Skip to yearly menu bar Skip to main content

Affinity Event Thu, Dec 10, 2026 • 1:00 AM – 7:00 AM AEDT C206

Africa in AI

Udunna Anazodo ⋅ Maruf Adewole

Project Page

Abstract

The Africa in AI Affinity Group is a dedicated forum at NeurIPS for AI researchers, practitioners, industry partners, and policymakers working at the intersection of AI and sustainable development in Africa. AAI brings together diverse disciplines and stakeholders across Africa's socio-political and innovation ecosystems to foster dialogue on the opportunities and challenges associated with AI adoption, including shared constraints related to infrastructure, skilled personnel, funding, governance, and institutional capacity.

The workshop focuses on cross-disciplinary collaborations that address interconnected development priorities, such as health and climate resilience or sustainable cities and productive employment, with the goal of advancing scalable and resource-efficient AI solutions. As a global platform for cutting-edge AI research and innovation, NeurIPS provides an ideal venue to showcase African perspectives, highlight region-specific challenges and opportunities, and elevate innovations on trustworthy AI that supports sustainable development outcomes. Ultimately, the Affinity Group aims to strengthen the African AI ecosystem and accelerate the responsible adoption of AI technologies that contribute to peace, prosperity, and inclusive development across the continent.

Chat is not available.

Schedule

Time zone: Conference local time zone

Differentiation at Scale: A Curriculum-Aligned, Offline-First Retrieval System for Overcrowded Classrooms in Rwanda

Gentille Uwera

Bridging the AI Hardware Gap in Resource Constrained Settings: Lightweight Architectures and Weight Optimization for 3D Medical Image Segmentation with nnU-Net

Willem Petrus Engelbrecht Boonzaier ⋅ Izak S Pretorius ⋅ Thandiwe T Zhanje ⋅ Aondona Iorumbur ⋅ Confidence Raymond ⋅ ⋅ Udunna Anazodo

AHCR-238: A Large-Scale Dataset for Amharic Handwriting Deep Learning

Mohammed Ayalew Belay

FineQA: A Lightweight No-Reference Quality Assessment Model for AI-Generated Images via Self-Supervised Pretraining

Sreejita Roy ⋅ Anurag Roychowdhury

Guidance, Not Adaptation: What Makes an Open Text-to-Music Model Sing isiZulu

Gideon Gyimah ⋅ ⋅

Resource-Efficient Anti-Money Laundering Detection: A Tabular Machine Learning Study for Compute-Constrained African Financial Systems

Rutvi C Patel

Learning Ordinal Latent Representations for Subject-Independent Parkinsonian Rigidity Estimation

Okello Andrew Peters ⋅ Christopher L Pulliam ⋅

When Scores Do Not Align: Diagnosing Calibration Failure in Large-Scale Open-Set Recognition

Sai Raghavendra Kunchala ⋅ Edwin Joseph Jayan

How Much Swahili Data Is Enough? English-to-Swahili Transfer for Low-Resource Intent Classification

ABDULL-NASSIR SHAIB HASSAN ⋅ Saleh H Othman

FPN-Mamba: Linear-Time Bidirectional State Space Feature Pyramids for Small-Lesion Brain MRI Classification

Simbiat Adetoro ⋅ Samuel A Adeniji ⋅ Moise Busogi

Decolonizing Digital Sovereignty: An Operational Framework and Policy Analysis of AI Governance in Sub-Saharan Africa

Teganmosibineba Jegede

Beyond Pilot Deployments: Why AI Imaging Diagnostics in Africa Needs Shared Data Infrastructure, Not More One-Off Models

Comfort Oyindamola Akanni

Evaluating Contrast-Dependent Errors in Virtual Contrast-Enhanced Brain MRI

VINCESS DONGMO ⋅ James K Ruffle ⋅ Samia Mohinta

When Retrieval Hurts: Measuring and Explaining Retrieval-Induced Hallucination in Chest X-ray Report Generation

