Dr. Kahira
@ankahira
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Globe trotting villager || Research and Engineering in AI & Supercomputers || Building @datawise_AFR || Occasional political banter ||
Joined May 2020
I am so glad so many A students have come out after that video. We have normalised politicians and thieves(so called street smart) as the only success story in Kenya. There are many successful Kenyans earning decent living after academic success.
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Kenya belongs to Kenyans , not tourists. We can’t have locals being killed by the police so that tourists can drink madafu.
When you burn tyres on the road and say Ruto must go, tourists will decide to visit Zanzibar or South Africa instead of visiting here - Amason Kingi
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You know what’s the worst part. If today I (or anyone)offered to build a classroom for this kids, which would cost less than 200 K, they wouldn’t let me. The bloody leaders wouldn’t demand at least of that to themselves. Believe me, I have tried.
Dear Kenyans, the year is 2024. This is a PP2 class ICF school in Wajir Town,Wajir County learning under a tree. This county earns 9B Kshs annually. The area Mp earns CDF amount close to 100M. While we still have young learners treated like this. Oh God Where did we go wrong?
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Engineering is probably the most gate kept profession in Kenya. You are at the mercy of someone who graduated in 1980s.
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Safaricom fumbled on so many opportunities, especially around tech. Devs would be building for the safaricom ecosystem and SMEs would be using safaricom cloud instead of Google cloud. Wait till we get alternatives for the insanely expensive Mpesa.
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Kenyan Tech community, please be friends to lawyers because the stuff we are about to hear for the next few days, we shall have to hide. I still haven't recovered from Paul Mwite's description of a firewall as "mtego wa paka na panya".
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Kenyans are coming face to face with the dangers of monopolies, especially in Tech. When this is all over, we need to revisit the fact that Safaricom is essentially a state machine and they did everything to stop anyone from gaining market share.
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@KarakeMark Sadly he is right. I believe academia is important and necessary for our societies but people have to look beyond that.
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In less than 10 years, we shall fully realise the damage Ruto will cause with this university funding model. There is a reason why any decent community aggressively protects education from capitalism.
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Also, street smart doesn’t always mean you have to do stupid deals and it is not the opposite of book smart. Watu wako sawa Githafu na ukitupeleka mtaani pi tuko sawa.
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For the last time, make sociology a mandatory class in engineering schools to avoid such takes.
Not to be disrespectful but I don't really understand the "Women in Tech" thing. Not particularly fond of it actually. I thought we're all in Tech.
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Also, I am pissed. Explains the typos. * The bloody leaders would demand at least half of that to themselves.
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Index 1 wa primary ni mimi, and in fact I did go to the best universities. Index 1 wa high school is a brilliant civil engineer who is doing amazing stuff in Kenya and elsewhere. This narrative is almost always false and focuses on outliers.
Where did Index 1s in our highschool go to? Tom Musembi questions. weeeh where are we headed as a generation
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This will go down as the single greatest mistake of this government( and they have f**ked up big time) . Ruto is up to destroy higher education in Kenya with this American model.
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Imagine if we had a railway from Mogadishu to Durban. Connecting all those coastal towns/cities.
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They have shot and killed a kid born in 1995 for simply going to the streets to demand that the government does better for his generation. 💔💔💔.
I have met with Rex’s mum, and we are on our way to City Mortuary. Since it’s a homicide, the police have said the body has to be booked in a public mortuary. After the post mortem, we shall move Rex. Her name is Gillian Munyao, and a killer cop just shattered her life forever.
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@johnnjenga This doesn’t make any sense because a child born of Kenyan parents is a Kenyan citizen no matter where they are born. So technically they don’t need a residence permit unless they hold another citizenship that prohibits them to hold the Kenyan one.
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On any day, I would support Safaricom. It's a Kenyan success story. But they have lost significant trust from the people after playing Ruto games. They also stopped innovating almost 3 years ago and their services continue to be insanely expensive.
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Now I actually have a PhD. I love that they state where I was born on the degree.
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For a long time, the brand represented the people(Yetu). The supported local artists, local football leagues and built hospitals. To see the people turn against this brand should raise serious questions in their management.
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I would hate for us to get here but I am increasingly seeing why people would want this. Citizens of Kenya need a way to protect themselves from Kenyan police officers.
Kenyan need a law that guarantees its citizens a right to keep and bear arms.
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I can’t even receive more than 500 Euros from a friend or family without the bank demanding to see my income statements. How do people get away with this things?.
Chiloba at pains to explain Ksh.800M net worth, controversial IEBC and CA exits
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As we Kenyans say, tuko site @DeepIndaba . Also, nothing makes me happy like seeing countries invest in beautiful infrastructure for education. #DLIndaba2022
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Meetings about Africa should be held in Africa. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
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We face neither east nor west, we face forward. Thank you Ghana !!!
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@TimKipchumba Technically, it is not free. We pay slightly more than 10% of our annual gross salary for healthcare(I am not complaining). Let's be realistic, SHIF(NHIF) should be sacred, but we need to contribute a lot more and fund it a lot more.
