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December 4, 2019 0

In its quest to raise 1 million Artificial Intelligence (AI) talents in 10 years and position Nigeria as a leading AI Hub, Data Science Nigeria (DSN) has expanded its learning community model to include a data science consulting and AI solutions delivery. In the last few months, the organisation has delivered solution-oriented machine learning projects, corporate trainings and bespoke consulting to local and international organisations with outstanding commendation of quality.

In order to strengthen its team, the organisation has expanded its consulting and operations workforce with experienced business and growth hacker, technical consulting lead, statisticians/data scientist, software engineers and grant/finance management expert from leading local and global organisations. The new model will also afford DSN a platform to scale up, ensure sustainability through self-funding, validate the Nigeria AI ecosystem, accelerate business use cases and provide hands-on learning opportunities for many DSN members (students, young professionals and beginners) across the country through paid internship and project participation.

Meet the new talents in the team

Michael NwosehStrategic Growth Lead: An experienced business manager, stakeholder and project management expert with 10 years commendable career in the Telecom and Banking industry. He has broad expertise in implementing strategic plans, conducting market research and driving execution excellence. He is also an expert in youth market engagement and strategy development, which is critical in driving our vision to raise 1million AI talents in 10 years.

Olalekan AkinsandeTechnical Delivery Lead: An experienced Data Scientist, Robotics Process Automation(RPA) Developer and Project Manager who previously worked with KPMG Data & Analytics team. Olalekan is proficient in building, deployment and management of end-to-end Data Analytics and Process Automation solution. He has broad experience in leading Data Analytics and Process Automation projects for Clients in the Financial Services, Oil & Gas, Telecoms, Manufacturing, FMCG, Transport and Utility industry.

Olusola Oseni– Software Engineer: An ex-Andela software engineer who will be driving how we find operational fusion of AI and software engineering in solving social and business problems. With PhD grade in his Petroleum Geology postgraduate studies, he has found a new passion in building solutions. He worked for 18 months as a freelance Software Developer before moving to Andela where he was a resident Software Developer and Technical Coordinator for 19 months. One of his works is a data collection app for a leading multinational tracking sale from the field.

Ezekiel OgundepoData Scientist: A first-class Statistics graduate with Master degree from African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS), Rwanda. He is an expert in Advanced Statistical modelling with professional experience at the Rwanda Revenue Authority (RRA) where he worked to build dynamic taxpayers data portal and automated key statistical reports required by internal and external users. He is an R programming guru with a passion for geospatial analytics, advanced data analytics, visualisation and business application for impact. Ezekiel has used the set skills in data cleaning, analysis, machine learning, and analytical storytelling to provide statistical consultancy for clients in 15 countries as a freelancer.

Ebenezer Don-UgwuSoftware Engineer: A vibrant and young full-stack software engineer, an ex- Andela staff member with a passion for building meaningful products that ease the life of users. He has worked with distributed teams and has a strong passion with regard to AI driven software engineering. He is a versatile professional who is keen on finding solutions through cross-bundled experimentation.

Anaeze Nsoffor Software Engineer: He is a full stack Javascript/Python developer who is an advocate of super-efficient programming. He previously worked at Andela and has rich experience in Node.js, C#, Jquery, Reactjs. He will aid in accelerating our solution creation and find beneficial intersections between software engineering and Machine learning solution delivery.

Tunmise Johnson – Grant/Finance Manager: A Chartered Accountant and expert with solid experience in financial/grant management in both private and public development organisations. He previously worked with a Health Strategy and Delivery Foundation where he managed many international grants. His functional experience spans across Financial Management, Grant management, Process Management, Audit and Financial Modelling.

Join us as we welcome these awesome talents.

You can download the Data Science Nigeria corporate consulting and training brochure here


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November 6, 2019 0

In 2020, DSN will be expanding to run 24 city-based AI+ learning meet-ups as part of our scale-up strategy to achieve our 1 million AI talents in 10 years. This will be executed via a structured learning platform for secondary school students, pre-university students, university/polytechnics students and professionals, similar to the AIEveryDay model currently being running at the AI Hub in Lagos.
These AI+ meet-ups will be fully funded by Data Science Nigeria and managed professionally with strong focus on curriculum, quality assurance and opportunity creation for all the community members. It will be managed by a dedicated DSN resource, Program Manager in charge of AI Community, Content and Collaboration. He/She will drive learning engagement, partnership development, support, curriculum/content support etc.

