Systems Optimization and Artificial Intelligence Innovations for Sustainability Systems of Africa (August 30th - September 04th in Kigali)

Research thrives on exchange and dialogue. In order to facilitate a constructive discourse and to set the starting point of the university cooperation between Ilmenau University of Technology and the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS) in Rwanda, seven scientists from the Process Optimization Group of TU Ilmenau and Dr. Divas Karimanzira from Fraunhofer IOSB-AST flew to Kigali, the capital city of Rwanda, at the end of August for a two-day workshop on “Systems Optimization and Artificial Intelligence Innovations for Sustainability Systems of Africa” . This cooperation is funded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (AvH) and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) with funds from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). The aim of the DAAD project is to develop optimization approaches for promoting the sustainability of water, energy and agrifood in Africa. 

At the beginning of the workshop, AIMS Centre President Prof. Sam Yala and the German Research Chair at AIMS Rwanda Prof. Abebe Geletu welcomed all attendees including the delegation of German researchers led by Prof. Li, Dr. Edo Abraham from TU Delft, Rwandan students and industrial partners, with an Ethiopian proverb: "When spider webs unite, they can bind a lion" to illustrate the power of collaborative research. During the workshop, international speakers presented their latest developments in energy and water distribution systems, control engineering, and mathematical optimization. The topics are of great interest to the sustainable development of Africa, and the audience raised many questions and comments that led to rich discussions, especially with the industrial partners, also during the coffee breaks and outside the workshop.  

On the third day after the scientific workshop, the participants visited AIMS Rwanda and African Leadership University (ALU) to get to know their organizations, meet the students and their research topics, and answer their questions. The visit to these universities left the impression of progressive educational institutions with students ready to solve interdisciplinary problems and conduct in-depth research. The partner university, AIMS Rwanda, has a total of 75 researchers at four research chairs (data science, systems optimization, discrete mathematics, and climate modeling) and a new cohort of 60 master students from 22 different African countries.  

After the workshop, the participants visited a local hydroelectric power plant, where they perceived the operations of the system including the turbines and motors as well as the control facility. Through discussions, the operators received some suggestions from the visitors for improving the power plant operation. The last place to visit on the day of departure was the Kigali Genocide Memorial in the capital, where the facts of numerous victims of the genocide against the Tutsi people were exhibited. Being at this memorial reminded us of what far-reaching hatred can lead to and why it should never be tolerated. 

The trip to Rwanda was both academically and culturally successful. We sincerely thank the funding from DAAD and were very pleased to meet our partners from AIMS Rwanda and to welcome them in Ilmenau at the beginning of October for a joint workshop on the topic "Introduction to Chance Constrained Optimization". We also had the pleasure to welcome the DAAD staff member responsible for our project and researchers from other disciplines. Besides lectures by Prof. Li and Prof. Geletu, there was a tour through the laboratories of the Department of Process Optimization. Furthermore, there were first cooperation talks with the Fraunhofer Institute about further project ideas for system optimization w.r.t. to sustainability in Africa. The DAAD scholarship holders will now stay at TU Ilmenau for the current winter semester to attend subject-specific courses and to continue working on their research.  

(Author: Kristina Korder)

Research topics

In addition to the original focus on Malaria, we continued to work on the topic of COVID-19 in 2022. We have received enormous media coverage in the first quarter of 2022. The range of topics was expanded to include monkeypox and the Marburg virus. We have published papers on both topics in the Lancet Infectious Diseases. The Marburg virus is the most deadly virus known. In the summer of 2022, there was a small outbreak in Ghana. Since we are working closely with WACCBIP in Ghana in the project and the outbreak occurred during a mobility visit, the outbreak caught our attention and we discovered that until now the incubation period of Marburg fever was estimated to be too short.

For the current outbreak of Ebola fever in Uganda, which is caused by Sudan Ebola virus for which there has been no vaccination, we developed a model that is already published in PLoS One. 

Prof. Gideon Ngwa (University of Buea), who is the technical contact in Cameroon for the project, was admitted as a member of the Academy of Sciences in Cameroon. One of the reasons was the extremely successful COVID-19 research that we initiated in this project.

In 2022, we were able to expand our transdisciplinary contacts with the University of Buea and established contacts with representatives of the National Malaria Control Program.

Travel grants for conferences

At this year's American Society for Tropical Medicine and Hygene (ASTMH) conference in Seattle, AIMS Cameroon Alumni (2019) Henri Christian Junior Tsoungui Obama was able to attend. He was awarded a Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation travel grant for 2020, which was renewed twice as the 2020 and 2021 conferences were virtual only. Ms. Patience Bwanu Iliya (AIMS Cameroon Alumni 2020) also received a travel grant for the ASTMH conference. Since she did not receive a visa for this year due to the long wait times, the scholarship was carried over to next year. Ms. Loyce Kayanula was also awarded a travel grant. Mr. George Kamange (AIMS Cameroon Alumni 2020) received a scholarship for virtual attendance at this year's ASTMH conference.

