AIMS South Africa Newseltter September 2024

[African Institute for Mathematical Sciences]

AIMS South Africa Celebrates the Arrival of New Students with a Week of Engaging Activities    On Monday 9 September, AIMS South Africa kicked off with a vibrant welcome week for the new 2024-2025 intake. The week was packed with activities designed not only to welcome the students but also to facilitate a smooth integration into the AIMS community for both students and staff.      The festivities began with the official welcome and registration, setting a warm and inviting tone for the incoming students. Throughout the week, a series of innovative and interactive events took place.                Read more    AIMS South Africa Welcomes New COO    We are excited to welcome Francois van Eyssen as the new Chief Operating Officer of AIMS South Africa. Francois is a seasoned business leader with extensive experience across various senior roles, including CEO, COO, and CFO.     At AIMS South Africa, we are confident that Francois's leadership will bring innovative approaches and continued success to our operations. Welcome to the team, Francois! We look forward to your impactful contributions and leadership.    Read more 2024 National Science Week Launch          On 28 September, AIMS, through its House of Science, joined over 70 exhibitions from universities, science councils, national research facilities, industry, science centres, government departments and relevant non-governmental organisations from across South Africa to kick off the 2024 National Science Week (NSW) at the Central University of Technology (CUT) in Bloemfontein. AIMS contributed to the launch through an engaging exhibition stand at CUT and delivering recruitment presentations at CUT and the University of the Free State.       Read more Highlights from the 11th Heidelberg Laureate Forum          From 22 to 27 September 2024, Heidelberg once again opened its doors to some of the world's most brilliant minds for the 11th Heidelberg Laureate Forum (HLF), a distinguished event that brings together young researchers and the most esteemed laureates in mathematics and computer science.    Mr Siyabonga Mthimkulu, a PhD student from AIMS/UWC, was among the attendees. He described the event as transformative, offering unparalleled access to luminaries and their groundbreaking work.    Read more    Student Updates          Structured Master’s students completed Mathematical Problem-Solving (Dimbinaina Ralaivaosaona, Stellenbosch University).       AI for Science Stream students also completed Introduction to Machine Learning (Claire David, AIMS South Africa).          Both streams completed Statistics Skills: Bayesian Inference (Sanjoy Mahajan, Lund University).       As part of the Lecturer Seminar Series, Prof. Mahajan gave a talk titled: ‘Two equals one: Street-fighting mathematics and science for better thinking and teaching’ on 30 September 2024.       Machine Learning for Ecology Group Updates This Group is hosting three international students. Shree Mohan (from MIT), Maria Stickel and Yichao Liu (from Heidelberg University). The students are working on projects related to deep learning and bioacoustics.       Dr Emmaneual Dufourq was invited to attend the Aspen Global Change Institute's workshop on AI for Biodiversity: Overcoming Barriers to Impact. The workshop took place in Snowmass Village, Colorado, United States. The workshop was attended by 25 researchers with various backgrounds in artificial intelligence and conservation, from the US and internationally. The workshop was co-organised by Professors Sara Beery (MIT), Kate Jones (UCL) and David Rolnick (McGill). The theme of the workshop was to identify key gaps and bottlenecks, and to prioritize goals related to AI for biodiversity.                Dr Lorène Jeantet, presented the group’s work at the African Bioacoustic Community (ABC) Conference in Cape Town during the first week of September, organized by Sea Search           The title of her presentation was ‘Unlocking the Potential of Unlabelled Data in Automatic Bat Vocalization Classification from Deep Learning Models.’ This project was primarily led by our student, Frank Fundel, from the University of Ulm in Germany, during his visit to AIMS in November 2023. It is a collaborative research effort with Alexandra Howard and Peter Taylors from the University of the Free State, who collected the data on bat calls and shared it with the group.    Additionally, Dr Jeantet taught a course at UCT for the Master's Program Data Science for Industry, where she delivered ten hours of lecture on deep learning algorithms and large language models.       AIMS Gender in STEM Programme Kick-Off       On 16 September, the House of Science kicked off the 2024/25 AIMS Women in STEM (AIMSWIS) programme with a meet-and-greet session. The programme is part of AIMS South Africa’s continuous efforts to support and guide female students during their time at AIMS and their future career progression, contributing to addressing the gender gap in STEM.   The session was organised to welcome our new female students and enable them to connect with senior students and researchers. It provided a supportive environment for sharing advice on navigating academic life at AIMS, building confidence, and establishing a support system among peers.    Read more    AIMS Contributions to Waste Management and Recycling Dialogue in the Greater Muizenberg Community On 26 September, AIMS hosted the second event in the "Talking Recycling Solutions" series, continuing the conversation on waste management and recycling in the Greater Muizenberg community. The event featured a screening of The Oracle of Mokattam, a film about waste management in Cairo. This was followed by insights from waste experts and members of the local informal recycling community.    AIMS students utilised this community platform to present and showcase their public mathematics communication/ outreach projects,    Read more    Teaching tip for lecturers!       By the time we teach our students, we have already gone through the iterative processes of constructing, conceptualizing, and deconstructing our ideas. Therefore, when we teach, we know the direction in which we want the lecture to proceed. What if we gave students more opportunities to reconstruct and rearticulate the ideas we have worked through ourselves? We cannot assume that students understand what we are conceptualizing if they have not experienced it as we have. Putting them through that process helps them develop a deeper understanding of what it means to construct, create and invent.       ANNOUNCEMENTS    We are hiring!       We have open positions for:    A Machine Learning Researcher: Earth Observation & Ecology (open until filled.)     A Mathematics Innovation Manager (Application Deadline: 15 November 2024)     Please see our applications page for more details!    Read more       Click here to unsubscribe from our mailing list.