Alan Blackwell's blog

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.

It's time to define some research priorities for our collaboration with Ethiopian colleagues.

Helen and I met with Tesfa Tegegne in Addis Ababa, to discuss issues relating to development of Amharic language resources in AI for Development, and potential for tools that might "leapfrog" data science methods and school curriculum for an AI generation.

What maths do we need for a new generation of AI and Data Science workers?

In preparation for departure to Ethiopia, Helen and I visited the team at the Cambridge Mathematics project.

I made the banner image for this blog to think about AI in Africa.

The red dunes of the Namib desert show the beauty of the African continent, and remind me of Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti . The cut-away behind the letters AI has been transformed using a Deep Neural Network for style transfer.

Artificial intelligence research has become deep but narrow. What would AI look like if it was invented in Africa?

Our goal is to explore that question by working with computer scientists and educators in Ethiopia, Namibia, Uganda and elsewhere. This blog will be our project diary over the coming year.