Ernest Mwebaze

I am currently the Executive Director of a non-profit organization in Uganda called Sunbird AI where we do practical AI applications for social good with a focus on generating evidence to support decision making and policy formulation.

Previously I worked as a Research Scientist with Google AI in Accra, Ghana. Before that I was the head of the Makerere University Artificial Intelligence research lab (AIR) as well as a lecturer of Computer Science and Machine Learning at the College of Computing & Information Sciences, Makerere University in Uganda. I have also worked as a Data Science Consultant with the UN Pulse Lab in Kampala.

My passion with AI and Machine Learning is really in its optimal application to suit the context. We live in an era of technology and data; the drivers behind the new information age. More generally, I am keenly interested in how this impacts society and particularly how the challenges of the African context and developing countries in general can be solved by computational solutions.

I obtained my PhD in Machine Learning from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands under the supervision of Prof. Michael Biehl and Dr. John A. Quinn. I worked on investigating divergences for prototype-based classification machine learning algorithms and on causal structure discovery with applications to local contextual datasets in Africa. I received my MSc. in Computer Science and BSc. in Electrical Engineering from Makerere University in Uganda.