Projects Dashboard

The MIIA Projects Dashboard has been organized into its three Project Type categories: Application, Research, and Technology.

Click on the following buttons to respectively go the the Projects Overview page, submit a new project on the Submit Project page, or view the Projects Showcase for completed projects. If you have any questions, ideas, suggestions, and/or comments that relates to projects, please email us at info@miiafrica.org. See Project Collaboration with Trello for an introduction to Trello, what it is and how to use it.

Application Projects Dashboard

ID	Title	Description	Expected Benefit	Industry	Problem/ Opportunity	Funding	Phase	Leader	Other Members	Partners
MA001	Social Network Reconstruction & Social Interaction Recording of an African community	The idea is to develop a technical solution (say a camera) that could record social interactions and (using image processing/facial recognition) reconstruct the social network of a community. This information could be very useful for developing higher impact social interventions. Computational Social Sciences funding call (see below) from the Volkswagen Foundation. This proposal is due 15 June.	Better understanding of African community dynamics Advancing Social Science in Africa Supports community building, learning, or collaboration Advancing technology It could be a useful partnership and it would result in collaboration with GESIS, one of the world’s leading institutes for computational social science.	Telecoms, Media, Technology Tourism, Retail, & Property	Lack of sustainable governance systems & crime prevention; Lack of technology and manufacturing competitiveness	Funded (TBD)	Funding	Charles Copley	Eli Grant	Volkswagen Foundation
MA002	Africa Health data capturing & analysis via mobile app	Africa Health data capturing & analysis via mobile app	Addressing an African problem or opportunity	Healthcare	Poor healthcare	Require funding	Approval	TBD	TBD	Praekert Foundation
MA003	Cognitive application for advancing African Education	Cognitive application for advancing African Education	Addressing an African problem or opportunity	Education	Poor education & skills development	Require funding	Approval	TBD	TBD	TBD
MA004	Traffic congestion in Africa major cities	Traffic congestion in Africa major cities	Addressing an African problem or opportunity	Infrastructure (Smarter cities)	Poor infrastructure (transport) & energy shortages	Require funding	Approval	TBD	TBD	TBD
MA005	Geospatial data analysis for financial inclusion	Geospatial data analysis for financial inclusion	Addressing an African problem or opportunity	Finance	Lack of employment and access to financial resources	Require funding	Approval	TBD	TBD	Cenfri.org & i2i (Insight2Impact)
MA006	Social Network Analysis using Mobile data	Social Network Analysis using Mobile data	Addressing an African problem or opportunity	Finance	Lack of employment and access to financial resources	Require funding	Approval	TBD	TBD	Cenfri.org & i2i (Insight2Impact)
MA007	Market intelligence, cross-border studies and policy analysis for financial inclusion	Market intelligence, cross-border studies and policy analysis for financial inclusion	Addressing an African problem or opportunity	Finance	Lack of employment and access to financial resources	Require funding	Approval	TBD	TBD	FSD Africa
MA008	Electronic immunization registry & data analysis	Electronic immunization registry & data analysis	Addressing an African problem or opportunity	Healthcare	Poor healthcare	Require funding	Approval	TBD	TBD	Bid Initiative
MA009	A distributed health system which relies on mobile phones for access to the health record	A distributed health system which relies on mobile phones for access to the health record	Addressing an African problem or opportunity	Healthcare	Poor healthcare	Require funding	Approval	TBD	TBD	Bid Initiative
MA010	Machine Intelligence approach to sustainable governance systems	Machine Intelligence approach to sustainable governance systems	Addressing an African problem or opportunity	Government	Lack of sustainable governance systems & crime prevention Weakening of representative democracy	Require funding	Approval	TBD	TBD	TBD
MA011	Data Science and Renewable Energy in Africa	Data Science and Renewable Energy in Africa	Addressing an African problem or opportunity	Energy	Poor infrastructure & energy shortages	Require funding	Approval	TBD	TBD	TBD
MA012	Using mobile data for inferring the source and spread of diseases	Using mobile data for inferring the source and spread of diseases	Addressing an African problem or opportunity	Healthcare	Poor healthcare	Require funding	Approval	TBD	TBD	TBD
MA013	Mobile app and analysis dealing with emerging crises or market opportunities	Mobile app and analysis dealing with emerging crises or market opportunities	Addressing an African problem or opportunity	Tourism, Retail, & Property Healthcare Infrastructure, Transport, & Logistics	Lack of sustainable governance systems & crime prevention Poor healthcare Increasing water stress (lack of clean drinking water) Lack of technology and manufacturing competitiveness	Require funding	Approval	TBD	TBD	TBD
MA014	Pollution analysis in Africa	Pollution analysis in Africa	Addressing an African problem or opportunity	Infrastructure, Transport, & Logistics Tourism, Retail, & Property Agribusiness & Forestry	Rising pollution in the developing world	Require funding	Approval	TBD	TBD	TBD
MA015	Numberboost	Geocoding a business’ customer database, plot those customers on a map, and do feature extraction from spatial datasets (e.g. census, house prices, voting data, etc) and then have an interactive dashboard to filter spatial correlations and do some other fun machine learning stuff e.g. use the features for better churn prediction, recommendation engines etc	Addressing an African problem or opportunity	Finance Infrastructure, Transport, & Logistics Tourism, Retail, & Property Government	Lack of employment and access to financial resources Lack of technology competitiveness Lack of sustainable governance systems & crime prevention Weakening of representative democracy	Funded (won 1st prize of R50k in LaunchLab competition)	Execution	Alex Conway	Qobo	TBD
MA016	Constructing spatiotemporal poverty indices from big data	Big data offers the potential of calculating timely estimates of the socioeconomic development of a region. Mobile telephone activity provides an enormous wealth of information that can be utilized along with traditional household surveys. Estimates of poverty and wealth rely on the calculation of features from call detail records (CDRs). However, mobile network operators are reluctant to provide access to CDRs due to commercial sensitivity and privacy concerns. As a compromise, we show that a relatively sparse CDR dataset combined with other publicly available datasets based on satellite imagery can yield competitive results. In particular, we build a model using two features from the CDRs, mobile ownership per capita and call volume per phone, combined with normalized satellite nightlight data and population density, to estimate the multi-dimensional poverty index (MPI) at the sector level in Rwanda. Our model accurately predicts the MPI for sectors in Rwanda that contain mobile phone cell towers	Addressing an African problem or opportunity	Finance Infrastructure, Transport, & Logistics Tourism, Retail, & Property Government	Socio-economic development of a region Lack of employment and access to financial resources	Funded	Execution	Patrick McSharry		CMU in Rwanda