Emmanuel Idoko ⋅ Abdusshakur Olabisi ⋅ Shiloh Oni ⋅ Josiah Adesola

Connectivity- and Security-Aware Edge Node Placement for Smart Cities: A Composite Scoring Framework for IXP-anchored Deployment in CDN-Desert Regions

Bisi Josh-Falade ⋅ Oladapo Adeduro ⋅ Ayobami E Mesioye ⋅ Ayodele Awokoya ⋅ Kayode Oladapo

SovereignRAG-Eval: Compute- and Sovereignty-Aware Offline-to-Online Retrieval Evaluation

Karthik Chandrasekaran

PidginAirAlert: Domain NLP for Community Soot and Health Alerts in Nigerian Pidgin

Israel Odeajo

Vector-Free Salience versus Local Dense Retrieval for Grounded Longitudinal Clinical Summarisation

Isaiah E. Essien ⋅ Orpheus M Manga ⋅ Idara P Essien ⋅ Marvin Ogore ⋅ Guda

Token Mixer Placement Matters: A Systematic Encoder–Decoder Ablation Study of Mamba for Brain Tumour Segmentation on BraTS-Africa

Abdulbasit Oyebamiji Oyetunji ⋅ Olamide Lawal ⋅ Kingsley Ibekwe ⋅ Grace A Ojemerenvhie ⋅ ⋅ Confidence Raymond

Preprocessing Filter Choice Affects Severity Calibration but Not Accuracy in Cardiac Murmur Classification

Nimat Sadiq ⋅ Brandone Fonya ⋅ Carine Mukamakuza

Beyond Exact Match: Unmasking WER Inflation in Akan ASR through Variant-Aware Evaluation

Prince Mireku ⋅ MohamedElfatih MohamedKhair ⋅ Emmanuel Asiedu Brempong ⋅ Amr Helmy ⋅ Perry Nelson ⋅ Tavonga Siyavora ⋅ Abdoulaye Diack ⋅ Aisha Walcott-Bryant

When Confounds Explain the Eect: Auditing Genre and Artist Entanglement in a Multilingual Nigerian Song Corpus

Sakinat Folorunso

Show Your Work in Swahili: Reinforcement Learning for Native-Language Mathematical Reasoning

Jessica Lundin ⋅ Katherine A Rosenfeld ⋅ David Adelani ⋅ Geoffrey Mosoti Nyakiongora ⋅ Halfan Ngowo ⋅ Sloan Coffin ⋅ Ralph Abboud ⋅ Guillaume Chabot-Couture

Tracing Sources of Brain Age Prediction Degradation in Low-Resource Clinical Settings

Tianyi Ren ⋅ Mehmet Kurt

Cross-Dataset Evaluation of Compression Strategies for Fuel Efficiency Prediction

Given Kangwa ⋅ Kelvin Kimani

How Many Labels Does a Language Need? Annotation Budgets and Cross-Lingual Pooling for African-Language Text Classification

Bhanu P Vangala ⋅ Sowmya Guda ⋅ Vangala Navya

A Comparative Analysis of Few-Shot Learning Models for Text-Based Diagnosis of Crop Pests and Diseases in Ghana

Nana Benyin Essel-Biney ⋅ Isaac Aboah

Physics-Guided, Temperature-Coupled Universal Differential Equations for Grid-Connected Battery Energy Storage

LUKI D BAKUORU ⋅ Raj Dandekar ⋅ Rajat Dandekar ⋅ Prathamesh Dinesh Joshi ⋅ Sreedath Panat

Safety Evaluation Does Not Transfer: Domain-Specific Failure Patterns in Patient-Facing LLM Triage

Mohamed Aly ⋅ Elsayed Mostafa

Beyond Black Boxes: Interpretable AI for Academic Performance Prediction Using Advanced Tabular Neural Networks with Augmented Attention Mechanism

