Everyone 18+ is welcome to apply, regardless of location or whether you are a student or not. We strive to have participants with diverse backgrounds to encourage networking between academic and industry communities from all over the world. The location of the summer school is tied to the Middle East and North Africa to raise visibility of the local MENA communities, and create opportunities to understand the challenges and opportunities AI presents to the region. But all are welcome!

Regrettably, that is not possible. We maintain a strict policy due to the large number of applications and our commitment to fairness for all candidates who met the submission deadline.

We will make all of our content available online on our YouTube channel as well as the program page.

If you missed this year, we hope to see you in the next year edition!

Cutting-edge talks, hands-on labs, and very passionate attendees who like you, are spending a week learning about the cutting edge in AI.

If you want more concrete representation, check our 2025 page for recordings and the topics covered.

Participants are expected to:

• have experience in programming (preferably Python); knowledge of any modern framework for neural networks (JAX, TensorFlow, Keras, PyTorch, etc.) will come in handy, though it is not strictly necessary;

• be familiar with notions of Linear Algebra, Probability Theory, and general Machine Learning;

• be very interested in learning about advanced topics in Deep Learning and Reinforcement Learning.

• The MenaML review process follows a double-blinded review; the reviewers don't have access to any of your personal information or if you have applied for scholarships, the reviewers have access only to the answers you have given to the questions. 

• Each application is reviewed by more than one reviewer. The selection criteria are a multi-objective and constraint optimization problem based on normalized and corrected reviewers' scores. 

• The objectives are outlined in the application: technical background, community engagement, and the personal motivation regarding the MENA region. All of the criteria are subject to constraints that ensure fair and equitable representation from across the MENA region.

We recommend checking our GitHub or Indaba's  for tutorials on applied deep learning in different domains and exercises to take. A great way to build your portfolio is to have some of the projects you are using for learning open-sourced.

Similarly, while writing your application, you may want to use the "impact driven resume" framework, to help contexualise your experiences for our reviews. 

We are always looking for value aligned and enthusiastic sponsors for this and future iterations! Please contact us at sponsorship@mena.ml.

We take your privacy seriously. To learn more about how we collect, use, and protect your personal information, please visit our Privacy Policy page for full details.

The practical will be using Python and PyTorch. We recommend attendees to familiarize themselves with PyTorch  https://pytorch.org/tutorials/beginner/basics/intro.html

You can look at our previous year labs  GitHub repository.