Research Projects Dashboard

ID	Title	Description	Expected Benefit	Industry	Problem/ Opportunity	Funding	Phase	Leader	Other Members	Partners
MR001	Machine Intelligence to enhance our World	Book on Machine Intelligence to enhance our World	Supports community building, learning, or collaboration	Research & Technology communictions to support applictions in other industries	Lack of technology competitiveness; Poor education & skills development	Don’t require funding	Preparation	Jacques Ludik	TBD	TBD
MR002	Cognitive Computing Research and Applications in Healthcare	Cognitive Computing Research and Applications in Healthcare	Advancing research & technology for applications	Research & Technology to support applictions in other industries	Lack of technology competitiveness; Poor education & skills development	TBD	Approval	TBD	TBD	TBD
MR003	Cognitive Computing Research and Applications in Education	Cognitive Computing Research and Applications in Education	Advancing research & technology for applications	Research & Technology to support applictions in other industries	Lack of technology competitiveness; Poor education & skills development	TBD	Approval	TBD	TBD	TBD
MR004	Cognitive Computing Research and Applications in *Finance*	Cognitive Computing Research and Applications in *Finance*	Advancing research & technology for applications	Research & Technology to support applictions in other industries	Lack of technology competitiveness; Poor education & skills development	TBD	Approval	TBD	TBD	TBD
MR005	Cognitive Computing Research and Applications in *Agriculture*	Cognitive Computing Research and Applications in *Agriculture*	Advancing research & technology for applications	Research & Technology to support applictions in other industries	Lack of technology competitiveness; Poor education & skills development	TBD	Approval	TBD	TBD	TBD
MR006	Deep Learning Research & Applications for Education	Deep Learning Research & Applications for Education	Advancing research & technology for applications	Research & Technology to support applictions in other industries	Lack of technology competitiveness; Poor education & skills development	TBD	Approval	TBD	TBD	TBD
MR007	Deep Learning Research & Applications for Healthcare	Deep Learning Research & Applications for Healthcare	Advancing research & technology for applications	Research & Technology to support applictions in other industries	Lack of technology competitiveness; Poor education & skills development	TBD	Approval	TBD	TBD	TBD
MR008	Deep Learning Research & Applications for Finance	Deep Learning Research & Applications for Finance	Advancing research & technology for applications	Research & Technology to support applictions in other industries	Lack of technology competitiveness; Poor education & skills development	TBD	Approval	TBD	TBD	TBD
MR009	Deep Learning Research & Applications for Agriculture	Deep Learning Research & Applications for Agriculture	Advancing research & technology for applications	Research & Technology to support applictions in other industries	Lack of technology competitiveness; Poor education & skills development	TBD	Approval	TBD	TBD	TBD
MR010	Machine Intelligence to transform Africa	Book on Machine Intelligence to transform Africa	Supports community building, learning, or collaboration	Research & Technology communictions to support applictions in other industries in Africs	Lack of technology competitiveness; Poor education & skills development	Don’t require funding	Approval	TBD	TBD	TBD
MR011	Advancing state-of-the-art in *Recurrent Neural Networks* and Sequence-to-Sequence Machine Learning	Advancing state-of-the-art in *Recurrent Neural Networks* and Sequence-to-Sequence Machine Learning	Advancing research & technology for applications	Research & Technology to support applictions in other industries	Lack of technology competitiveness; Poor education & skills development	TBD	Approval	TBD	TBD	TBD
