The Marconi Research and Innovations Lab participated in the Deep Learning Indaba 2025, held in Kigali, Rwanda, where the team showcased its latest research through a series of poster presentations.
The lab presented four posters at the conference:
1. Accelerating Medical Image Annotation: A Model-Assisted Labeling Pipeline Leveraging YOLOv8 and SAM presented by Dr. Andrew Katumba;
2. PaliGemma-CXR: Multitask Multimodal Models for Chest X-Ray Interpretation presented by Denis Musinguzi;
3. Enhancing Bean Crop Disease Diagnosis with Vision-Language Models: A Multitask Approach Using PaliGemma presented by Peter Oketta; and
4. Benchmarking Automatic Speech Recognition Models for African Languages presented by Sulaiman Kagumire and Alvin Nahabwe.
Three of these posters received awards for best posters and presentations. As part of the prizes, Dr. Andrew Katumba received an Instructor-Led Course, Denis Musinguzi received an NVIDIA Deep Learning Institute (DLI) Self-Paced Course, and Peter Oketta received a Local Souvenir from the Deep Learning Indaba organizing committee.
A key highlight of the conference was the keynote address by Dr. Verena Rieser (Google DeepMind) titled “Whose Gold? Aligning AI with Diverse Views on What’s Safe, Aligned, and Beneficial.” She emphasized the importance of intentional AI alignment that reflects diverse human values. During her talk, Dr. Rieser also highlighted the Amplify Initiative, a Google Research project to which Marconi Lab contributes, focused on building inclusive, community-driven datasets in African languages to support culturally grounded AI innovation.
The conference was an inspiring experience, connecting with brilliant researchers from across the continent, exchanging ideas, and learning about the exciting progress being made in AI and deep learning in Africa. We return motivated and energized, looking forward to building on these insights and contributing further to this growing community.
Here’s to more collaboration, innovation, and impact. See you at the next Indaba!