Get involved
Contribute
There are many opportunities for researchers to contribute to the exciting AI for Science program. Whether you are an experienced professor, researcher in industry, postdoctoral researcher or a PhD student, there are many things that we hope to learn from you! These include:
Teaching a 3-week course at AIMS
Supervising an AI for Science research project
Joining AIMS South Africa’s tutor team
Teach!
Supervise!
Tutor!
Teach!
Courses at AIMS are taught in three-week blocks by local and visiting researchers. AIMS is a fully residential institute where students live in the same building where they are taught. It is a very immersive pan-African environment! Visiting researchers and lecturers stay at the institute. If they’re not having breakfast in a beachfront cafe they could be seen discussing deep ideas with students over breakfast, lunch and dinner!
A typical course consists of a face-to-face session of around two hours each day for three weeks. AIMS has a team of tutors who report to our two academic directors, Claire David (AI for Science) and Karin-Therese Howell (Mathematical Sciences) and the tutors support the courses in every practical way. Our tutors mark assignments and track student progress, and as a team they work closely with course lecturers. The courses are at graduate level.
AIMS covers or provides:
flights to and from Cape Town,
accommodation at AIMS or the area,
a modest honorarium
as well as kind, bright, engaged, eager, thankful and hard-working students from across Africa!
Sign me up!
If you can contribute anything from an introductory deep learning or probabilistic inference course to computer vision to the state-of-the-art application of AI in some scientific discipline, we’d love to hear from you. Please email contribute@aims.ac.za to get in touch!
Teaching at AIMS is a brilliant experience. By largely disconnecting from the rest of the world and focusing on teaching, I was able to make more progress on my book in three weeks than in the six months before that!
The stay was very well accommodated and teaching AIMS students is incredibly rewarding. And last but not least: I have only found cappuccinos similar in quality to the ones I drank in Muizenberg in Italy!
Max Welling
Supervise!
The taught Master’s program at AIMS concludes with a three-month research project. The themes of these projects could be proposed and supervised by researchers anywhere on earth! It is not uncommon that students continue as PhD students with the researchers that proposed and supervised them for a short while! If you cannot travel to Cape Town to teach, but would still love to get involved by remotely supervising a project, please email contribute@aims.ac.za.
Projects from the 2023-4 academic year ranged from advancing personalised cancer vaccines through AI-driven de novo peptide sequencing, to increasing the sample efficiency of policy gradient methods using offline reinforcement learning, to component separation algorithms to unveil the large-scale structure of the universe.
Tutor!
Courses at AIMS are supported by a team of tutors who are all graduate students (usually PhD) in their own right. Tutors live at AIMS in their own accommodation, and share meals and other facilities with the students. Tutors work closely with all lecturers, and are central to life at AIMS!
If you would like to take a one-year gap from where you are now, and be based at AIMS in Muizenberg, Cape Town, then why don’t you introduce yourself at contribute@aims.ac.za?
Experience Cape Town
Cape Town is a spectacular city. Diverse, scenic, and very well run. AIMS is located next to the Muizenberg beachfront, where many of our visiting lecturers learn to surf. Agatha Christie learned to surf there, too!
The area is a biodiversity hotspot. We’re in the Cape Floristic Region, by far the smallest of the world’s six floral kingdoms and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Our students have seen bioluminescent waves at night (really cool) and Shark Spotters keep an eye on what’s happening in the Bay. It is clear why we teach AI for Ecology courses!
Please see thisis.capetown or capetown.travel to learn more about what’s on offer!