AfricAIED 2024

This workshop aims to bring together educators, researchers, entrepreneurs, policymakers and AI experts to discuss and collaborate on innovative ideas, best practices, and future developments in leveraging AI to enhance learning experiences and outcomes in Africa

Recent advances in AI systems such as BERT, ChatGPT, and GPT-4 have demonstrated their potential for advancing education with various EdTech companies such as Duolingo, Quizlet, and KhanAcademy leveraging them. Yet, these AI systems tend to be deployed and evaluated primarily in the Western world. For example, the launch of GPT-4 featured various academic exams as benchmarks with none from Africa. The African continent tends to be an afterthought in terms of applications of such AI advances with no attention whatsoever to the unique needs and challenges of students in this context. 

AfricAIED is the genesis of a movement to make pronounced the building and advancement of AIED systems that work well in the African context. Building upon a successful inaugural edition of this workshop last year — AfricAIED 2023 — this year's workshop aims to crowdsource and highlight efforts to build and deploy AIED systems in Africa as well as discuss potential opportunities and challenges. This workshop will be centered around an online AI Hackathon —  AfricAIED 2024 Hackaton — that builds upon our open-source project, Brilla AI which is building an AI Contestant to address our proposed grand challenge in education — NSMQ AI Grand Challenge — “Build an AI to compete in Ghana’s National Science & Maths Quiz Ghana (NSMQ) competition and win — performing better than the best contestants in all rounds and stages of the competition”.

The NSMQ is an annual live science and mathematics competition for senior secondary school students in Ghana in which 3 teams of 2 students compete by answering questions across biology, chemistry, physics, and math in 5 rounds over 5 progressive stages until a winning team is crowned for that year. The NSMQ is an exciting live quiz competition with interesting technical challenges across speech-to-text, text-to-speech, question-answering, and human-computer interaction. An AI that conquers this grand challenge could have real-world impact on education such as enabling millions of students across Africa to have one-on-one learning support from this AI.

AfricAIED 2024 is a satellite workshop of the 25th International Conference on AI in Education (AIED 2024). It aims to bring together educators, researchers, entrepreneurs, policymakers, and AI experts to discuss and collaborate on innovative ideas, best practices, and future developments in leveraging AI to enhance learning experiences and outcomes in Africa. 

The workshop will be a hybrid one and will consist of technical presentations by the top 3 competitors on their winning approaches, invited talks, and panel discussions on opportunities for AIED, and challenges in developing and deploying AIED in Africa. The workshop will also feature presentations and demos from team leads of the Brilla AI project on the 2024 version of Brilla AI.