MR012	Use of Tensor methods and novel techniques in non-convex optimization to solve complex highly- dimensional problems	Use of Tensor methods and novel techniques in non-convex optimization to solve complex highly- dimensional problems	Advancing research & technology for applications	Research & Technology to support applictions in other industries	Lack of technology competitiveness; Poor education & skills development	TBD	Approval	TBD	TBD	TBD
MR013	Advancing the state-of-the-art in Unsupervised Learning by incorporating learnings from both neuroscience and machine learning	Advancing the state-of-the-art in Unsupervised Learning by incorporating learnings from both neurosience and machine learning (e.g., build causal understanding of sensory space with temporal correlations of concurrent & sequential sensory signals)	Advancing research & technology for applications	Research & Technology to support applictions in other industries	Lack of technology competitiveness; Poor education & skills development	TBD	Approval	TBD	TBD	TBD
MR014	Deep Learning research and applications in genomics	Deep Learning research and applications in genomics	Advancing research & technology for applications	Research & Technology to support applictions in other industries	Lack of technology competitiveness; Poor education & skills development	TBD	Approval	TBD	TBD	TBD
MR015	Application of *evolutionary computation* in applications such as robotics, software agents, design and web commerce	Application of *evolutionary computation* in applications such as robotics, software aents, design and web commerce	Advancing research & technology for applications	Research & Technology to support applictions in other industries	Lack of technology competitiveness; Poor education & skills development	TBD	Approval	TBD	TBD	TBD
MR016	Combining control principles with reinforcement learning for robust machine learning applications	Combining control principles with reinforcement learning for robust machine learning applications	Advancing research & technology for applications	Research & Technology to support applictions in other industries	Lack of technology competitiveness; Poor education & skills development	TBD	Approval	TBD	TBD	TBD
MR017	Advancing the state-of-the-art in *Topological based analysis of data sets to uncover the shape of data sets*	A topological approach allows you to study datasets without assuming a shape beforehand and to combine various machine learning techniques while maintaining guarantees about the underlying shape of the data.	Advancing research & technology for applications	Research & Technology to support applictions in other industries	Lack of technology competitiveness; Poor education & skills development	TBD	Approval	TBD	TBD	TBD
MR018	Advancing the state-of-the-art in Attention models for powerful learning algorithms that require ever less data to be successful on harder problems	Attention models represent a promising direction for powerful learning algorithms that require ever less data to be successful on harder problems	Advancing research & technology for applications	Research & Technology to support applictions in other industries	Lack of technology competitiveness; Poor education & skills development	TBD	Approval	TBD	TBD	TBD
MR019	Advancing the state-of-the-art in Probabilistic Graphical Models (PGMs) research and applications	Advancing the state-of-the-art Probabilistic Graphical Models (PGMs) research and applications	Advancing research & technology for applications	Research & Technology to support applictions in other industries	Lack of technology competitiveness; Poor education & skills development	TBD	Approval	Jaco du Toit	Jacques Ludik; TBD	TBD
MR020	Advancing the state-of-the-art in Knowledge represenation architectures research and applications	Advancing the state-of-the-art in Knowledge represenation architectures that are instantly melleable and shapeable by the environment (e.g., sensory learning using patterns and sequences of patterns in cause-effect versus probabilistic way)	Advancing research & technology for applications	Research & Technology to support applictions in other industries	Lack of technology competitiveness; Poor education & skills development	TBD	Approval	Jacques Ludik	TBD	TBD

Technology Projects Dashboard

ID	Title	Description	Expected Benefit	Industry	Problem/ Opportunity	Funding	Phase	Leader	Other Members	Partners
MT001	Spark for distributed machine learning	MIIA team utilizing & sharing learnings with spark fro distributed Machine Learning	Advancing research & technology for applications	Technology to support applictions in other industries	Lack of technology competitiveness; Poor education & skills development	Don’t require funding	Preparation	TBD	TBD	TBD
MT002	TensorFlow	MIIA team utilizing & sharing learnings with TensorFlow & Open source Deep Learning software platform	Advancing research & technology for applications	Technology to support applictions in other industries	Lack of technology competitiveness; Poor education & skills development	Don’t require funding	Preparation	Jacques Ludik	TBD	TBD
MT003	IBM Watson on Bluemix	MIIA team utilizing and sharing learning with IBM Watson on Bluemix	Advancing research & technology for applications	Technology to support applictions in other industries	Lack of technology competitiveness; Poor education & skills development	Don’t require funding	Preparation	TBD	TBD	TBD
MT004	NuPIC	NuPIC (Numenta Platform for Intelligent Computing)	Advancing research & technology for applications	Technology to support applictions in other industries	Lack of technology competitiveness; Poor education & skills development	Don’t require funding	Preparation	TBD	TBD	TBD
MT005	Microsoft Cortana	Microsoft Cortana	Advancing research & technology for applications	Technology to support applictions in other industries	Lack of technology competitiveness; Poor education & skills development	Don’t require funding	Preparation	TBD	TBD	TBD
MT006	IBM Watson AI XPRIZE, a Cognitive Computing Competition	It is a $5 million competition (announced on the TED Stage on Feb 17, 2016) challenging teams from around the world to develop and demonstrate how humans can collaborate with powerful cognitive technologies to tackle some of the world’s grand challenges. Every year leading up to TED2020, teams will go head-to-head at World of Watson, IBM’s annual conference, competing for interim prizes and the opportunity to advance to the next year’s competition. The three finalist teams will take the TED stage in 2020 to deliver jaw-dropping, awe-inspiring TED Talks demonstrating what they have achieved.	Advancing technology & research Supports entrepreneurial activity	Technology to support applictions in other industries Healthcare Education Agribusiness & Forestry Finance Infrastructure, Transport, & Logistics Manufacturing & Services Energy, Oil & Gas, Mining Telecoms, Media, Technology	Poor education & skills development Poor healthcare Lack of employment Lack of sustainable governance systems & crime prevention Poor infrastructure (transport) & energy shortages Food shortages and ineffective agriculture sector Lack of technology and manufacturing competitiveness	Don’t require funding	Preparation	Jacques Ludik	TBD	TBD
MT007	DiDi Research – Algorithm Competition	DiDI Research – Algorithm Competition As less than 10% of China’s 1.4 billion citizens own automobiles, the frequency at which Chinese citizens commute on taxis, buses, trains, and planes is the highest in the world. Didi Chuxing, the dominant ride-hailing company in China, processes over 11 million trips, plans over 9 billion routes and collects over 50TB of data per day. To meet needs of riders, Didi must continually innovate to improve cloud computing and big data technologies and algorithms in order to process this massive amount of data and uphold service reliability.	Supply-demand forecasting is critical to enabling Didi to maximise utilisation of drivers and ensure that riders can always get a car whenever and wherever they may need a ride. Supply-demand forecasting helps to predict the volume of drivers and riders at a certain time period in a specific geographic area. For instance, demand tends to surge in residential areas in the mornings and in business districts in the evenings. Supply-demand forecasting allows Didi to predict demand surges and guide drivers to those areas. The end result is higher earnings for drivers and no surge pricing for riders!	Technology to support applictions in other industries	Lack of technology competitiveness; Poor education & skills development	Don’t require funding	Preparation	TBD	TBD	TBD
MT008	Google Cloud Platform & App engine	Google Cloud Platform & App engine	Advancing research & technology for applications	Technology to support applictions in other industries	Lack of technology competitiveness; Poor education & skills development	Don’t require funding	Preparation	TBD	TBD	TBD
MT009	Open source Python ecosystem for Machine Learning	Open source Python ecosystem for Machine Learning	Advancing research & technology for applications	Technology to support applictions in other industries	Lack of technology competitiveness; Poor education & skills development	Don’t require funding	Preparation	TBD	TBD	TBD
MT010	Plotly	Plotly	Advancing research & technology for applications	Technology to support applictions in other industries	Lack of technology competitiveness; Poor education & skills development	Don’t require funding	Preparation	TBD	TBD	TBD