2020, My Year of Fame

Published in

Masakhane

7 min readNov 25, 2020

2020 — ongoing: My Year of Fame and how I joined the world of Research

My name is Bonaventure Dossou. I am 24 years old. I am originally from the Benin Republic but currently living in Bremen, Germany. For most of my friends and people, I am the «FFR guy», a “nerd”, and a “star”. So, let me take you into my 2020’s wonderful adventure — Ooops, that’s basically the meaning of my first name … Well enough of talking and… Let’s goooooooooo !!!

I actually graduated high-school majoring in Biology. But funny enough, I now hold a Bachelor’s degree of Science in Mathematics (and with honors — haha I believe I deserve to show off a bit). I am currently pursuing my Master of Science in Data Engineering at Jacobs University Bremen, Germany.

I started 2020, with a bit of deception, probably as a lot of people. But it was because I left Hotshi, a startup where I committed 200% of my time building from scratch a professional & social network application. I was the Manager of the Mobile App and AI/DS teams.

Why did I leave? For the sake of intellectual property, and integrity.

Intellectual property because a product I made was taken from me: yes I developed and implemented into the app, a translation system based on Python, allowing to translate publications into as many as Google supported languages. I made it possible on the chat system for two users or more, to decide which languages they wanted to read incoming messages in. I did that with my own resources.
Integrity because, a friend of mine that I can proudly call my brother from another mother, Chris Emezue was minimized and ridiculed.

We were basically told by the CEO « Your works weren’t useful. I wanted to make you known, I wanted you to be a reference when people mention AI in Africa. But you guys deceived me».

In case you haven’t noticed it, I have a big passion for everything turning around AI. In fact, already in Russia, I have developed a few Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) systems for Place Detections, Accident & Traffic Jams Reduction on public roads, Objects Identification and Segmentation, Recommendation Systems, etc… As a matter of fact, for my Bachelor's Degree, I have developed a CNN system for Speech Emotion Recognition.

I left Hotshi, I left them the system I built and all the hard work too. But mind me, as one of the main co-owners of the startup, I wasn’t paid a penny of my shares. However, I knew I made the right choice, and that certain things would get better.

And they kicked right in. In fact, early in January 2020, I published my first paper on DeepAI, summarizing my work on CNNs for Places Detection/Tagging from pictures. The system has been developed on 8 cities worldwide and extended later to 5 African cities. Right after that, I joined an amazing community of researchers, people with integrity that in fact made 2020 look like a «hall of fame» for me. The community’s name is Masakhane and please follow us on Twitter.

After I joined Masakhane, I started working, with Chris, on a Neural Machine Translation for Fon, my native language. Masakhane hosted the AfricanNLP Workshop, at the International Conference on Learning Representation (ICLR 2020).

Coming back a bit in time, in May 2019, Chris told me «Yooo Bona, we need to do something for ICLR. This is a conference I would like to take part in when I start my Master in Germany». Funny right? ICLR was just knocking at our door. And we took down the chance and wrote our first attempt at scientific research. Here, I would like to thank two wonderful women: Julia Kreutzer and Jade Abbott, my dear and beloved mentors who helped us down the road.

Our first paper was submitted on 14.02.2020 for blind review. And… (I let you guess what’s next).

02.03.2020 — booooooom!!!!! We (Chris and I) received a notification saying «Congratulations …». As far as I remember, we were in class and the joy was exponential: a Master's degree plan was just coming true, even right before we graduated from our Bachelor.

At ICLR, I was reached by Dickens Olewe, a journalist at BBC who wrote an article about me: «AI in Africa: Teaching a bot to read my mum’s texts». And yes, that was the trigger.

Today, I can’t honestly count the number of articles and interviews about me on the internet but here is a shortlist of the most important ones for me (for 2020 — and 2021 ongoing with many more coming soon):

Oh my gosh! That’s a quite long list. Hopefully, I didn’t only give interviews but also talks at ICLR 2020, ACL 2020, AI Expo Africa 2020, WMT-EMNLP 2020, Machine Translation for Low-resourced African Languages at LoResMt — AACL 2020. The last one (probably) in 2020, is the “Stem For Us — By Us” Conference of Visibility Stem in Africa.

Besides all this mediatic, I have pursued my research on Fon, and I have up to 12 publications now (1 more coming up at International Conference in Computer Vision — ICCV 2021). The full list is available at Bonaventure F. P. Dossou — Semantic Scholar. I also worked on an AI-based system for Pneumonia Detection through Chest X-ray scans and Speech Emotion Recognition. The Pneumonia publication is already available.

In my free time, I especially work on improving the FFR model that would be deployed soon, to provide Fon translation platforms for its users. With Ricardo Ahounvlame and Fabroni Yoclounon, we made available in the meantime, the mobile version of «Clavier des Langues Béninoises et Africaine» which is a keyboard of Benin and African Languages. And I have implemented also its desktop version «Mi kúabɔ̀ ɖò, nù wlǎn nǔ Fɔngbé tɔ̀n jí».

Currently enrolled on my Master’s degree, parallel to my NLP research, I am exploring AI applications in Healthcare through network approaches in Biology and Medicine, management of biological and medical data, and modeling of complex (biological, ecological) systems.

[2021 Update:] I am currently a Deep Learning Research at the Mila Quebec AI Institute, under the supervision of Yoshua Bengio and Dianbo Liu. I am also a scientist in residence at Modelis, a drug discovery company based in Montreal. Readout more here.

My plan for the future? I truly really want to make available the platform for the Fon system translation. After I graduate with my Master’s degree (with honors), I would deeply want to pursue my Ph.D. in AI, somewhere in the intersection between NLP, Computer Vision, and Healthcare.

As I daily wake up, my only goal is to get to a better version of myself, inspire and motivate people to hunt their dreams. I wanna live to be immortal through the next generations. I wanna be a model for the next African IT specialists and researchers; making them go like «I want to be like Bonaventure Dossou» — whenever they’re asked, which figure inspires them the most and they would like to be like.

I know that I still have a long way to go. As I always say, «I am taking my baby steps». And of course, Jade would always reply «Don’t mind him, he’s got many papers published already» or «he writes and publishes papers just for fun» (I like this woman :) )

So I think that the main takeaway that most young people like me, and if I want to target more specifically, the Junior African ML practitioners could get from my experience could be:

Do not be afraid to walk away from people exploiting you
Join communities who share values with you and who will uplift you
Try everything and don’t be afraid to fail. Reviewers will only make you stronger
Always challenge yourself
Stay hungry for knowledge, and never be afraid to stand out and amaze because even the smallest idea can be quite innovative and offer enough open-doors.

So yeah, that’s it. That’s my «2020 year of fame». I suck at new year resolutions, but I will make sure the road still goes down, in 2021 and many years to come.

I wanna thank God, my Dad, my Mum, Jade, Julia, Chris, all the Masakhane Community, and everyone who helped me to grow so much through this year.

I wanna also thank Mr. Christian Wilkens and all the Jacobs University staff who helped and still help me to pursue my Master’s dream here in Germany (it hasn’t been a piece of cake).

I couldn’t finish without saying special, warm thanks to a wonderful woman: for the love, the care, the help, the constructive criticisms, etc… which helped me to grow not only professionally but also in my personal & private life. Wherever you are, if you’re reading this, you can be proud of yourself.

I am living to be immortal, through next generations

For endnote, to be updated about my works & me, follow me on:

Twitter: @bonadossou
Instagram: @bona.dossou
LinkedIn & Facebook: Bonaventure Dossou
Github: bonaventuredossou
Personal page: https://bonaventuredossou.github.io/

Written by Bonaventure Dossou