[Annoncement] Monthly Meet talks and Community Proejcts

[chrisfouriesa]

Hey everyone =]

We don't have a speaker for this week's last Thursday of June - is there anyone that would like to give us a talk on their research?

A reminder that the Monthly Meets are mostly social events to:
- help introduce new individuals to the community
- help community members share their ideas and research
- provide a space for community members to socialise and form connections for research and for fun

So we have a rough list of speakers for the rest of 2021 with some gaps for June, July and September - if anyone would like to give a quick talk about their research / research group or just on a topic that they are interested in (e.g. I would like to give a talk sometime on what I believe to be the importance of open digital infrastructure for healthcare e.g. open source tools to help to digital health systems - not that I have done research on this, but I am quite passionate about the topic)

We are looking for talks from both the ML and healthcare spaces, as well as at their intersection. So if you would like to talk about for instance the state of digital healthcare in your country, this too would help provide great insight to the rest of the community.

So then if you would like to give a talk please feel free to add yourself to the speakers list linked below - also I will pin this list to the Monthly Meet channel on our Discord server - additionally if you know of anyone that would be a good fit to provide a talk for this community and you would like to reach out to them, add their name to the list and go ahead!

Also if you would like to give a talk and aren't too sure where to start please feel free to direct message me any time !

Monthly Meet Talks - speakers list

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1KLKgFa1DWLgGtVNU3ysb6xY6MLuLtWcqA5aH2MmCYjw/edit?usp=sharing

Additionally... A fair number of individuals come to monthly meets looking for projects...

We have been working to try and setup some projects for the community that are well suited to the format of a community that will hopefully be akin to an Africa wide distributed research group / lab.

So far we have two projects that seem promising - although I imagine there is still going to be a lot of trial and error before we find our groove as a community. Simply put, the two projects that we are considering are

1) Survey research on ML & Healthcare in Africa

1.1) This would be to help create a listing of researchers and research labs that describes the type of research they are interested, what kinds of collaboration they would be interested in with means of contact and if they are looking to recruit anyone
1.2) Help describe the state of ML & Healthcare in Africa - which could be a potentially publishable research paper

2) Helping make African Health Datasets more accessible
PySyft (https://github.com/OpenMined/PySyft) is "A library for computing on data you do not own and cannot see"  - We are busy trying to get access to a substantial African TB imaging dataset to develop a template process of providing access to African Health Data without having to make the dataset open access - that is the process would look something like

-> a SisonkeBiotic community member reaches out to a group with Health Data to request access to the data, just enough to enable using PySyft
-> once this is in place, other researchers should be able to train models on the health data without direct access

There are a lot of steps to making this work, including how to navigate the context / location specific regulatory hurdles in getting one individual access to the data - so we hope to, over time, be able provide a template and technical guide to do this in one's own local context.

If anyone is interested in helping out, or being involved with either of these or if anyone would like to put forward a project idea - I would encourage you to join the weekly meets =D

Best,

Chris

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Dr. Chris Fourie | +27645240720 | chrisfourie.africa | twitter | LinkedIn

MBBCh (Wits)

[Houcemeddine Turki]

Dear Mr.,

I thank you for your answer. I will be happy to participate to the Survey on ML & Healthcare in Africa. Data Engineering and Semantics Research Unit, University of Sfax, Tunisia, has the required skills for evidence collection and Scientometrics. Concerning your Monthly Meet, I have seen on the last Monthly Meeting that there should be a session about what we currently do as a Research Unit in Tunisia. There is a lot to clarify concerning Pre-Processing, Biomedical Reasoning and Medical Evidence. I will be honoured to give a talk on this issue in July entitled "Low-Cost Biomedical Informatics: Our vision to ML and Healthcare".

Yours Sincerely,

Houcemeddine Turki

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