Schedule
Friday, October 10, 2025 (All times in East African Time GMT +3)
| 07:30 - 08:30 | Registration |
|---|---|
| 08:30 – 08:40 | Welcome Remarks Prof. Engineer Bainomugisha Chair of Computer Science Department Makerere University, Board Member Sunbird AI |
| 08:40 - 09:40 | Keynote and Product Launch By Sunbird AI Dr Ernest Mwebaze & Dr John Quinn |
| 09:40 – 10:00 | Official Opening Keynote. Dr. Aminah Zawedde Permanent Secretary, Ministry of ICT & National Guidance, Uganda. |
| 10:00 - 10: 30 | Group Photo / Tea & Coffee Break |
| 10:30 - 10:50 | Invited Talk: Language Preservation in the AI age Ms. Babra Babweteera Executive Director of the Cross-Cultural Foundation of Uganda. |
| 10:50 - 11:00 | Opening of AfriLang conference. Dr. Joyce Nabende Head of Makerere University Center for AI. |
| 11:00 - 11:30 | Invited Talk: African NLP Strategy Prof. Vukosi Marivate Co-Founder of Masakhane NLP, Deep Learning Indaba, Lelapa |
| 11:30 - 13:00 | Paper presentations: 10 minutes presentation, 5 minutes plenary |
| 1. Promoting Uganda’s major local languages: Introducing Luganda Text generation models and diverse accent-aware TTS models Rashid Kisejjere, Reuben Magala, Abubakhari Sserwadda 2. Tonative: Community-Driven Extension of African Datasets Through Human-AI Collaboration Cynthia Jayne Amol, Sharon Ibejih 3. Bridging the Language Gap: Fine-Tuning LLama for Machine Translation in Low-Resource African Languages Mary Wambui Kariuki, Joseph Muguro, Ciira wa Maina, Lilian Diana Awuor Wanzare 4. Sauti Halisi: Towards Direct Speech-to-Text Translation for Colloquial and Code-Switched Swahili Brian Gillo | |
| 13:00 - 14:00 | Lunch Break |
| 14:00 - 14:30 | Invited talk on African Language Technology. Dr. John A. Quinn Director of Research, Sunbird AI |
| 14:30 - 15:50 | Paper presentations :10 minutes presentation, 5 minutes plenary |
| 1. End-to-End Continuous Ethiopia Sign Language Recongnition Anteneh Yehalem Tegegne 2. KALAM-NA: Multi-Dialectal Corpus for 16 variants of the Sara linguistic family of Chad Abdel-aziz Harane Abounounou 3. Robust Tokenization for Low-Resource Oromo Medical Texts via Novel Lightweight Augmentation Karthik Srikumar 4. How much speech data is necessary for ASR in African languages? An evaluation of data scaling in Kinyarwanda and Kikuyu Benjamin Akera, Evelyn Nafula, Patrick Walukagga, Gilbert Yiga, John Quinn, Ernest Tonny Mwebaze | |
| 15:50 - 16:50 | Panel Session: What next for African language AI Moderator: Dr. Ernest Mwebaze, Sunbird AI |
| Panelists: Dr. Joyce Nakatumba Nabende, Head - Makerere University Center for AI. Prof. Vukosi Marivate, University of Pretoria, ABSA Chair of Data Science. Dr. Lilian Wanzare, Maseno University, KenCorpus. Chenai Chair, Director - Masakhane African Languages Hub. Samuel Rutunda, Digital Umuganda. | |
| 16:50 - 17:00 | Closing Remarks |