JEDI (Joint Exchange Development Initiative) is a programme brought forward by Prof Bruce Bassett, Dr Nadeem Oozeer and their team. The idea is straightforward. In most of the conferences, people will normally present their work and if it happens that we go to two different conferences, coincidentally, we might eventually find the same persons giving the same presentations. Therefore, instead of spending so much money on conferences, why don't we bring all academic staffs and students together for one week and work on a completely new project?

So, we would normally organise it in a beautiful place (possibly in a different country, so that, some of the local students can benefit from it), work together, cook together, stay together, thus eliminating the gap between students and academic staffs. Having done so in the past few years, several projects initiated in JEDIs, have not only led to publications (see for example BIRO) but also, students have had the chance to continue further studies, for example, undergraduate to MSc, MSc to PhD and so forth. In short, students have been able to advance in their career. For me personally, this programme also gives the students the opportunity to be future leaders.

My participations in JEDIs have enabled me to learn a lot. I was lucky that I got the chance to be part of it at a very young age. I had good grades for my undergraduate studies (BSc (Hons) Physics with Computing) in Mauritius but I had no idea of where to use the skills and knowledge I had gained through this degree. It was not only until I participated in one JEDI that I came to learn about Data Science, Machine Learning, Deep Learning and so forth. The transfer of scientific ideas, skills, knowledge towards solving various other non-scientific problems is simply amazing. It all came back and I could use my mathematics and coding techniques again. As Steve Jobs rightly said, "You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future."

Now that many students have an experience of how the JEDI works, we, students work together with Prof Bruce Bassett and his team to organise various such events in different places/countries in Africa. Until now, I have participated in a few of them and I was also sometimes on the organising team.