Adekunle K Ojo ⋅ Ayodele Awokoya ⋅ Bisi Josh-Falade ⋅ Marion Adebiyi

Trust Before Compression: Towards a Trustworthy Compression Frontier for ECG Classification

Tushar Shinde ⋅ Sudhanshu Gaurhar

Alignment Is Not Separation: Two Geometric Axes of Cross-Lingual Sentiment Representation in a Multilingual LLM

Sai Adith Prakash

A Geospatial and Machine Learning Approach to Identifying and Predicting High-Risk Segments along Major Highway Corridors in Northern Nigeria

Nwajiunor Edgar-Odurombi ⋅ Solomon Oluwole Akinola

Health Equity Benchmark (HEB): A Synthetic Dataset for Responsible AI Education and Fairness Evaluation

Blessing Ogbuokiri ⋅ Chioma Kamalu ⋅ Victoria Udechukwu ⋅ Chinalu B Ujah-Ogbuagu ⋅ Collins Udanor ⋅ Laleh Seyyed-Kalantari

Comparing Scoring Signals for Gaussian Coreset Selection Across Visual Benchmarks

Aryaman R Midha

MITIGATING ISSUES CAUSED BY DEVICE DROPOUT IN KNOWLEDGE DISTILLATION BASED FEDERATED LEARNING

Eyerusalem Bante ⋅

Evaluating and Fine-Tuning Speech Technologies on Culturally Grounded Yorùbá Proverbs Using the Òwe-Voice Proverb Speech Corpus

Ayomide Fagoroye ⋅ Victor Odumuyiwa ⋅ Daud Abolade ⋅ Similoluwa Ola-obaado ⋅ Iyanda Taiwo

Tight-Setting Alternatives for Long-Horizon Building Temperature Prediction: Bilinear Imputation and Multi-Scale Encoding under Sensor Uncertainty

Rohan Saha ⋅ Shambhavi Srivastava

VARET: Decomposing Robustness for Multi-Site Phonocardiogram Classification under Missing Auscultation Sites and Cohort Shift

Yvette Tuyambaze ⋅ Brandone Fonya ⋅ Carine Mukamakuza

Early Detection of Hypertensive Disorders of Pregnancy in Sub-Saharan African Women: A Multi-Model Machine Learning Approach

Grace M. Kaimburi

Benchmarking Physics-Informed Unrolled Reconstruction for Accelerated Low-Field Brain MRI on a 47 mT Open-Source System

Glory Ejigah ⋅ Aondona Iorumbur ⋅ Henry A Sanni ⋅ Udunna Anazodo ⋅ Confidence Raymond

Lumora: Seeing the Farm from Above, A Locally-Built Intelligence Pipeline for Smallholder Crop-Stress Monitoring in Data-Scarce African Landscapes

Edwin Joseph Jayan ⋅ Sai Raghavendra Kunchala

Artificial Intelligence, Large Language Models, and Machine Learning in African Health Professions Education: A Systematic Review of Adoption, Literacy, Institutional Feasibility, and Ethical Perceptions

Promise Oladejo ⋅ Oserebameh A Beckley ⋅ ⋅ Owoyemi J Oladiipo ⋅ Samuel G Fodop ⋅

Modeling Outage Substitution for Robust Reinforcement Learning in Traffic Signal Control

Salim Oyinlola

Evaluating Clinical Safety of Multimodal LLMs Across Text and Speech in Low-Resource Languages.

Mardiyyah Oduwole ⋅ Tassallah Abdullahi ⋅ Tobi Olatunji ⋅ Gloria A Katuka ⋅ Macton Mgonzo ⋅ Chibuzor Okocha ⋅ Terry Oko-odion ⋅ Kelechi Ezema ⋅ Almene De Meran Meguimtsop ⋅ Lukman Ismaila

Rigorous Evaluation of Large Language Models for Malaria Drug Discovery: Trade-offs in Performance, Scale, and Resource Utility

Marvellous Ajala ⋅ Zainab Ashimiyu-Abdusalam ⋅ Comfort Adesina

How Few Sensors Are Enough? Toward Efficient Sensor Selection for Remaining Useful Life Prediction

