Karim Gamal

Karim Gamal, Ahmed Gaber, Hossam Amer

Federated learning is a growing field in the machine learning community due to its decentralized and private design. Model training in federated learning is distributed over multiple clients giving access to lots of client data while maintaining privacy. Then, a server aggregates the training done on these multiple clients without access to their data, which could be emojis widely used in any social media service and instant messaging platforms to express users' sentiments. This paper proposes federated learning-based multilingual emoji prediction in both clean and attack scenarios. Emoji prediction data have been crawled from both Twitter and SemEval emoji datasets. This data is used to train and evaluate different transformer model sizes including a sparsely activated transformer with either the assumption of clean data in all clients or poisoned data via label flipping attack in some clients. Experimental results on these models show that federated learning in either clean or attacked scenarios performs similarly to centralized training in multilingual emoji prediction on seen and unseen languages under different data sources and distributions. Our trained transformers perform better than other techniques on the SemEval emoji dataset in addition to the privacy as well as distributed benefits of federated learning.

Abdul-Hakeem Omotayo, Ashery Mbilinyi, Lukman Ismaila et al.

Despite significant efforts to democratize artificial intelligence (AI), computer vision which is a sub-field of AI, still lags in Africa. A significant factor to this, is the limited access to computing resources, datasets, and collaborations. As a result, Africa's contribution to top-tier publications in this field has only been 0.06% over the past decade. Towards improving the computer vision field and making it more accessible and inclusive, this study analyzes 63,000 Scopus-indexed computer vision publications from Africa. We utilize large language models to automatically parse their abstracts, to identify and categorize topics and datasets. This resulted in listing more than 100 African datasets. Our objective is to provide a comprehensive taxonomy of dataset categories to facilitate better understanding and utilization of these resources. We also analyze collaboration trends of researchers within and outside the continent. Additionally, we conduct a large-scale questionnaire among African computer vision researchers to identify the structural barriers they believe require urgent attention. In conclusion, our study offers a comprehensive overview of the current state of computer vision research in Africa, to empower marginalized communities to participate in the design and development of computer vision systems.

Abdul-Hakeem Omotayo, Mai Gamal, Eman Ehab et al.

Computer vision is a broad field of study that encompasses different tasks (e.g., object detection). Although computer vision is relevant to the African communities in various applications, yet computer vision research is under-explored in the continent and constructs only 0.06% of top-tier publications in the last ten years. In this paper, our goal is to have a better understanding of the computer vision research conducted in Africa and provide pointers on whether there is equity in research or not. We do this through an empirical analysis of the African computer vision publications that are Scopus indexed, where we collect around 63,000 publications over the period 2012-2022. We first study the opportunities available for African institutions to publish in top-tier computer vision venues. We show that African publishing trends in top-tier venues over the years do not exhibit consistent growth, unlike other continents such as North America or Asia. Moreover, we study all computer vision publications beyond top-tier venues in different African regions to find that mainly Northern and Southern Africa are publishing in computer vision with 68.5% and 15.9% of publications, resp. Nonetheless, we highlight that both Eastern and Western Africa are exhibiting a promising increase with the last two years closing the gap with Southern Africa. Additionally, we study the collaboration patterns in these publications to find that most of these exhibit international collaborations rather than African ones. We also show that most of these publications include an African author that is a key contributor as the first or last author. Finally, we present the most recurring keywords in computer vision publications per African region.