AfricAIED 2023

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 recent announcement of GPT-4 features 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. 

This workshop is the genesis of a movement to make pronounced the building and advancement of AIED systems that work well in the African context. This workshop aims to highlight efforts to build and deploy AIED systems in Africa as well as discuss potential opportunities and challenges. In particular, it will be centered around our open-source project, NSMQ AI addressing 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”.  Details can be found in our position paper  — “Can an AI Win Ghana's National Science and Maths Quiz? An AI Grand Challenge for Education” that was presented at the Practical ML for Developing Countries workshop at ICLR 2023.

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 can have real-world impact on education such as enabling millions of students across Africa to have one-on-one learning support from this AI.

This workshop is a satellite workshop of the International Conference on AI in Education (AIED 2023) and 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 would consist of technical presentations by the team leaders of the NSMQ AI project, invited talks, and panel discussions on opportunities for AIED, and challenges in developing and deploying AIED in Africa.