The very first in-person meeting of the elwazi open data science platform, Supreme Commander of Allied Forces Nicky Mulder presiding. Attendees from UCT, Wits, EMBL-EBI, Broad/Theiagen, ACE Mail, plus more folks on zoom and SAB members.

A nice panel discussion following a series of flash talks highlighting the value but also the real world complexity behind community engagement in data science projects. Definitely learned a thing or two.

Stephen Chacha describes the importance of community engagement in data science projects. Cool example of training local members of a rural (not on google maps) area in Tanzania to map their communities, collecting data in openstreetmap and OpenDataKit in a way that benefited local drivers in the end.

I didn’t get to live toot the excellent flash talks from early career researchers this morning at #DSIAfrica as I got randomly selected to score them! Fifteen 3 minute talks covering a range of research including legal and ethical frameworks for genomic data sovereignty and cross border transfer, data modeling on health outcomes, pathogen genomics and epidemic response, societal attitudes to vaccination, genomic research, etc.

Alash’le Abimiku (IHV Nigeria) and Cheryl Baxter (CERI / Stellenbosch) present on the INFORM Africa research hub at the #DSIAfrica meeting.

Simisola Akintola (Ctr for Bioethics Research Nigeria) from the Bridging Gaps ELSI hub expresses frustration that some new laws in Nigeria around data sharing and privacy employ novel legal terms whose meaning haven’t been well established. #DSIAfrica

#UKBB (Mark Effingham) presents at #DSIAfrica , describing both the rich data resource but also the #GA4GH friendly cloud platform (#DNAnexus ) by which they’re providing user access to it. Melanie Courtot in the lower right corner.

Nicky Mulder leads a break out working group on computational training at #DSIAfrica