The Winners of The AI Wellbeing Hackathon Organised By AI Commons In Nigeria Emerge
AI For The Common Good
AI dramatically expands the scope and scale of human intelligence. It is important to have a model of how AI development will happen.
Stuart Russel
Data Science Nigeria, in conjunction with AI Commons, recently held a wellbeing/health hackathon in Nigeria that brought together diverse AI Culture powered teams from around the country, consisting of healthcare professionals, IT gurus, academics, and researchers under one common roof, to design solutions to identified health challenges in Nigeria.
When I heard about this hackathon, boy was I excited. My excitement went through the roof when I was given the privilege to be part of the judges/mentors for these solutions. I immersed myself in reading & studying, these solutions, watching video pitches, and going through codes, and I could see pure intelligence oozing out of every solution designed.
Africa is ready. Ready to take on the numerous healthcare challenges that plague the healthcare industry with the energy of artificial intelligence. I mean, here are brilliant Nigerians who have been able to create and design AI algorithms, even though not perfect, that show promising solutions to some of the problems that we face in the area of healthcare, especially public health.
What we need is the right environment, I love to call it community. The one that provides for us a temperature that can help us to incubate our ideas. Africans have always been a people who are able to explore deeply their creative sides, despite the unfavourable conditions that we find ourselves.
More exercises like this should be conducted on a regular basis across the continent. We have got the resources, so there are no excuses. There are more people out there who are ready, who have amazing ideas buried in them that just need the right environment to blossom.
Go through the winning solutions, see for yourself, the beauty of AI, and how young Nigerians have gone ahead to portray excellence, invoke ingenuity and proffer solutions using the fingers of Artificial Intelligence.
Artificial Intelligence for the common good it is.
