Bubacarr Bah

Bah was born in The Gambia.^[5] He studied mathematics at the University of the Gambia and graduated summa cum laude in 2004.^[6][7] He was awarded a Master of Science (MSc) degree from the University of Oxford,^[8] where he studied mathematical modelling as a postgraduate student of Wolfson College, Oxford.^[9][10] He joined the University of Edinburgh, where his PhD investigated compressed sensing and was supervised by Jared Tanner [Wikidata].^[11][2][10] He was a member of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) student chapter.^[12] His work on Gaussian matrices was awarded the SIAM best student paper.^[13][14]

Between 2012 and 2014 Bah was a postdoctoral researcher at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, where he continued his investigations into compressed sensing.^[9] He was a member of the Laboratory for Information and Inference Systems.^[15]

In 2014 Bah joined the University of Texas at Austin, where he worked on signal processing, machine learning and sampling strategies in high-dimensional data.^[7][16] He developed a matrix for dimensionality reduction that uses bi-Lipschitz embeddings, which can exploit data redundancy.^[17][18][19]

In 2016 Bah was appointed the German Chair in Mathematics at the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS), which is supported by the Humboldt Foundation.^[16] The position was welcomed by the AIMS community, who believe Africa needs better data science infrastructure.^[5] Bah organised the software engineering for Applied Mathematical Sciences workshop, which teaches basic programming and research programming.^[20][21] He is responsible for connecting the AIMS in South Africa with central Africa and German universities.^[22] As of 2019, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation supports five chairs at AIMS centres.^[23] He holds a joint position at Stellenbosch University, where he works on information theory and deep learning.^[24][25]

In March 2019 Bah was appointed to the Google advanced technology external advisory council, a collection of experts who will consider the artificial intelligence (AI) principles of Google.^[26] Google disbanded ATEAC on April 4, 2019 following criticism by Google employees about another member, Kay Coles James.^[27]