Bayo Adekanmbi, the CEO of Data Science Nigeria, has emphasized the need for Africa to create its own artificial intelligence (AI) systems that are context-specific, culturally relevant, and locally informed.
Adekanmbi, a panelist at the Gates Foundation’s Goalkeepers event in Lagos on Wednesday, warned that the continent must refrain from overrelying on imported technologies and global datasets that don’t account for African realities.
“I believe that AI is more about people than technology,” the statement goes. And AI must comprehend the people’s richness, diversity of their language, culture, epistemology, and value system in order to serve them.
Because of the knowledge it will impart to humans as a set of instructions for solving everyday problems, he said.
The data scientist explained that AI must be trained on a wide range of representative data in order to function correctly because it depends primarily on pattern recognition.
For instance, if I want AI to help me predict the likelihood of a disease, I need to provide it with enough different types of training to learn the visual. And it will be able to respond when the next person has a different pattern.
However, he said, “I won’t get the results I’m looking for if I train AI with data that is biased, discriminatory, or not representative.”
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Digitalizing African Languages 
The data scientist noted that despite Africa’s diversity, the majority of modern, highly developed AI models fail in African settings, particularly because there aren’t any digital African languages.
“Over 90% of the most sophisticated and complex AI models we currently use fail to understand African languages and the context. Why? More than 95% of African languages have not yet been digitalized.
There is nothing for AI to learn, therefore. If AI is unable to create context-specific, nuanced solutions to our everyday problems, he said, it cannot learn our content, whether in text, images, or pictures.
He advocated for the creation of AI systems based on African data and created by African citizens. He cited a proverb from which Nigerians draw and stressed the value of local participation.
In his absence, a man’s head cannot be barbed or shaved. She must be physically present, the center of attention, and that is not enough to make a woman look absolutely gorgeous, even with the best of logistics systems.
“So, if we want to create AI for Africa, we must be at the forefront of our attention.” He further stated that the people must collect the data, the models must be created by the people, and the finished product must have a nuanced user interface.
AI was created with the help of the people in mind and is intended to address the people’s peculiarities.
Adekanmbi further explained how mobile data from telecoms networks, in contrast to conventional demographic data, enabled the identification of community clustering patterns, and urged stakeholders to put their weight on implementing adaptive innovation.
“Digital illiteracy will always exist. What do we have that can be repurposed and modified to solve our issues, though? We can’t just say, “It’s not working.” There is still work there, even if it’s not working. Find out what is working, he said, and make it work.
He also cited promising developments in the digital landscape of Africa. “We now possess talent. Ecosystems are now forming.
The Gates Foundation in Nigeria is currently developing the speech data needed to enable AI to speak a wide range of Nigerian languages.
“What we need already exists,” he says. More opportunities and possibilities are available. And let’s use AI to solve our everyday issues, he said.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s inaugural Goalkeepers event in Lagos brought together world leaders, policymakers, and changemakers to assess progress making the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Source: Channels TV
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