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@MuthuriKinyamu Even in upcountry, the small shopping centres have largely dried up. The kiosks have closed down. It is a sad state of affairs.
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On Saturday all road(and airways actually) head to Ghana for Deep Learning Indaba @DeepIndaba . Super excited about this particular Indaba because I will be presenting a few things I have learnt so far on Distributed Deep Learning in HPC.
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As I start preparing my own dissertation, I have started reading other dissertations. Currently reading @chao_mbogho . It's amazing how PhD students manage to compress an incredible 4 or 5-year story into a hundred or so pages. There is so much beauty in how the story is told.
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Honestly, I think the best use of KDF in the streets should be to protect Kenyans from the police.
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On transit in Madrid after an intensive week at @DeepIndaba . A few observations I made throughout the week. The Indaba scope has really grown. I saw a paper on hardware benchmarking, a poster by a historian( on privacy) and attended a talk on quantum machine learning.
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After reading Caroline Elkins' "Britain's Gulag", I said that Kenya Police is an extension of colonial rule in Kenya and still serves the exact same role the colonizers intended it to serve. We can't fix a colonial legacy, we have to abolish it.
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One thing I am learning as an instructor is that, beyond teaching, the bigger task is igniting enough passion in your students about a subject so that they can learn more on their own. What you can teach is very limited.
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We meet again next year in another city in Africa. But for now, it is our collective responsibility to shape our own destiny. The Pan African spirit lives on at @DeepIndaba #DLIndaba2022
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On the very night I am packing for @DeepIndaba , I get to listen to @siminyu_kat , @alienelf and Solomei talk about the very reason why the Indaba is soo important.
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I won this book for my poster Indaba 2018 and later went to chill with penguins. #DLIndabaStories .
🪘🪘🇬🇭🇬🇭🪘🪘🇬🇭🇬🇭.As applications are still ongoing, we would love to hear your stories from previous Indabas . Tell us about your first application, your first Indaba or that one story you will never forget from Indaba #DLIndabaStories.🇬🇭🇬🇭🪘🪘🇬🇭🇬🇭🪘🪘.
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I am honoured to be working with an incredible team @JengaSchool teaching Introduction to Computer Programming and Foundations of Data Science.
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It's been slightly over a year since I finished my PhD and moved to Germany to work on something slightly different from what I was primarily doing for my PhD. It was a major leap of faith but looking back, no regrets.
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Pre-defence is done. I have to say I am incredibly happy today. Not just for passing this step but the fact that the committee found my work very relevant and timely and that they enjoyed reading through the document. Almost there !!!.
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When a river runs through your best friend's farm and he builds a damn to serve the community but it's also a super good swimming spot. Also, I have enough mangoes to last me a month courtesy of @kithekanifarms . Talk to me nicely !!.
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Poster presentations at #DLI2023 . Met this amazing group from Cameroon teaching data analytics and AI courses in #Cameroon while building and building a community of techies. @BelInitiative
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Now that I have had time to relax and recover from exhaustion, I can celebrate completing my PhD. I am really grateful to my supervisors, Dr. Leonardo Bautista and Dr. @rosabadia . Thanks to @FundlaCaixa who funded my work and the opportunity to do that at @BSC_CNS & @la_UPC.
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Besides my PhD, I am most proud of the 20-30 people we have introduced to Computer science and Programming in the last 1 year. It's pure joy every time I receive GitHub notifications from repos they are working on.
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Dear Church, . You lost many of us many years ago. Now you have pretty much lost everyone with a functioning brain. Yours, . Excommunicated Christian.
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European racism is very sophisticated. It’s not often your neighbour shouting racist slurs(though people have experienced this as well) . It is strategic, deeply embedded in government policies. It’s a government strategy. Listen to most of Macron’s speeches on Africa.
“Europe is a garden. It's the best combination (. ) humankind has been able to build, the rest of the world is a jungle, and the jungle could invade the garden, and the gardeners should take care of it. <…> Europeans are the privileged people.”
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The farming community in this app is becoming like the tech community. Building in the open, sharing ideas, helping each other out and frankly, making a good living out of it. I am loving it.
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Thank you @sarahookr . It is extremely important we change the spaces where research is done. Keynote @DeepIndaba #DLIndaba2022
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Najua mlisema hiking ni ya watu wamerudishwa soko but these are the views we get from the top.
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Rigathi Gachagua has a huge opportunity here to settle a score by resigning which would effectively bring down this government. I don’t like the dude at all but he could be a useful idiot right about now.
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Lamu-Mombasa road is finally done. We have waited for this since independence. Terrorism is still a threat but the amount of security personnel on the road is a bit reassuring. We have needed police (and sometimes military) escort on this road since I was born.
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I think we can all agree that professional bodies are pretty useless and outdated. The obsession with regulating people rather than processes must end. Regulate to protect, not to build walls.
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Great talent attracts great talent. A lot of people join a company/organisation because they will get to work with a certain person/group.