David Dada

LLMs as Instruments of Statecraft: Digital Silk Roads, Export Controls, and the Geopolitical Risks of AI for Africa

Soumya Banerjee

Whose Right to Define? Machine-Assisted Framing Analysis of Epistemic Authority in Nigeria's 2025 Genocide Discourse

Mohammed A Taiye

Beyond the Prompt: Re-examining the Determinants of Large Language Model Output Quality in 2026

Pearl Denedo

Mimic-Aware Tuberculosis Detection in Nigerian Chest X-rays via Disease-Specific Transfer Learning

Sufyan Z Sani ⋅ Alyasaa Anas ⋅ Ummulkhairi Ibrahim ⋅ Abdullahi Ismaila ⋅ Zulyadaini Muhammad Aminu ⋅ Dahiru Mohammed ⋅ Umar S Muhammad ⋅ Temitope A Yussuff ⋅ Muhammad Abba ⋅ Hauwa S Yusuf ⋅ Abdulrazaq A Zubair ⋅ Confidence Raymond ⋅ D. Zhang ⋅ Aondona Iorumbur ⋅ Maruf Adewole ⋅ Tigbee Isaac

The African Microbiome Gap: A Missing Foundation for Reliable Clinical Artificial Intelligence

David de Gruijl ⋅ Samson Adegbe ⋅ Atharva Tyagi ⋅ Blessing O Taiwo ⋅ Arvid Ernst Gollwitzer

Compute What the Task Needs: Operational Decision Frontiers Beyond Raw Scale

Ronald Katende

NaijaFacts: A Framework for Disentangling Language from Knowledge in Facts about Nigeria

Zainab Afolabi ⋅ Nikita Kozodoi ⋅ Jack Butler ⋅ Babs Khalidson ⋅ Sabastine Dekaa Francis ⋅ Christiana I Ezeilo ⋅ Akinlolu Olosunde

Evaluating Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) Systems on Yorùbá STEM Educational Content

Daud Abolade ⋅ Victor Odumuyiwa ⋅ Sharon Alawode ⋅ Ayomide Fagoroye ⋅ Blessing Towoju ⋅ Blessing I Adetokunbo ⋅ Joseph Makinde

EEG-Based Brain Age Modeling in African Populations: Quantifying Cross-Population Generalization Gap and Brain Age Gap in Healthy Nigerian Adults Using Low-Cost EEG

Oloruntoba Ajayi ⋅ Oluwapelumi Samuel Solagbade ⋅ ⋅ Nimota Yusuf ⋅ Chijioke Ibe ⋅ ⋅ Fodilullahi Abdulrasaq ⋅ ⋅ Aondona Iorumbur ⋅ Confidence Raymond ⋅ Tolulope Olusuyi ⋅ Udunna Anazodo

Speech Emotion Recognition with Classical and DeepLearning Models: Speaker-Independent Evaluation,Mechanistic Analysis, and an Accuracy–EfficiencyFrontier

Yashash Yallapragada ⋅ Shambhavi Srivastava

Equivalent Text, Unequal Predictions: Auditing Unicode Robustness in African News Headline Classification

Adokiye D Okoro ⋅ Mayowa T AKINYELE

Compact Amharic OCR: Evaluation on Unseen Writers in the Fidel Dataset

Boniface Chukwuemeka Godwin

What Drives Smallholder Yields in Tanzania? An Interpretable Machine Learning Analysis of Inputs, Climate Shocks, and the Gender Yield Gap

Milliam Rukanda

N-grams vs. Neural Models for Low-Resource African Languages: When to Switch?

Nana Sam Yeboah ⋅ Cajetan Songwae ⋅ Dennis Asamoah Owusu

Climate-Routed Low-Rank Adapters for Label- and Compute-Efficient Cross-Country Cropland Mapping in Africa

Moinul Hossain ⋅ Md Kishor Morol