The next Shocklab Seminar will be online on Wednesday, ​5 November 2025, at 16:00 PM. Chris Emezue will be presenting Lanfrica, open science, open access, and AI in Africa. Please come along if you can, it’s sure to be an engaging talk!
 
Title: Lanfrica, open science, open access, and AI in Africa
Speaker: Chris Emezue
Date: Wednesday, 5 November 2025
Time: 16:00-17:00 (GMT +2)
 
Abstract: Our digital world is a rich tapestry of ideas, languages, cultures, and knowledge. However, our access to and understanding of these resources is skewed; some gain significant visibility, while others remain underrepresented and obscure (even when available on the web and open). In today’s fast-paced digital age, if information cannot be found, it is often perceived as nonexistent and remains under-utilized.
This phenomenon is profound in the open science AI community in the Global South. Despite the vast open initiatives (datasets, models, research papers, tools, etc) aimed at fostering technological growth, Africa’s contributions remain largely excluded from modern AI because they are siloed, obscure, heavily fragmented and scattered.
Our project, Lanfrica, directly confronts this challenge by building the essential community-driven infrastructure to map the African AI ecosystem. With our open-access platform (https://lanfrica.com/en), Lanfrica organizes Africa’s vast AI resources - datasets, papers, models, and more - under one connected hub, enabling unprecedented "discoverability" of Global South AI, as well as data-driven "insights" for policymakers. In so doing, Lanfrica unlocks breakthroughs in inclusive science and technology.
 
Bio: Chris Emezue is a mathematician & computer scientist with a passion for languages and improving people's lives with technology. He has spent half a decade designing inclusive AI technologies that better serve the African population. His research areas cut across the intersection of natural language processing, causality, and reinforcement learning. Currently, he is solving the discoverability problem with Lanfrica.
 

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