Building AI, the African way
- Wits University
AMLD Africa 2026 urges Africa-led artificial intelligence and machine learning education, research and innovation.
Collaboration in machine learning and artificial intelligence research and development across all countries, cultures and economies in Africa is what sets the continent apart from others to make a meaningful and lasting impact through innovation and entrepreneurship.
“Back in 2017, Wits University and others launched the Deep Learning Indaba and we were blown away by the interest in AI and ML in Africa. Today, that and similar initiatives have catalysed so much excitement across the continent. We have moved from very small, isolated pockets of people just starting to dabble in AI to one of the strongest, most vibrant AI communities in the world — amazing people who are really trying to build things that can change the world,” said Professor Benjamin Rosman, Director of Wits University’s Machine Intelligence and Neural Discovery (MIND) Institute.
Rosman delivered the opening address for the AMLD Africa 2026 Conference, where students, young professionals, scientists, researchers and machine learning experts from various African countries and beyond gathered at Wits University’s Science Stadium for one of the highlights on the Continent’s artificial intelligence calendar.
AMLD Africa, the Applied Machine Learning Days Africa, was founded by African students and alumni from EPFL, the Swiss Federal Technology Institute of Lausanne, Switzerland, with the mission to democratise AI and Machine Learning across the continent.
This year, the main conference focused on the most pressing current issues in AI and ML facing Africa, including:
- AI for healthcare
- AI for cultural preservation
- AI for sustainability
- AI governance
- AI ethics
- AI for economic empowerment
AMLD Africa also connects academia, industry, and policy to empower communities through inclusive access to AI knowledge and tools. Its goal is to break financial and geographic barriers, amplify African talent, and drive innovation that responds to the continent’s unique challenges.
This year the Conference also focused on startups and entrepreneurship. Said Khalil Aouani Cherif, President of AMLD Africa: “Research is important but we also need entrepreneurship and people to believe in themselves and be backed by the right investors. In these kinds of events and gatherings, a lot of ideas and opportunities emerge, and we hope to capitalise on that. Thanks to AMLD, more opportunities can grow.”
Wits at AMLD Africa 2026
Joining Rosman from Wits was Dr Martin Bekker, computational social scientist and AI ethics researcher in the School of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics, and a Fellow in the Wits MIND Institute. His talk interrogated the very nature of values (and value studies) itself, challenging how we define, measure, and encode ethical frameworks into probabilistic models. By reframing the conversation from abstract philosophy to concrete metrics, he discussed how we could develop a more robust approach to the interface between human ethics and machine outputs.
A talk by Professor Nasreen Mahomed, Academic Head of the Division of Radiology at Wits, highlighted the role of AI diagnostics in advancing digital health, improving diagnostic accuracy, efficiency, and access to care. She emphasised the need for clinically governed, ethically deployed AI, that is supported by interoperable digital systems, sovereign data, and strong privacy protection.
Dr Muhammad Ahsan Mahboob, Head of the Sibanye-Stillwater Digital Mining Laboratory (Digimine) at Wits, delivered a talk in the AI for Energy Transition subtract, talking about climate adaptation and mining.