Alan Blackwell's blog

ChatGPT is a bullshit generator. To understand AI, we should think harder about bullshit

Ongoing work with Nic Bidwell, our collaborator and host for the work we were doing in Namibia before interrupted by the pandemic, has led to her writing this reflective piece that I am sharing with blog readers.

How do the Black Lives Matter protests relate to the AI in Africa project, and the work of Cambridge Global Challenges?

As with so many enterprises around the world, the AI in Africa project has been suspended in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Before starting the next leg of my fieldwork in Namibia, I made a side-trip to my home country of Aotearoa New Zealand, where Billie Lythberg, Rachel Wolfgramm and their colleagues have helped me to explore interpretations of AI in Maori and Pasifika cultures.

Mahlet Woreta is an Ethiopian researcher has been building natural language processing systems to improve maternal health and safety in childbirth.

The AI in Africa project has been covered in an interview on the BBC World Service programme Digital Planet.

What opportunities are there for AI methods to contribute to healthcare in Ethiopia?

I've been learning about the IT systems deployed in the Bahir Dar health centre and main hospital. There are some serious systems challenges - with some relationship to my previous work in electronic health records, but no apparent 'quick wins' for AI research.

Is it possible to teach and practice programming wholly in a national language, rather than the mix of English keywords and local content that is so typical of digital working?

Addisu Damena at the Bahir Dar Institute of Technology has created a system that does exactly this - not only for practical tasks like interactive websites, but even for experimenting with AI using neural networks.

We have been reminded how deep the cultural assumptions of open source and community computing can go.

Eden Melaku, a fifth-year undergraduate in software engineering at Bahir Dar University, discovered during a hackathon-style workshop that the open source Arduino platform is not open enough to support the Amharic language.