Our one-month Research Cohort this November runs over five Saturday and it is open to anyone interested in research. Our audience encompases individuals that wants to learn how to effectively read, present, and extend technical research papers.
The cohort will provide an opportunity to:
- Learn how to critically read and analyze research papers.
- Present research findings to both technical and non-technical audiences.
- Re-implement or extend a selected research paper.
- Interact with seasoned researchers from academia, industry and research institutes
While all applicants are invited to participate in discussions, give feedback, and attend the presentations, 10 research scholars are selected to present their chosen papers and demonstrate an extension or re-implementation of the work. Application form
Key Dates:
Notification of Selection as presenter: October 23rd 2024 (on rolling basis)- Application Deadline: November 1st 2024
- Cohort starts: November 2nd, 2024
- Cohort ends: November 30th, 2024
We meet every Saturday from November 2nd to November 30th (10am - 12pm WAT).
For all Participants
- How to read a research paper
- Understand the research process
- Gain the knowledge to participate in research paper reading and writing
For Presenters
In addition to the above,
- Interpret and reproduce experiments in a paper
- Present paper to both technical and non-technical audiences
- 5 weeks meeting discussions and engaging with fellow researchers
- Workshop series and round-table discussions in week 1, 2, and 4 delivered by seasoned researchers from academia, industry and research institutes
- Participation in research paper discussions in week 3 and 5
- Certificate of participation
In addition to the above,
- Participate in research paper presentation in week 3
- Reproduce chosen research paper and/or extend the author's work
- Reproduce the result of the chosen research paper and/or extend the work
- Present the reproduced and/or extension results in week 5
- Certificate of participation as AI Saturdays Lagos Research scholar
- To be eligible for certificate of attendance, you need to achieve 100% attendance rate. Participation is monitored by taking attendance after each week's class.
- To be eligible for certificate of participation as AI Saturdays Lagos Research Scholar
- you need to achieve 100% attendance rate
- you need to be a presenter
- you need to participate in paper presentation in week 3
- you need to present the reproduced and/or extended results of your chosen research paper in week 5
Goal: To equip the audience with knowledge to effectively read, and understand a technical research paper
- Welcome and cohort overview
- Workshop: Introduction to reading research paper
- Speaker: Odumakinde Ayomide, Research Scholar at Cohere
- Potential topics covered
- Components of a research paper in computer science field
- Key strategies for reading papers effectively
- How to critically analyse a technical paper
- Identifying the main argument, contributions, and limitations
- Recommended Read
- Round table discussions
- Panelist:
- Tejumade Afonja, Co-founder of AI Saturdays Lagos and Doctoral Researcher at CISPA
- Tobias Lorenz, PhD Student at CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security
- Odumakinde Ayomide, Research Scholar at Cohere
- Moderator:
- Jeremiah Fadugba, Doctoral Researcher at African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS)
- Potential topics to discuss
- What are your process to reading a technical research paper
- How do you address challenges in reading and understanding papers
- How do you stay updated in a fast-moving field like machine learning
- Do you have any tips and tricks that you have found useful in your research journey
- Panelist:
- Open up the floor for Questions
- Interactive session
- Goal: audience to briefly share their areas of interest and interact with fellow attendees
Goal: To equip the audience with knowledge to choose research topic, formulate research question, form hypothesis, validate through experiments, write up their results and publish at top-tier Computer Science venues
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Welcome
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Workshop: The research process – from ideation to publication
- Speaker: Orevaoghene Ahia, Computer Science (CS) PhD student at University of Washington
- Potential topics covered
- Choosing a topic to research / Choosing your supervisor
- The idea process to publish your first paper; what does this entail?