What makes our AI+ City Meet-Up different?
• It will encompass all learning segments. For example, we will use our new book on AI for Primary and secondary schools to train Primary/JSS students during holidays/midterm breaks
• All the tutors and city leads are verified and validated instructors who will also be attending regular DSN classes and workshops on regular basis for quality assurance
• Students who are part of these learning communities will have access to DSN internship, virtual work opportunities and job recommendations – especially with our growing project consulting portfolio for local and international clients.
• Each will be fully funded by Data Science Nigeria and operate in partnership with a local facility provider (Hubs/ Campuses etc.)
• The City Lead will also be responsible for our high-impact strategy to get AI into all primary and secondary schools in Nigeria via a Train-the-trainer programme to equip primary and secondary school teachers across Nigeria with the right basic skills to use our new book on AI/Python programming as part of the curriculum

Benefits for the City Leads
• Access to all DSN mentoring, travel grants and support platforms.
• Participation in DSN projects as a way to earn extra income, particularly through our DataCrowd product.
• Access internship at DSN office in Lagos and DSN partner companies
• Recommendation for DSN third party job placements and scholarship opportunities
• Selected candidates will receive special slot to attend the 2019 AI Bootcamp as part of their capacity building and briefing programme (if they are not currently on the list).

Requirements
(1) Selected candidates with good experience that can be validated via Kaggle/GitHub/Zindi
(2) Excellent community building and relationship skills that can be proven
(3) The AI City Lead must be available in the city for the next 6-12 months

Cities of Interest:

  • Abuja
  • Sokoto
  • Kano
  • Zaira
  • Jos
  • Bauchi
  • Gombe
  • Yola
  • Ilorin
  • Ibadan
  • Kaduna
  • Lokoja
  • Abeokuta
  • Ijebu-Ode
  • Osogbo
  • Akure
  • Ado-Ekiti
  • Benin City
  • Owerri
  • Enugu
  • Calabar
  • Uyo
  • Port Harcourt
  • Asaba

To Apply: Click Here


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October 21, 2019 0

In our drive to be a world-class centre of academic research, AI social good solution development, consulting, capacity building and talent pipeline development; we have openings for extremely motivated, brilliant and passionate talents who share in our vision to raise 1million AI talents in 10 years

We cherish our values as a fun-filled, family-oriented, responsible, innovative and knowledge-driven non-profit that is scaling up very fast with global credibility and increasing local endorsement.

We have openings in these areas for some awesome projects we are working on and so many others on the queue:

Find the detailed description for each role attached below

Application Developer for AI solutions

Solution Development Lead

Product Growth and Research Lead

Vacancy Programme Director DSN

Data Architect

Data Scientists Analytics and Visualization

Geospatial Data Interns and Analysts


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October 16, 2019 0

We are excited to welcome Wuraola Oyewusi, a pharmacist and data scienstist who joins Data Science Nigeria as the Lead for Research and Innovation. She is a passionate professional committed to advancing Artificial Intelligence practice. She previously worked with eHealth Africa (eHA), a US firm with the largest data-driven health delivery system in Africa.

She is well recognized in the AI community for her work on Scispacy.Click Here to view it

She has also been in the forefront of the unstructured data application and open source access, especially in the area of health. She developed #NLP Datasets related to health, which she made open to global acknowledgement. Dr Stephen Odaibo of RetinaAI USA (one of our Advisory Board members) actually did a tweet on this Click Here to see attached. The open source dataset is useful for Topic Modelling, Sentiment Analysis, Text Pre-Processing and even more.

