Curriculum Vitae

Currently a grad student at McGill University and Mila working, working on applied machine learning for climate change, deep learning and computervision.

Even the best résumés leave a lot to be desired: they lack context and narrative. If you’d like a better idea of how I work, I think you’ll find the rest of this page a lot more helpful.

Will be graduating soon, Hence will be on the job market say hello!


About Me

I am a Software Engineer by trade, over the past few years, my focus has been on trying to understand how we can use computational methods from Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence for Societal good.

Education

Msc. Computer Science - McGill University, Mila - Quebec AI Inst. Advisor: David Rolnick. Interests; Climate Change, Computer Vision, Deep Learning.

I graduated with a **Bachelor of Science in Software Engineering from Makerere University in Uganda in January 2019. My final thesis  —  Using machine learning to improve in field diagnosis of Cassava Crop Diseases.

My Work

Current: McGill University | Mila | Sunbird.ai

I am currently a grad student at McGill University, I spend time between Mila and Sunbird AI working on AI for Good projects

Earlier Work

IBM Research Africa - Nairobi

June-Sept, 2022. Spent summer of 2022 in Nairobi, with the Climate and Sustainability team in IBM. Worked on streamlining data pipelines for remote sensing and incoporating machine learning methods for Accelerated Discovery in Climate research.

Sama (previously Samasource)

Dec 2020 - Aug 2021 Worked with the R&D team on tools and techniques to improve data labelling with Machine Learning

Mila Quebec AI Institute

Jan - Dec 2020 Research Intern under the Supervision of Prof. Yoshua Bengio, working on machine learning for climate change and healthcare;

  • Machine Learning for Glacier Monitoring in the Hindu Kush Himalayas

Sunbird AI

Jan 2020 - Now Building Language models for Ugandan Languages based on BERT

Makerere University AI Lab

2014-2018 Throughout my undergrad at Makerere University, I was involved with the Machine Learning group, we worked on Machine Learning for the developing world, AI for Good, Machine Learning for Healthcare.

My Projects

Papers, open source, and hobby project

Papers

2023

Bird Distribution Modelling using Remote Sensing and Citizen Science data Teng, M., Elmustafa, A., Akera, B., Larochelle, H., & Rolnick, D., (2023)pdf

Multilingual Model and Data Resources for Text-To-Speech in Ugandan Languages –Owomugisha, I., Akera, B., Mwebaze, E., and Quinn, J., (Climate Change AI workshop - ICLR 2023)pdf

2022

Machine translation for african languages: Community creation of datasets and models in uganda –Akera, B., Mukiibi, J., Sanyu Naggayi, L., Babirye, C., Owomugisha, I., Nsumba, S., Nakatumba-Nabende, J., Bainomugisha, E., Mwebaze, E. and Quinn, J., (2022)pdf

2021

hBert+ BiasCorp–Fighting Racism on the Web  —  Onabola, O., Akera, B., Ma, Z., Xie, Y., Ibraheem, A., Xue, J., Liu, D. and Bengio, Y (2021) arXiv preprint. arxiv

2020

Machine Learning for Glacier Monitoring in the Hindu Kush Himalaya  —  S. Baraka, B. Akera, B. Aryal, T. Sherpa, F. Shresta , A. Ortiz, K. Sankaran, J. Lavista, M. Matin, Y. Bengio (2020) Spotlight paper, Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning, NeurIPS 2020 pdf

A dataset of necrotized cassava root cross-section images  —  J. Nabende, B. Akera, J. Tusubira, S . Nsumba, E .Mwebaze (2020) Published in Data in Brief Journal . pdf

Scoring Root Necrosis in Cassava Using Semantic Segmentation  —  Tusubira, J. F., Akera, B., Nsumba, S., Nakatumba-Nabende, J., & Mwebaze, E. (2020). Accepted at CVPR 2020 Vision for Agriculture Workshop proceeedings . pdf

A new approach for microscopic diagnosis of malaria parasites in thick blood smears using pre-trained deep learning models  —  R. Nakasi, E. Mwebaze,J Tusubira, B Akera, G Maiga (2020). Published in Springer SN Applied Sciences . pdf

Improving In-field Cassava Whitefly Pest Surveillance with Machine Learning  —  B Akera, J Tusubira, S Nsumba, F Ninsiima, G Acellam, J Nakatumba, E Mwebaze, J Quinn, T Oyana. (2020) Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshops. pdf

2019

Keyword Spotter Model for Crop Pest and Disease Monitoring from Community Radio Data  —  Akera, B., Nakatumba-Nabende, J., Mukiibi, J., Hussein, A., Baleeta, N., Ssendiwala, D., & Nalwooga, S. (2019). Presented at NeurIPS 2019 Workshop on Machine Learning For the Developing Worlds. arxiv

Open Source Software

Machine Learning

  • Glacier Mapping Pipeline:
  • Machine Learning for Crop disease surveillance

Talks

2020
  • DSA 2020: Intro to Deep Learning and computer vision
2019
  • Deep learning indaba: Nairobi, Kenya: Tiny Machine Learning for Agriculture Pest surveillance
  • Data Science Africa: Addis Ababa: Intro to Data Science, Python, Pandas, Numpy and Matplotlib
  • GDG: Machine Learning in the cloud
2018
  • DSA 2018: Nyeri, Kenya: Intro to Deep Learning