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I went to enrol in a driving school and I will cost me at least 3000 Euros to get a driving license. So I am thinking, I just need 7000 more and I could get a pilot license instead. Told them to give me two weeks to think about it.
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Heh. Most of the Christian rituals were just pagan and tribal rituals in Europe that were repurposed to fit Christianity after it became the cool thing in Europe.
That Olympic opening ceremony is blasphemous. I bet they wouldn’t try that with Islam. Christianity is being watered down and mocked and that’s disgusting.
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Life after Indaba is always something else. After a few weeks, we get back to it again, with new ideas and new energy. You, the people, make it all possible and beautiful.
It's been a week since another phenomenal experience at the @DeepIndaba 🇬🇭🇬🇭. The post Indaba period is always a bit odd for me, but I have renewed energy & so many ideas after all the wonderful conversations. Special thanks go to the community &organisers for an amazing time
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I love getting this @DeepIndaba newsletter every month. With everything happening in the world right now, I have been thinking a lot about what Our Voice truly means and what the future holds for us. Thank you @vukosi for the perspective and inspiring the future.
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So we all agreed that we won’t even attempt to have some sort of a physical address system in Kenya huh.
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What the Indaba X communities have done around the continent to strengthen AI/ML is definitely worth attention. 47 countries so far and growing. Great to see all their work at @DeepIndaba #DLI2024.
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I sleep a happy person today. Very proud of all the students @JENGASchool and the work they did. Also congratulations to @JedidahMM that we worked on this class together. We are doing some cool stuff and the best part is ahead.
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I recently started going to Cameroonian restaurants(thanks to Liege and Brussels being an hour away) and though I hate to admit it, they really do have good foods.
I have to have main character syndrome when it comes to African food. Cameroon still has the best African food. Nigeria comes a close second. Kenya is last.
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Yaani even engineers are just advocating for more regulations and gate keeping. Jesus !!!.
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My 70 year old mum got vaccinated today and I have never been happier. It took some serious convincing from me and her personally witnessing the lack of beds in the local hospital.
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Me explaining to my friends that Christmas at our place(our home not Kenya in general) involves slaughtering a goat, cooking loads of chapatis and an afternoon swim at the beach after a heavy lunch. Then back to more chapatis for dinner.
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You will find someone to validate whatever absurd idea/opinion you have. There is even probably a community for that. Problem is, the reality of life doesn't factor that in. It is what it is !!!.
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How did Mombasa miss out on being Kenya’s (and to a large extent East Africa’s ) startup/digital nomads capital? Perfect weather throughout the year, relatively cheaper cost of life and away from the menace that is Nairobi.
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And just like that, another Indaba is behind us. It has been an incredible week here in Accra seeing the African AI community again after Tunisia. Pondering on the question asked @shakir_za “What happens when your dreams come true?” as we head back to our countries. #DLI2023.
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As one of my friends said today, 2021 has been extremely intense for me. Made a lot of progress personally and professionally. Glad to be surrounded by loving friends and family. Grateful to all that pushed me to my best this year. Looking forward to the new year !!!.
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Keynotes at @DeepIndaba leave you soo inspired and energised to get to work. Exactly what a keynote should do . Thank you Sebastian Ruder #DLIndaba2022.
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@SheilahBirgen In my experience, go for the advisor/supervisor first before country or university. That will be the most important factor in your PhD journey. If you can get a really good supervisor in Kenya, do it here. Second, go for a place where a PhD is a full-time job with a salary.
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Today is technically my last day with Barcelona Supercomputing Center. To say I am not going to miss my colleagues at BSC is a lie. 4 years of really good times, sometimes tough times. Glad to have worked on MareNostrum supercomputer and waiting to see Pre-Exascale MareNostrum.
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I shared similar thoughts recently. DeKUT will end up creating an ecosystem like Cambridge.
Nyeri could turn out to be the techsquare of Kenya all because of @DeKUTkenya.
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A lot of what I did during my PhD was not published in either papers or my thesis. This year I hope to publicly avail it. Short technical blogs covering how to do very specific things around ML in HPC.
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@njooroge @gabrieloguda The fact that this guy is able to talk about it on National TV is why people have a hard time trusting our credentials out here.
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Such an honour to write this month’s letter to the community for @DeepIndaba ‘s Sauti Yetu newsletter. This month also happens to be my birth month (pure coincidence).
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I have a lot to say about that water issue but let me start here, if you have never had to walk upto 10 KMs to look for drinking water or gotten bilharzia because of getting drinking water from Gitofu(pond), then sit this out. You don't know the indignity that comes with that.
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One of the things we often take for granted is the work done by those who came before us. Always pay it forward if you can.
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Super happy to do this with Light Academy. We are targeting 500 books.
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@MorsiAlia has taken research presentations to a whole new level at @MasakhaneNLP workshop. We are listening to @diamondplatnumz and learning a ton of stuff about music information retrieval.
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Giving a talk to my new group about my research work so far and glad to announce I am finally comfortable talking about my own work. Excited actually. For context, many grad students(myself included) struggle a lot with confidence about their work.
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