Makerere Safe Intelligence Lab
Advancing safe, reliable, and responsible AI — with African contexts at the centre.
MakSIL / In action
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Featured videoNote ScanAI-powered banknote authentication01 / Research areas
Building AI systems that act in accordance with human intentions and values.
Understanding model capabilities, limitations, and risks through rigorous evaluation.
Investigating how AI systems behave under uncertainty, distribution shifts, and adversarial attacks.
Studying fairness, transparency, and accountability across the AI lifecycle.
Exploring the policies, institutions, and practices needed to govern AI responsibly.
Grounding AI safety research in African languages, communities, and deployment contexts.
02 / Featured projects
Featured projects will appear here, connecting our research questions to methods, tools, and real-world contexts.
03 / Latest publications
2026 / Journal article
Data in Brief, volume 69, article 113293
An image dataset of genuine and counterfeit Ugandan banknotes, providing labelled examples for research on banknote authentication and counterfeit detection.
Publication details2025 / Conference paper
Pan-African Conference on Artificial Intelligence (PanAfriCon AI 2024), Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol. 2550, pp. 179–193. Springer.
Evaluates convolutional neural networks for detecting counterfeit Ugandan banknotes from smartphone photographs, then integrates a selected model into an application that checks banknotes locally …
Publication details2025 / Conference paper
2025 IEEE/ACM Symposium on Software Engineering in the Global South (SEiGS), pages 53–58
Extends agent-based mobile money simulation with differential privacy, using protected statistics from real transactions to calibrate synthetic datasets and evaluate their statistical similarity to …
Publication details04 / People
Safer AI calls for ideas across disciplines. Meet the people exploring the technical and societal questions behind safe intelligence.
Meet the lab05 / News
Find future lab updates, research announcements, and events here.
06 / Join MakSIL
Interested in AI safety?
Explore opportunities to learn, research, and collaborate with MakSIL.