She is a Pythonista whose contribution to Pandas was recognized by Marc Garcia. The post on her Pull Request being merged on pandas was a celebration for the Nigerian AI community.Check Here

She was also part of the NLP project led by Dr Wale Akinfaderin (Duke Energy USA) which recently won a grant from the Canadian/Swedish government backed AI4Development on the use of NLP for parliamentary document analysis

Wura has grown to be an end-to-end machine learning and deep learning user with documented proof of study/applications in topics like Sequence Models, Deep Learning, End to end ML with Tensorflow, Time series, Recommendation systems and lately Google IT support Check Here

You can check many of her works via Github repo: Here
At Data Science Nigeria, Wura will be driving our research works, publications/contribution to knowledge, supporting the Knowledge leadership that DSN is known for, application of theory into solution development, leading DSN proprietary in-house bespoke AI suites, consulting support for clients and partners, mentoring of in-house researchers, teaching, project management related to our core solutions and support for ongoing solution development (AI Class Monitor, NaLie, DataCrowd etc.)
Please join us to welcome her with your usual support and camaraderie. She is accessible via email at wuraola@datasciencenigeria.ai


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June 27, 2018 1

Dr. Moustapha Cisse1 was recently appointed as the Lead of the Google Artificial Intelligence (AI) Research Lab in Accra, Ghana, the first Google lab in Africa. It might interest you to know that Moustapha’s journey in AI began when he started designing an algorithm for a strategic game while studying for a Math and Physics degree at a Senegal university. He then went on to study Machine Learning with a Masters and a PhD degree in Paris, France. After spending some time working at Facebook AI Research, he has moved to lead Google’s AI expansion strategy in Africa. Moustapha is an AI technical researcher, hands-on expert and proactive knowledge champion with an inspiring vision for AI in Africa. Below we list ten facts about Moustapha Cisse.

  1. An Axiological AI Expert

Moustapha is a strong believer in AI for social good. He believes that the most fundamental role of Artificial Intelligence is to enrich and enhance the quality of living while also enabling the core values of a society.  Speaking at the ITU’s AI for Good Global Summit2, 3 last June in Geneva, he stressed that developments in AI should aim at making our societies better. He believes that AI should have a direct positive impact on peoples’ lives, in particular, education and healthcare. AI research and applications should be aligned with societies’ values and needs.  It must be anchored on the essence of a society as an enabler of common good.

  1. Advocate for AI as a Solution to Local Problems

Using AI to solve specific local community problems has been another career drive for Moustapha. For example, with regard to malnutrition in Africa, he proposes building AI systems and datasets to predict nutrition crises and also to provide insight for proactive actions4. Moustapha argues that joint partnerships should be established between policy makers and the AI community to build intelligent solutions to local nutrition challenges5. He was very passionate about these issues at the African Green Revolution Forum (AGRF), which took place in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire in 2017.

  1. Concerned with the Limitations in Datasets

“You are what you eat, and right now we feed our models junk food”6. Moustapha emphasizes the need to focus on making our models less biased by relying on high quality and less noisy datasets. He believes that in order to remove bias and inequality, data trust mechanisms should be used to evaluate the input data that AI products and platforms currently rely on.

  1. Believes that AI Bias is more fundamental

Moustapha believes that the AI bias problem is fundamental and can be eliminated only by trustworthy and quality datasets. He advocates a non-discriminatory definition of AI problems seeking to tackle global issues, not just white-centric ones2. Moustapha argues that the AI community should explore many important problems to be solved in developing world, and not only the stereotypical white or male only issues.

  1. Active Participant in African Talent Development

Moustapha is committed to supporting AI development and growth in Africa. His vision for AI in Africa and his technical contribution to the field makes him an inspirational role model for young talented Africans to follow. Moustapha is an influential participant in many African AI talent development and capacity building events. He was a speaker at the Data Science Africa 2016/2017 Summer School, in Uganda/Tanzania respectively7. During that event Moustapha had an active role in the Data Science in Africa Workshop, aiming to develop an engagement framework for young African talent to get more involved in using big data and real time data analytics to solve community problems. Moustapha will be participating in the Deep Learning Indaba8 in September 2018, to be held in South Africa. In collaboration with other prominent AI participants from the continent, Mustapha is genuinely committed to enhancing African involvement in the advancement of AI.

  1. Open Access Advocate

Collaborative, open and free access to knowledge has been central to Moustapha’s personal development. Therefore, he is a strong advocate of open access as a driving force for innovation. Recently, he signed an agreement to boycott the Nature’s Machine Intelligence Journal due to its lack of open access9.

  1. Co-Founder of Black in AI Group

Dr. