I had the opportunity to attend the AI for Social Good Seminar in the famous Computer Science venue, Schloss Dagstuhl! The aim of the the seminar was to bring together machine learning experts from across the globe with data-savvy NGOs who were seeking to exploit AI and ML tools for social good. We began by exchanging key ideas of the worlds of NGOs and ML to try and make sure we all understand the challenges faces by the NGOs, as well as the opportunities and limitations that ML can bring.

The food served by in Dagstuhl was delicious, especially the daily 3pm cake! The evenings were full of fun, with cheap German beer, board games, and a little bit of dancing. Especially enjoyable was the company, wonderful people from all over the world.

In the final days we carried out a hackathon. I focused on two projects: Laterlite wanted to improve their prediction models for school dropout, and AirQo wanted to see if we could predict air pollution given a sparse array of sensors. Two days was not enough to do any considerable work, however, I hope we can carry on our collaboration and help them in the future!

A link to the seminar’s report can be found here. I also leave a picture of when we caught chickens playing a chess tournament.