This weekend you can find our GKEN volunteers at the 8th Ethiopian Sports and Culture Festival; UNITY FESTIVAL.

Drop by our stall to find out more about GKEN’s work and how as graduates, academic, researchers and practitioners you can get involved.

Hosted by Escf London the sports weekend takes place on Saturday 7 & Sunday 8 July from midday till 9 pm both days. At West Ham Memorial Sports Ground, 157-159 Memorial Avenue, E15 3BS. (Wes Ham Tube Station).

Great DJs, Food, football, athletics, talent show, quiz, all kinds of business stalls etc.

Children games, football and running contests. Adults, men and women, running contests will be more exciting than last year. Come to enjoy the weekend with your fellow Ethiopians and Eritreans.

For more information click here

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JIMMA- Global Knowledge Exchange Network (GKEN) said it is working to switch brain-drain challenges into opportunities.

GKEN Co-founder, Chairman and Ethiopian Doctoral and Masters Academy (EDMA) Director Prof. Amare Desta, at recently held 7th International Multi-disciplinary Conference and Workshop, noted that GKEN aspires to cultivate local researchers, knowledge exchange initiative and reinforce Ethiopian and Ethiopian born professors’ support to the local community.

“Promoting indigenous knowledge at the grass root level should be the main concern of Ethiopian intellectuals.”
Prof. Amare also said that: “We have to think beyond the horizon on how to invigorate and interrelated indigenous with scientific knowledge to utilize it for the national development endeavors.”

GKEN has 1,541 volunteer members with Professors and Ph.D level performing and practising various academic researches worldwide, he said. According to him, these Professors and Doctors have been contributing to bring about a tangible knowledge exchange and provide students here with competent advisory, support and mentorship.

President of Jimma University Prof. Fikre Lemmesa said that the main objective of the conference is to exchange GKEN member professors’ research, teaching-learning and innovation experience among the local university students and researchers. Currently, the members of GKEN are providing free supervision and mentorship service to post-graduate and doctoral candidates, Prof. Fikre added.

Over 250 Ph.D graduated students have been offered advisory service by Ethiopian legendary network member professors working in different international universities, Prof. Fikre said. According to Prof. Fikire, hosting this conference creates a good platform to exchange knowledge, present researches and publish journals together.

“This conference is part of the university’s strategy of internationalization and will bring a lot of opportunities to diversify our university’s extensive engagements”, Prof. Fikre noted.

Prof. Fikire reaffirmed his university’s commitment to reinforce partnership with GKEN in different areas and succeed the university’s move in serving the community.

For his part, GKEN-EDMA Jimma University Coordinative Manager Demelash Mengistu (Ph.D) said that supporting, supervising and mentoring postgraduate and doctoral candidates are the foremost objectives of EDMA’s establishment. “Ethiopian and Ethiopian born university instructors in UK, Australia, Canada, US and other countries assigned as an external advisor and they are helping our students with fresh insights,” he added.
Nigeria’s Premier University of Education Prof. Edwards Adeseye Alademerin (Ph.D) said that knowledge transfer is obsolete this time and has changed with knowledge exchange. Intensifying efforts in developing competent human powers, advancing such knowledge exchanging networks and investing more in education is essential to manage the impact of brain-drain, he recommended.

Accordingly, participants from Ethiopia and Africa working in the global universities as well as African lovers are attending the conference.

 

Source The Ethiopian Herald 

Jimma University organised a four days short term training on “Design and Analysis of Experiments; and Publication of Peer-reviewed Papers on Reputable Journals” in collaboration with Global Knowledge Network (GKEN)/ Ethiopian Doctoral and Masters Academy (EDMA). The short term training was conducted from July 17-20/2017. Directors, Colleges/Institutes Research and Post Graduate Program coordinators, editor-in-chiefs’ of Jimma University hosted journals, researchers and senior staff selected from different colleges/institutes of the University participated in the training.

The short term training was aimed at strengthening the research capacity of Jimma University.  The training included design and analysis of experiments, analysis of data using Minitab and SAS, the art of research collaboration and the ins and outs of publishing peer-reviewed papers in reputable journals.

