AI Media, the curators of AI Expo Africa, the largest business focused Artificial Intelligence (AI) & Data Science B2B trade event and conference in Africa are proud to announce the results of the 2019 awards as voted by members of the community who attended the show.

AI Media Co-Founder Roy Bannister awarding Lee Naik CEO Transunion for Best Keynote 2018

Now moving into its 3rd successful year, the 2020 conference and expo will run on 3rd-4th September 2020 and builds upon the phenomenal success of the 2018 / 2019 events that were held in Cape Town, that cemented it as the largest gathering of its kind, with over 1000+ registered decision makers, investors, buyers, suppliers, innovators, SMBs and global brands in the region focusing on real world AI and Data Science business applications.

AI Expo Africa Awards

Asif Valley, CTO MSFT SA – Picking up an award for Microsoft

At the AI Expo Africa 2019 show, delegates are given the opportunity to vote for 9 stand out categories of award to reflect the effort and dedication by the individual recipients and companies as seen in the eyes of the delegates and partners that attend. Now the votes have been we counted the votes the results are as follows:

BEST PLENARY KEYNOTE

  • Winner – Dr Simon See – Nvidia
  • 2nd Place – Dr Karim Beguir – InstaDeep

BEST MAIN TALK

  • Winner – Dr Jay Van Zyl – Ecosystem AI
  • 2nd Place – Chris Currin – UCT

BEST FLASH TALK

  • Winner – Jade Abbott – Retro Rabbit
  • 2nd Place – Amira Abbas – UKZN

BEST WORKSHOP

  • Winner – Rhoban RoboCup
  • Joint 2nd Place – AWS & UiPath

BEST DEMO

  • Winner – Ocular Technologies
  • 2nd Place – UiPath

BEST STAND

  • Winner – UiPath
  • 2nd Place – Ocular Technologies

BEST START UP [ HOSTED @ THE AWS INNOVATION CAFE ]

  • Winner – Offer Zen
  • Joint 2nd Place – 2 Way Systems & Grenadilla Insurance

BEST POSTER [ HOSTED @ THE MTN INNOVATION WALL ]

  • Winner – Christopher Dunderdale – Photovoltaic Defect Classification through Thermal Infrared Imaging using a Machine Learning – Nelson Mandela University
  • 2nd Place – Jeanne Daniel – Towards Automating Healthcare Question Answering in a Noisy Multilingual Low-Resource Setting – University of Stellenbosch

AI MEDIA DIRECTORS AWARD

  • Winner – Mustapha Zaouini – AI in Africa & FLIPTIN for an outstanding contribution to grass roots AI skills development with young learners in South Africa

ZINDI AI ART & MUSIC AWARDS

While AI Expo Africa is mainly business-focused and designed to bring users across all sectors like retail, banking, insurance, healthcare, manufacturing, mining it also has a strong skills-development and capacity building element and offers AI Skills workshops and novel innovation challenges. One of which was the AI Art challenge. Zindians were asked to produce an original piece of visual art or music leveraging AI for a chance to win a trip to AI Expo Africa that took place in Cape Town South Africa 4-5 September.

The community stepped up to the challenge with some truly unique and creative artwork. The decision was so difficult that the judges decided to award three winners instead of just two! Congratulations to:

  • Matthew Baas (visual art) South Africa
  • Emmanuel Onwuegbusi (music) of Nigeria
  • Samuel Burnett (video) of South Africa

Also a big thank you to Celina @Zindi,  Mathieu & Marion @French Embassy, Henri @AWS and Elisja @MTN for supporting the event and helped us introduce / showcase some of the winners listed here.  Our sponsors play a big part in making our event a massive success and we thank you for your support in 2019 – it really is appreciated !