Why did we create Fatima Fellowship?
A way to globalize machine learning
Why we created Fatima Fellowship.
Fatima Fellowship was created in 2021 as a free mentorship program for students all over the world, particularly aimed at students from countries that are LMIC (low and middle income countries). Many of us organizers are 1st and 2nd generation immigrants in the United States, we saw the disparity in access to research opportunities, and wanted to create an initiative for globalizing machine learning.
Our goal is for fellows to be accepted into a PhD or Masters program. We provide them with free research opportunities in machine learning, computer science, or related fields. Every year around March we host an application for students to apply for admission into the fellowship. The application consists of a coding challenge and questions about an applicant's personal background, and educational history. Our fellows will also be given a mentor. Mentors provide fellows with personal application guidance when it comes time to submitting applications, which for most US programs, occurs in Nov-Dec.
Fatima Fellowship simply aims to bridge the gap in research opportunities. We do not promise a guarantee of acceptance into a PhD or Masters programs, nor do we offer any scholarships; our goal is simply to help fellows jump to the same level playing field as someone in a country with a high-development index.
Fatima Fellowship works as a non-profit. None of our organizers or mentors take a paycheck. We run entirely by funding and donations. Our current funder is Hugging Face, and through their generous sponsorship, we are able to provide free computational resources to our fellows for their research projects.
Many of our fellows have been accepted into Universities in North America and Europe. Tarek Nous, who now works with us as an organizer, was a 2021 fellow who got accepted into Georgia Tech for a Machine Learning PhD. In addition, Rohan Banergee was accepted into Mila and Polytechnique Montreal. 2021 fellow Kuna Fumboh is now completing a computer science PhD program at Queen Mary University at London. To view the full list of our past fellows and their accomplishments, view here.
Ohida, originally from Bangladesh, is now completing her PhD in Computer Science from Northeastern University.
Our goal is for our fellows to have their research projects published. Recently our fellows Asım Ersoy, Gerson Vizcarra, Tahsin Mayeesha, and their mentor Benjamin Muller published their preprint: "In What Languages are Generative LMs the Most Formal? Analyzing Formality Distribution across Languages". To read the full paper, click here.
To stay up to date with Fatima Fellowship, follow us on Linkedin and Twitter. If you want to apply as a mentor, click here. If you would like to be waitlisted for the 2024 Fatima Fellowship, click here. Go to our YouTube channel to view testimonials from our previous fellows.