Africa must not take back seat in pursuit of artificial intelligence
SA and other countries need to play a part in shaping tools to deal with continent’s realities WE NEED OUR OWN EXPERTS TO HARNESS THE TECHNOLOGIES TOWARDS OUR LOCAL CHALLENGES AND PRIORITIES IN AFRICA FORTUNATELY, WE ALREADY HAVE A NUMBER OF HIGHLY SKIL
The continent needs its own experts to harness artificial intelligence (AI) towards our local challenges and priorities in Africa.
Behind buzzwords such as “data science” or “fourth industrial revolution” that we are being bombarded with, is the promise of major disruption to every aspect of our lives, powered by the engine of AI.
The technology underlying AI is the field of machine learning, in which computer science intersects with statistics and which is concerned with computers learning to improve their own performance over time, by being exposed to an increasing amount of data.
This stands in stark contrast to former generations of software, which relied on humans to programme every fine detail of how they should operate, by hand. Breakthroughs in recent years have led to a plethora of applications, including real-time translation between languages, automatic captioning and tagging of images, diagnosing cancers from medical tests, and autonomous driving.
The potential benefits of this technology are numerous and can drive change at every level of society. Among the most important is the democratisation of critical services such as health care and education, with the ultimate aim of providing personalised interventions to every individual. This includes tools to treat or even eradicate a far greater number of diseases than before, at affordable rates.
The same innovations are poised to offer greater transparency of governance, improve corporate and political decisionmaking, and enable more efficient logistics.
With these great opportunities comes the need for SA and Africa to play a part in developing and customising these tools,
shaping them to deal with our realities, and not just reusing them off the shelf as developed in other parts of the world. AI hints at the possibility of solving some of the greatest challenges we face as a species, if we get it right, and one of the greatest threats to our existence, if we fail to pre-empt the ramifications.
We need our own experts to harness these technologies towards our local challenges and priorities in Africa. We cannot afford to take a back seat in one of the most important pursuits of modern science. If the aim is to target a number of flaws in society, then we should be at the helm.
Fortunately, we already have a number of highly skilled teams of researchers within our borders. The school of computer science and applied mathematics at Wits University has specifically been piloting the growth of our local research agenda.
Our researchers have received much international recognition from the likes of Google and Huawei, and are the only team of African researchers to be publishing regularly at the major machine learning, AI, and robotics conferences.
In the robotics, autonomous intelligence and learning (Rail) lab, our researchers are making an impact in areas ranging from fundamental questions around how robots can organise their knowledge of the world to modelling the interaction between humans and machines, and applications of these ideas in the education and health-care spaces.
Looking slightly further afield, the Deep Learning Indaba movement is a recent example of the talent that is being cultivated on the continent. Founded by several Africans, based locally and abroad, this is already the largest week-long machinelearning summer school in the world. Over the last two years, this meeting has brought together almost 1,000 of the most ambitious and skilled machinelearning practitioners and researchers from across the continent, to learn from each other and high-profile international speakers.
This has been expanded to encompass 13 satellite events in countries across the continent with our IndabaX programme, reaching more than 1,000 more attendees in 2018. Events are due to be held in 27 African countries, half of the continent, in 2019. The aim of these events is not only to train, but to celebrate the inspiring range of research projects, community and industry developments, and start-up companies that are harnessing these cutting-edge technologies in Africa.
It is clear we are approaching a watershed moment in our technological development, with the potential to benefit millions across society. It is important that we move forward with our collective eyes open, and train enough smart young people to guide us in the right direction. It is a really exciting time, and when I see the calibre of young scientists and technologists, I am very optimistic about our future.