The training was delivered by Prof. Tessema Astatke, a Professor of Statistics at the Faculty of Agriculture, Dalhousie University, Canada, and an active member of GKEN/EDMA. Finally, on the 20th of July-2017 all trainees were certified for their successful completion of the short-term training. On behalf of Jimma University, Dr. Tsige Ketema expressed her gratitude to Prof. Tessema Astatke and the founder of the GKEN/EDMA, Prof. Amare Desta for their dedication to develop the academic capacity of the University.

Source: Jimma University.

We are pleased to inform that our 7th GKEN Conference & Workshop event, hosted in collaboration with Jimma University between 11 December 2017 – 22 December 2017, featured in The Ethiopian Herald, one of the national newspapers of Ethiopia. The Ethiopian Herald presented and praised how GKEN and Jimma University are set to switch brain-drain challenges into opportunities. Read the full article here in English and in Amharic. More details of this successful event are also available on JU website.

We will soon be hosting our 8th GKEN Conference & Workshop in Africa this year, 2018. Watch out for our updates.

Mr. Kora Tushune, Vice-President of Jimma University visited London between 7^th June  – 9^th June 2017 to further strengthen the noble work of GKEN / EDMA at our hub (i.e. Jimma University). In order to further assist JU to internationalise their courses and start collaborative partnerships with UK institutions, GKEN also facilitated Tushane’s visits to Anglia Ruskin University and to Portsmouth University for Wednesday the 7th and Thursday the 8th of June respectively. A special meeting was held for GKEN members to meet Mr. Tushune at London South Bank University on Friday, the 9^th June 2017.

         

Timnit Gebru honored as an Alicorn of Artificial Intelligence by People in AI

Meet Timnit Gebru, a person who The Selfpreneur has awarded the rare title of “Alicorn in Artificial Intelligence.”

As a teenager, she left her native country to move to the United States and began embarking on a journey that would lead her to achieve a Bachelors, Master’s and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford. From there she earned a prestigious engineering job at Apple, then co-founded a startup. That should be enough right? Not for Gebru! She left Apple in the past, and now she is a Ph.D. Candidate at Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence Lab. But there’s more.

Gebru’s work was featured this year by The Economist. They highlighted her research to use machine learning and deep learning to predict census data using millions of images from google street view.

What’s further fascinating about Gebru is that she is a multiplier! She returned to Ethiopia to teach programming to young students with AddisCoder, a programming bootcamp. The students in this bootcamp were a diverse range, hailing from both rural areas and cities, with male and female gender balance, and accommodating people with disabilities. Some of these students have gone on to earn admission to Ivy League Universities. Thanks to work like this the next great innovation for our world very well may come from the minds Gebru has inspired and helped to mold.

Forbes has even featured Gebru’s work. She saw a problem after having the experience of often being the only woman in the room at AI conferences and being among a small group of people of African descent. She didn’t sit back on this knowledge as diversity is critical to innovation in general, but also essential to the development of AI which is known to inherit the bias of the people who develop it. Gebru took action to address the problem and co-founded a social community called Black in AI which is a thriving community of data scientists, and AI engineers of African descent and/or who identify as black. This community serves as a place for sharing ideas, fostering collaborations and discussing initiatives to increase the presence of black people in the field of Artificial Intelligence.

Source: Theselfpreneur

Two students from the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) have challenged Government and other policymakers to use science and technology to address Ghana’s sanitation problems.

The two; Miss Agyirakwa Monney Bernice and Doreenda Nikoi Kotei-Sika, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science students at the Kwame Nkrumah Science and Technology (KNUST) respectively have developed an app which has been electronically fitted into waste bins to direct the public on proper waste disposal.

They emerged winners at the 2017 edition of the MTN Girl Code Project in Kumasi.

The project which is a partnership between Women in Technology Africa and the MTN-Ghana Foundation is a five-day boot camp which equips young women with basic coding techniques and business validation processes to enable them develop solutions to problems in their communities.

Some of these apps and business ideas focused on breast care, kayayei, food and sanitation.

The winners have pledged to broaden their innovation which will go a long way to solve the sanitation problems in the country.

According to them, they will partner sanitation agencies to produce such waste bins for the primary and Junior High Schools (JHSs) across the country as a way of inculcating good sanitary practices and hygiene into pupils.

 

 

Source citifmonline