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During the pandemic, we found new ways of collaborating. Through 39 online meetings and counting, a team from Mzuzu University’s ICT Department and Copenhagen University’s Computer Science Institute and FAIR organized an event for a new community in Malawi: Students, researchers and lecturers in the field of data science met up in a week-long training and project workshop whereby new relationships were formed. This happened not least with financial support from ACM’s KDD group’s Community Impact Program. It was called Malawi Data Science Bootcamp and we are already hoping for a second edition in 2022.
The event has its own website here: https://mwdata.science/
Through this work, we are seeing the full potential of ICT access: When academic environments connect and lift eachother up through knowledge sharing.
Data science is a field in computer science that focuses on large data sets: Finding knowledge and patterns in these. It comprises both machine learning and AI and brings together practitioners and researchers from different disciplines - such as ICT, medicine, finance, statistics, mathematics and social sciences.
We have found tremendous support for the event, through a full line-up of facilitators teaching through the entire week, as well as double the number of registered participants that the event could cater for.
The community in and around Malawi deserves another event like this.
FAIR’s core role in this type of activity is to equip learning labs with computers at universities and secondary schools. But moreover, we are happy to work to bring together academic communities across borders.
If you are a part of a company that would like to make an arrangement for the future of your equipment or work at a university who would like to establish a connection with the Malawi community, we would love to hear from you.
You can also support FAIR through a private membership.
