John Quinn

I'm a Senior Lecturer in Computer Science at the School of Computing & Informatics Technology, Makerere University, Uganda. I'm also a Visiting Lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Sheffield, UK. My research interests are in machine learning, computer vision and data mining, and particularly in the use of these in developing countries to solve problems in health, agriculture and resource allocation. For more information see the site of the Artificial Intelligence in the Developing World (AI-DEV) group, which I coordinate.

News

From November 2012 to February 2013 I visited Masashi Sugiyama's machine learning group at the Tokyo Institute of Technology.
I talked at the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems (Sept. 2012) and the Tokyo Institute of Technology (Nov. 2012) about spatiotemporal disease modelling and prediction (slides).
Updates on my research projects are now being posted to the AI-DEV blog.
Our AAAI 2012 paper Coupling Spatiotemporal Disease Modeling with Diagnosis (the first author is my PhD student Martin Mubangizi) won the Community Computing Consortium Outstanding Student Paper Award in the Computational Sustainability and AI track.
I received another Google Research Award for mobile auction/market design for commodity trading in Africa.
I gave an invited talk at the International Conference on Computational Sustainability in Copenhagen, July 2012, on machine learning opportunities for developing-world sustainability (slides).
Some media: an article in New Scientist describes our our crop monitoring system. See the section "Smartphones keep an eye on crops", 8 October 2011. Also, an article in the New York Times, 6 December 2011.
I talked at Google, Mountain View, in August 2011 about crop disease monitoring in Uganda (slides).
Video lecture of my talk at the PASCAL AI Bootcamp 2011, Introduction to Machine Learning is online. Also code and data for the speech classification example.
Our crop surveillance site is online with updates of viral cassava disease in Uganda.
I received a Google Research Award for crop disease monitoring with AI and mobile devices.
I received a Microsoft Mobile Healthcare for Africa Award to work on automatic diagnosis of malaria with smartphones.
First Makerere Workshop on Social Systems and Computation, 3-10 December 2010.