- Process of submitting and publishing a paper in a top CS conference
- Write the paper > submit > reviews > rebuttal > camera ready > poster/talk > present
- Presenting a technical paper
- The highs and lows of research (personal anecdotes)
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Round table discussions
- Panelist:
- Khadija Iddrisu, PhD Researcher at Insight SFI Research Centre for Data Analytics
- Joscha Cüppers, PhD Student at CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security
- Orevaoghene Ahia, CS PhD student at University of Washington
- Moderator:
- Shadrack Adeyemi, Data Analyst at Dams Flourish Nigeria Limited
- Potential topics to discuss
- How did you choose your topic and/or your supervisor
- How did you discover your first idea that led to publication
- How did you deal with your first rejection (if any)
- How do you stay motivated
- What skills did you develop during your PhD (so far) that you have found very useful in your research journey
- Panelist:
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Open up the floor for Questions
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Interactive session
- Goal: small groups break-out sessions to look a sample paper together and present their findings
Goal: Presenters give 10mins presentation about their chosen research paper
- Welcome
- Presentations:
- Each presenter presents their assigned paper
- Peer feedback on clarity, depth, and structure of presentation
- Group discussions
- Potential topics to discuss:
- Research questions explored in presented papers
- Noticeable gaps in the presented papers and potential area of extension
- Open discussions on presentation challenges, and potential area of improvements
- Potential topics to discuss:
Goal: To gain in-depth understanding of how researchers design experiments, choose baseline methods, evaluation metrics, and test different hyperparameter choices
- Welcome
- Workshop: Implementation and Evaluation of Research Paper
- Speaker: Sewade Ogun, AI Researcher in Speech and Language Technologies, previously PhD student at Inria
- Potential topics covered
- How to set up experiments to be able to test different hyper parameters quickly – use of config file, etc
- How to choose evaluation metrics
- Setup experiments to tell the story you want to tell
- Baseline & other methods
- Ablation study - show that all the parts of method are needed
- Different settings, noise, number of features, scalability, (problem dependent properties)
- How to tell a convincing story about your method (such that reviewers accept your paper)
- Motivate topic with personal research project
- Round table discussion on implementation and evaluation of research paper
- Panelist:
- Olumide Okubadejo, PhD, Head of Product at Sabi, previously Machine Learning Engineer at Spotify
- Sahar Abdelnabi, AI Security Researcher at Microsoft, previously PhD student at CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security
- Sewade Ogun, AI Researcher in Speech and Language Technologies, previously PhD student at Inria
- Moderator:
- Tejumade Afonja, Co-founder of AI Saturdays Lagos and Doctoral Researcher at CISPA
- Potential topics to discuss
- Is it okay to omit results that are bad on your method?
- Why do you think authors sometimes fail to highlight the limitations of their method?
- If a method fails in another setting, does this mean it is a bad method?
- What are some good practices that you wish to see more of in research
- Panelist:
- Open up the floor for questions
- Interactive group activities
- Goal: participant discuss findings from changing different hyper-parameter setting of a certain paper’s results
Goal: researchers tend to present settings where their method works well and probably don’t show the setting where their method struggles. Try to identify a setting that was not considered in the paper and test how well it works
- Welcome
- Presentations:
- Presenters present re-implemented projects, discuss any extension they have made
- Peer and invited guests feedback on clarity, depth, and novelty
- Next steps, and networking
- Closing remarks
- Tejumade Afonja, Co-founder of AI Saturdays Lagos and Doctoral Researcher at CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security
- Oluwafemi Azeez, Co-founder of AI Saturdays Lagos and Head of Data Science at Pastel
- Kenechi Dukor, Core organizer of AI Saturdays Lagos and Product Management Consultant at Motorola Solutions
- Shadrack Adeyemi, Data Analyst at Dams Flourish Nigeria Limited
- Joscha Cüppers, PhD at CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security
- Ejiro Onose, Technical Writer for Bazara Tech Inc
- Oluwaseun Ajayi, Machine Learning Engineer at LuminaCog
- Adetola Adetunji, Data Analyst at XNStatPipe
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Wang, Yufei, Yi Yu, Wenhan Yang, Lanqing Guo, Lap-Pui Chau, Alex C. Kot, and Bihan Wen. "Exposurediffusion: Learning to expose for low-light image enhancement." In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision, pp. 12438-12448. 2023.
Presenter: Zion Oladiran
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Trinh, Trieu H., Yuhuai Wu, Quoc V. Le, He He, and Thang Luong. "Solving olympiad geometry without human demonstrations." Nature 625, no. 7995 (2024): 476-482.
Presenters: Hassan Zainab Mosunmola
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Fareed, Mian Muhammad Sadiq, Shahid Zikria, Gulnaz Ahmed, Saqib Mahmood, Muhammad Aslam, Syeda Fizzah Jillani, Ahmad Moustafa, and Muhammad Asad. "ADD-Net: an effective deep learning model for early detection of Alzheimer disease in MRI scans." IEEE Access 10 (2022): 96930-96951.
Presenter: Olusola Aremu
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Wu, Zhaoxuan, Mohammad Mohammadi Amiri, Ramesh Raskar, and Bryan Kian Hsiang Low. "Incentive-Aware Federated Learning with Training-Time Model Rewards." In The Twelfth International Conference on Learning Representations. 2024.
Presenter: Olumide Buari
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Keselman, Ariel, Sergey Ten, Adham Ghazali, and Majed Jubeh. "Reinforcement learning with A* and a Deep Heuristic." arXiv preprint arXiv:1811.07745 (2018).
Presenter: Adesola Josiah Taiwo
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Park, Robin Y., Rhydian Windsor, Amir Jamaludin, and Andrew Zisserman. "Automated spinal mri labelling from reports using a large language model." In International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention, pp. 101-111. Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland, 2024.
Presenter: Bakare Kaosara
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Xu, Lei, Maria Skoularidou, Alfredo Cuesta-Infante, and Kalyan Veeramachaneni. "Modeling tabular data using conditional gan." Advances in neural information processing systems 32 (2019).
Presenter: Uthman Rasheed
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