IBM at Deep Learning Indaba 2025

IBM will showcase the latest advancements and developments in its AI models and tools, including the Granite Guardian project, Geospatial Studio, Text-to-SQL; Quantum Computing initiatives for Africa; and IBM SkillsBuild, a skills development programme.

Trustworthy AI seeks to ensure that AI systems are aligned with ethical principles, particularly in their societal impact. Given the unique historical and structural challenges of the African continent, it is vital that AI systems are developed to be culturally and ethically relevant, reflecting the continent’s diverse values, and effectively addressing its specific challenges in sectors like healthcare, agriculture, and finance. This full-day workshop offers a platform for researchers to learn, discuss, and engage with the challenges of developing and deploying trustworthy AI systems—especially for and within Africa. This year, the focus is on “Building Public Awareness and Engagement”. By bringing together researchers, ML practitioners, and stakeholders, we aim to strengthen the ecosystem for African centered trustworthy AI. Through this platform, we hope to inspire initiatives that ensure AI development in Africa is trustworthy, inclusive, and impactful, benefiting marginalized communities and fostering a more diverse, culturally relevant global AI landscape.

IBM organizer: Miriam Rateike

IBM advisory committee: Celia Cintas, Skyler Speakman

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Join us in exploring the current landscape of robotics research and applications in Africa!

IBM organizer: Ndivhuwo Makondo

Please find more information here.

This workshop explores the intersection of artificial intelligence with business and financial sectors across Africa, focusing on developing and implementing AI solutions that address unique regional challenges. Through talks and collaborative discussions with industry and academic leaders, participants will investigate cutting-edge AI technologies and culturally aware approaches adapted for African markets. The workshop aims to bridge the gap between theoretical advances and practical implementation while ensuring ethical and equitable AI deployment for diverse African communities.

IBM organizer: Ndivhuwo Makondo

Please find more information here.

This workshop will introduce the foundations of Quantum Machine Learning (QML) to its audience. The 2025 workshop edition will have a focus on healthcare, exploring a cancer classification task using histopathology images. Participants will learn the fundamentals of QML, explore hybrid approaches combining classical methods with quantum computing, and gain hands-on experience with the Qiskit programming SDK. The workshop aims to inspire and equip young African researchers with the skills to apply QML to real-world problems in healthcare, disease research, and beyond, fostering innovation and collaboration in the field.

IBM organizers: Stephanie Julia Muller, Ndivhuwo Nyase

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The Third IJCAI Symposium in Africa consolidates as the annual discussion table on Responsible AI research from Africa to the world. International stakeholders from academia, industry, non-governmental and governmental organizations, sit as equals with Indaba participants, in Africa, to learn from and with the unique African AI community. The grassroots AI research conducted across Africa, supported by Deep Learning Indaba, is changing the rules of the game in the global AI research ecosystem, contributing both to fundamental AI state of the art and to solving the local challenges. This is partly due to the community-based engagements of AI researchers in the continent, focusing on specific research areas such as NLP, Computer Vision, Geospatial ML. The AI research community in Africa is leading the responsible AI efforts globally.  However, there is still a big gap between the African AI research landscape and the international AI research ecosystem, where conferences, journals and publication venues are not designed according to the characteristics of the research context in the continent. There are growing efforts to address the gap, such as special tracks and dedicated committees, but a lot more needs to be done.  This workshop aims to generate a discussion and build effective bridges between the unique AI research agenda across Africa and the international AI key stakeholders, to learn about Responsible AI from Africa to the world.

Learn more about this workshop here.

IBM organizer and speaker: Sibusisiwe Makhanya

Join IBM's Kush Varshney for his keynote at the "Human-AI Interaction in the Global Majority" Workshop.

Learn more about the workshop here.

How is AI being used by the global majority, how are AI tools evolving based on user needs and how are workflows changing/impacted as a result of AI system deployment? 

Human-AI collaboration for the global majority requires meeting people where they are to integrate AI into existing workflows while ensuring accessibility, agency, and responsible use. This workshop will (1) capture the breadth of deployed applications of AI on the continent and (2) discuss patterns for collaboration alongside AI covering the importance of interface design and of algorithms that account for downstream use. We aim to promote new paradigms and evaluation protocols to advance the state of the art in human-AI collaboration for such open-ended complex tasks where, oftentimes, there is no structured ground-truth output.