!

Given all of the above progress being made, a consensus notion throughout the conference was that the contributions so far are meaningful but small compared to the overall opportunity.

#5 Beautiful Stellenbosch

It was my first time in South Africa and I was pleasantly surprised by the rather exquisite landscape on the drive from Cape Town airport to the conference venue at Stellenbosch. Changing scenery of fields, vineyards, hills/mountains and lots of trees/green. While I did not have much time to visit much of the countryside, I found the Stellenbosch university campus to be both beautiful and very well appointed.