Workshop at the Deep Learning Indaba, Senegal
1. September 2024, von Theresa Pekarek Rosin

Foto: Tamlin Love
We are happy to announce that in early September, Tamlin Love, one of our doctoral candidates supervised by Antonio Andriella and Guillem Alenyà Ribas at the Institut de Robòtica i Informàtica Industrial, attended the Deep Learning Indaba in Dakar, Senegal to run the 2nd Robot Learning for Africa workshop, sponsored by the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society and LelapaAI.
The Deep Learning Indaba is an annual conference which brings together the African AI and machine learning community to disseminate research, engage in discussions and form a bridge between researchers and industry. This year’s Indaba was held in Senegal at the Amadou Mahtar Mbow university, and featured a mix of students, faculty and industry professionals in attendance. Highlights from the conference include keynotes by Samy Bengio and Isabel Valera, the Ideathon contest and a number of workshops on a diverse range of topics such as NeuroAI, AI in climate and AI for good.
One such workshop, the 2nd Robot Learning for Africa workshop, focused both on connecting robotics researchers across the African continent and on introducing the field to the larger community. Insightful keynotes were delivered by Benjamin Rosman, who spoke about reinforcement learning for robotics, and Sekou Remy, who spoke about bridging the gap between robotics research and work in industry. The organisers of the workshop also partnered with Scaleup Robotics, a Swedish cloud robotics company, to provide attendees the opportunity to remotely control a number of robot arms. Capping off the workshop was a group discussion during which participants discussed the opportunities present in Africa for robot solutions, the barriers present that hinder the development and deployment of these solutions, and the ways we can overcome these barriers.