Ro'ya-CV4Africa
A Grassroots Computer Vision Community for Africans and by Africans
Ro'ya is an Arabic word that means vision to indicate the focus of our community on computer vision datasets, methods and applications that impact our African communities.
We aspire to have a diverse community whose members span the whole continent and come from every country in Africa inspired by DLIndaba-X. One of our main beliefs inspired by the DLIndaba community is that “We learn together to build together”. We want to encourage more students and researchers to learn about computer vision fundamentals and its applications which impact Africans. We aim to solve real-world problems that are happening in developing countries, especially the African continent, instead of the current CV research that is focused on developed countries and big tech companies' goals. Our community focus is on a big umbrella of multiple computer vision applications including medical image processing, precision agriculture, remote sensing, traffic monitoring, wildlife monitoring, climate change, AI fairness and others.
Our Goals
For Africa
To build and facilitate a community of Computer Vision researchers, connect and grow it, spurring and sharing further research, build helpful tools for applications in medicine, agriculture, science and education, to benefit our African communities. We aspire to have a computer vision community with members from every African country and help establish diverse goals that serves the whole continent without bias to certain areas.
For CV Research
To build data sets and tools to facilitate Computer Vision research for Africa, and to decolonize the current Computer Vision research that is mostly focused on Big Tech companies and developed countries goals instead of our needs.
Our Values
We inspire from other AI grassroots such as Masakhane and Sisonke Biotik in our values
Umuntu Ngumuntu Ngabantu - loosely translated from isiZulu means “a person is a person through another person” or “I am because you are”. This philosophy calls for collaboration, participation and community. It proposes relationality, over individualism for stronger social cohesions towards sustainable communities. It believes we share our successes and one’s personhood is evaluated based on their contributions to the community.
African-centricity. We centralize the narratives of Africans as a remedy to the effects of Euro-centricism on our beliefs. This way we reassert a new way of looking at information from an African perspective and shun any attempts to devalue our knowledge and stories
Everyone has valuable knowledge - We believe that each person’s individual experiences have value and each person is worth listening to and has something to contribute.
Data sovereignty - We believe Africans should be able to decide what data represents our communities globally, retain ultimate ownership of that data, and know how it is used
Reproducibility - We believe in reproducible research. As a result, we publish our code and data from our research so that others can reproduce and build upon it.
Love for others what you would love for your own self. We believe in leaving a positive impact when collaborating and dealing amongst ourselves and with others. - حب لاخيك ما تحب لنفسك
Ownership - We believe that Africans should be in charge of owning, driving and participating in the Computer Vision research process, rather than as observers or data providers.
Openness - We believe in sharing our ideas and progress openly, especially on the African continent, for Africans. We’re against research that takes African contributions or data and puts them behind a paywall that is infeasible for Africans to access.
Multidisciplinarity - We truly believe that participation from all fields and experience and that multidisciplinarity leads to a more robust and more inclusive society
Kindness - We believe that being considerate, friendly and generous within our community is the best way to support it and encourage more inclusivity
Responsibility - We believe that each person in the technology process has an ethical responsibility to what they produce in the world. For this reason, we actively wreckon with the ethical impacts of our work
Sustainability - We believe that sustainability is necessary for societal change - that small daily efforts, over a long time are what truly change the world. To that, we aim for sustainability of our work, by being fully integrated with technological stakeholders to ensure the community continues to thrive into the future
How to participate?
Initiatives
Our community members are helping in multiple initiatives
CV4Africa Workshop
CV4Africa Workshop in DLIndaba 2023, Ghana. We are working on organizing a computer vision for Africa workshop with two tracks (Datasets - Methods). Where the first track focuses on datasets for Africans on applications that are relevant to us, while the second track is about the algorithms, architectures and computer vision approaches that serve our African communities. We are also working with Zindi to host a challenge as part of the workshop.
Bibliometric Study
Computer Vision for Africa, A Bibliometric Study. We are currently working together on building a bibliometric study for both datasets and methods that are for Africans and by Africans. The goal of this study is to understand the current CV research ongoing in Africa and understand the gaps where we need the community to contribute to.
Study Group
Weekly Reading/Study Group on Sundays 3:00 pm GMT. We have studied the fundamentals of meta-learning, fewshot learning, and vision transformers. Additionally, we had one hands-on practical on ViTs. Next we are focusing on medical image processing application and learning about generative modelling along with its intersection with few-shot learning.