Projects and Initiatives

 

 

 

The Africa Archives Project (AAP) consists of diverse projects devised by and relevant to Princeton faculty engaged in the work of archiving and memory in and around Africa. The core idea and outcome are a digital archive hosted at Princeton and accessible to scholars and researchers everywhere. While components of this archive would document the past, some will exist as “living” platforms that would grow with time, as new, relevant materials were deposited. The AAP supports physical archives projects on the African continent.

 

 

 

AIC’s mission is to develop practical business solutions that address the challenges faced by start-ups and businesses across the African continent. AIC aims to use innovative technologies and strategies to bridge the gaps and promote collaboration among participants to advance Africa’s development and contribute to the growth of start-ups. The conference was a success as it enabled participants to leverage their collective expertise and promote technology to foster Africa’s growth.

 

 

Africa World, in partnership with the Office of Vice Provost for International Affairs, and Mpala Research Center, with the support of Kenyan stakeholders will establish a residency program at the Mpala Research Center for writers and artists from East Africa. 

 

 

 

 

It is vital to reposition Princeton’s engagement with science and technology research and innovation in and about Africa. We harness existing Princeton-based resources, including Pan-African Scientific Research Council and Africa Innovation Hub, to strengthen the place of Africa in Princeton’s investment in STEM Innovation.  AWI serves as the institutional locus for research, and collaboration initiatives, projects and programs with African institutions and stakeholders.

 

African languages continue to lag in natural language processing (NLP), Large Language Models (LLMS), and AI research, and this has been mainly due to the lack of quality datasets. The goal of the project is to increase the representation of African languages in NLP, LLMS, and AI research by creating a quality dataset with theoretically sound and consistent syntactic human annotations for eleven typologically diverse African languages.

 

In Spring 2024, our Postdoctoral fellow Happy Buzaaba with Christiane Fellbaum presented at the Princeton Language + Intelligence (PLI) Symposium 2024 on the “Infrastructure for African languages: African Universal Dependencies Treebanks.”