Expert Colloquium

What it is

An invited talk series. Each colloquium features a single speaker, usually a working researcher or senior engineer, presenting current work, followed by an extended Q&A. Past speakers and topics are listed below, and upcoming sessions are announced through the newsletter. Recordings are posted publicly when permitted.

Why it matters

Colloquia close the loop between TRI AI’s learners and the people producing the field’s frontier work. They give cohort graduates a direct window into how research actually happens, and they give visiting speakers a thoughtful audience that has read the paper.

Who attends

Open to TRI AI cohort graduates, partner institution students, and invited members of the wider community. Capacity is limited at in-person events. The livestream is unrestricted.

Upcoming Themes

Theme A: Research frontiers

State-of-the-art ML and AI research: large language models, diffusion models, RLHF, multi-modal AI, graph neural networks, and in-context learning. Straight from research labs and academia.

• Date: TBD

• Time: TBD

Theme B: AI for Africa

African NLP, speech and accent technology, African image datasets, AI for healthcare and agriculture, climate AI, local language models, and building datasets for underrepresented languages. The most distinctive theme in the series.

• Date: TBD

• Time: TBD

Theme C: AI in industry and product

Building and deploying AI products: MLOps, model evaluation, responsible AI in production, AI startup journeys, and career paths in AI engineering. Grounded in practice.

• Date: TBD

• Time: TBD

Theme D: Ethics, policy, and governance

Bias and fairness, AI policy in Africa, data sovereignty, algorithmic accountability, AI safety, and privacy. Not optional, rather, essential to building AI that actually serves communities.

• Date: TBD

• Time: TBD

Theme E: Inspiration and pathways

Career journeys, community building, research culture, mentorship, and the experience of navigating the AI field as an African professional. Deliberately personal.

• Date: TBD

• Time: TBD

Past colloquia

A selection of past sessions, with full recordings on the AI Saturdays Lagos YouTube channel.

• Luis Serrano (30 January 2021). Machine learning educator and author of Grokking Machine Learning. Watch on YouTube
• Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún (20 March 2021). Linguist and writer working on Yorùbá language preservation and digital language tools. Watch on YouTube
• Julius Adebayo (24 April 2021). Interpretability. Then a PhD candidate at MIT working on interpretability and algorithmic fairness; now at Guide Labs. Watch on YouTube
• Irene Lo (22 May 2021). Market design for social good: using math, algorithms, and economics to address social problems. Professor of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford, with ongoing work on resource allocation in public housing and school assignment. Watch on YouTube