(Author: Kristian Schneider)

July 4th-  8th, 2022 

A workshop centered around selected topics in Discrete Mathematics and Probability was held at AIMS Rwanda from the 4th to the 8th July 2022, organized by Jan Hązła, the Humboldt Research Chair at AIMS Rwanda. The workshop was aimed at young African researchers interested in the areas of Discrete Mathematics and Discrete Probability. It was organized as a part of the ongoing DAAD cooperation between Goethe University and AIMS Rwanda. 

Sixteen participants (including five women and eleven men) from ten African countries  (Algeria, Benin, Cameroun, Egypt, Ethiopia, Madagascar, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Sudan) attended the workshop. The participants spanned various career stages, including assistant professor, postdocs, current and future PhD students, as well as AIMS graduates. Majority of the participants were AIMS alumni, but there were a few newcomers who had their first opportunity to be introduced to AIMS. 

Each participant gave a thirty minute talk on a discrete mathematics topic of their choice, connected to their previous research. There was ample time allocated for the questions from the audience and often a talk was followed by a lively discussion. The talks allowed the attendees to get acquainted with various research directions related to discrete mathematics, combinatorics, probability and computer science.  

Most days featured four talks, separated by lunch and coffee breaks, leaving time for socializing, networking and informal discussions. On the first day, Jan Hązła gave a two-hour lecture on recent progress in understanding the computational complexity of learning by neural networks. 

The presentations by the participants included topics such as: using machine learning and combinatorics in designing trading and pricing algorithms; properties of communication channels in information theory; structure of near-fields in abstract algebra; application of the Lempel-Ziv compression algorithm to estimating relative entropy; topics in extremal graph theory including domination number, quantum chromatic number, and counting induced subgraphs; aspects of the simplex algorithm for linear programming; analysis of evolutionary algorithms; the congruent number problem in number theory; topics in combinatorics including integer partitions and Catalan numbers; cellular automata and ergodic theory; and some techniques from applied probability and statistics. 

The links to the recordings of all the presentations can be found here courtesy of AIMS Rwanda. 

It is worth mentioning that several of the workshop participants have continued working with Jan Hązła in various capacities, as PhD students (Donald Kougang Yombi  and Abdou Majeed Alidou), a postdoc (Dr Tina Ambinintsoa Malalanirainy Rakotoson) and a visiting researcher (Dr Prudence Djagba), respectively.  

We would like to thank the staff at AIMS Rwanda for excellent technical and administrative support. We are also grateful for the financial and administrative support from the DAAD and Goethe University, as well as the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. 

(Author: Jan Hazla)

To celebrate the 10-years jubilee of the AIMS cooperation programme, AIMS Ghana organised a conference on "Mathematics and its Applications" from August 29th to September 1st in 2022.

Read the article about the conference on the AIMS Ghana webpage

Read an article about CMIA in a local Newspaper

Q: What is the title of your research paper?  
A: The title of my PhD research topic is ‘Sufficient Stochastic Maximum Principles under Contagion with Applications in Finance’. 

Q:Why is this subject important in your research field? 
A: This research seeks to contribute to the literature on Financial Mathematics, especially in the areas where the models used take into account the contagion effects of the market. Investors and fund managers will have mathematical backing as to why diversification alone, without taking into account the contagion effect, will not be the best approach to mitigating against certain risks in the market. 

Q: What was the most interesting insight or the greatest difficulty? 
A: Mathematical models of the financial markets that take into account contagion effects were motivated by the fact that the earlier models were not able to capture what leads to financial crises as has been observed in the past and also recently.  These new proposed models were developed to mimic the reality of the financial markets as much as possible.

Q: Did the scholarship affect your professional ambitions?
A: I was able to go through this PhD programme because of the scholarship I obtained from DAAD, which covered my tuition fees at the university, and monthly stipends as well as yearly research allowances throughout the duration of the programme. The scholarship also made it possible for me to have research stay experience in Germany on two occasions. During my second research stay in Germany I was able to present my research findings at the 13th International Workshop on Stochastic Models and Control, Lubeck-Travemunde, Germany from 14th to 18th March 2022, and also at the 40th Finnish Summer School on Probability and Statistics, Lammi, Finland, 23rd to 27th May 2022. 

Q: What do you plan next? 
A: After successfully completing the programme, I will take on more research projects to contribute more in the chosen field of research and related areas. I would also like to stay in academia in order to train more people with similar interests. 

(Questions: DAAD - P24; Answers: Edward Korveh)