Leadership

Global Assignments, Leadership, Volunteering and Community Building

• UN-Habitat: Session Co-Moderator at the Second UN-Habitat Assembly 2023

As a self-taught data scientist from a minority under-represented group in the Global South, Kennedy empathetically understands how daunting it can be for an underserved youth to seek education and employability in Kenya. He believes that education is one of the most important ways for us to help remove the barriers to diversity and inclusion in the data field.

• 2019-Present ❙❙ Technical Community Lead, Developer Advocate and Mentor:Deeplearning.AI

As a Developer Advocate, Kennedy leads the Deeplearning.AI Nairobi Community with a membership of 4,527 learners and exists both online, and offline. He supports the community of learners in Kenya and globally with the right tools, resources, and a platform to connect, check-in, learn, voice, and share with other learners while building meaningful careers in artificial intelligence.

• Through Deeplearning.AI, Kennedy has excelled in promoting partnerships with educators and technology players such as Coursera, Datacamp, Dataquest, NVIDIA AI and PACKT to increase educational and professional opportunities, participation, and representation of the underserved communities in Africa.
• He has empowered over 7,691 black technology community members with free one-year data education scholarships from Coursera and Datacamp to improve their data literacy levels and advance for in-demand careers in the data field.
• Mentoring the learners enrolled in the Natural Language Processing Specialization

• -2023 ❙❙ Volunteers Committee Member: The Deep Learning Indaba Conference 2023, The University of Ghana, Accra, Ghana:

  • Assisted in welcoming the attendees, the check-in process, providing badges, materials, event schedules and providing directions to different conference areas.
  • I presented my poster paper work on: ‘DeepPlastic Watch: A Deep Learning Approach for Marine Plastic Litter Detection, Classification, and Quantification’.

• -2023 ❙❙ Tableau Social Ambassador:

  • Social Ambassadors go above and beyond to drive thought-provoking conversations about data in social media. They champion others and welcome all people to the #DataFam.

• -2022 ❙❙ Sponsorship Committee Organizing Member: ❙❙ The Deep Learning Indaba Conference 2022, Tunis, Tunisia:

  • Supported the fund-raising, logistics and communication about sponsorship and sponsor-related activities.
  • Having steered the partnership and onboarded Datacamp as one of our partners, I spearheaded the distribution, allocation and ensured that all the attendees received a free one-year data training scholarship, post-Indaba 2022 to improve their data literacy levels.

• -2023 ❙❙ Data Science Nigeria ❙❙ Hackathon Solutions Reviewer:

  • Provided mentorship, guided, reviewed and assessed the Mobility and Geospatial Data for Health Solutions in Africa Hackathon submissions
  • Ensured meaningful experiences for the hack teams and determined the winners

• -2022 ❙❙ Technical Mentor: The AI Global Hub:

  • Providing technical support, guidance and feedback to learners towards achieving their AI skills and projects goals

• -2021-2022 ❙❙ Technical Reviewer:
  • Reviewed book chapters, provided technical feedback, assistance and guidance on Python, data science, machine learning books and tutorials to the authors and book editors with the goal of improving the quality for readers when the book releases!

• -2019-2021 ❙❙ GDSC JKUAT Data Science Community Lead:

  • Established and co-founded the first JKUAT Data Science tech community.
  • Recruited, trained, mentored, and provided computing resources to 100+ data enthusiasts, guided, mobilized, and led 3 teams to win data science competitions.

• -2020-2021 ❙❙ NeurIPS Volunteer and Meetup Organizer:

  • Provided technical assistance during, and after the NeurIPS 2020 and 2021 Virtual Conferences
  • Assisted with Tutorials, Sessions, Workshops, Socials, and Affinity Groups
  • Tested the website and staffing the Helpdesk during the virtual conference
  • Organized the NeurIPS 2020 Nairobi Meetup

• -2020 ❙❙ Technical Mentor ❙❙ Hackmakers #BuildwithAI Global Hackathon Challenge:

  • Provided mentorship, guided, reviewed and assessed the #BuildwithAI Global 2020 Hackathon Challenge submissions themed around the global COVID-19 pandemic.
  • Ensured meaningful experiences for the various hack challenge teams and determined the winners

• -2020-2021 ❙❙ AWS Educate Student Cloud Ambassador:

  • Secured 10,000$ AWS credits for Cloud Computing to empower 27 scholars in Kenya to continue building innovatively with the AWS Services, and technologies.
  • Spearheaded the discussions, and establishment of a partnership between JKUAT, and the AWS Academy, making JKUAT the first ( AWS Academy Member Institution in Kenya and East Africa.
  • Designed training programs to empower, support, and strengthen the professional development of new African AI talent.

• -2019 ❙❙ Udacity Bertelsmann Data Science Track Technical Leader:

  • Supported learners enrolled in the the Bertelsmann Udacity Data Science Scholarship 2019
  • Provided technical mentorship, feedback, guidance and preparation for successful experience in the Data Science Nanodegree program

• -2017-2019 ❙❙ Jomo Kenyatta University Students Association (JKUSA):

  • Appointed Member of the JKUSA Academic Affairs Committee (2017-2018): Advocated for the development and enhancement of the educational provisions to students.
  • Class Representative (BSc. Information Technology: 2016-2020)
  • Commissioner involved in the Review and Promulgation of the JKUSA Constitution 2017.
  • Kennedy represented the views/ issues of the students welfare through meetings and committees, liaising with fellow Congress, University staff, and the Student Union body to find the most common issues, areas of best practice and solutions.
  • Supported over 500 students to learn, and grow as part of the university’s technology developer ecosystems (Google Developer Student Club of JKUAT and the JKUAT Microsoft Learn Student Ambassadors), training them on emerging technologies and the future of work.
• The Jomo Kenyatta University Students Association (JKUSA) Promulgates the 2017 Reviewed Constitution ( The Discover JKUAT Blog)
• Kennedy Leads a Team of JKUAT Students To Win The 2019 Oracle Student Hackathon (The Discover JKUAT Blog)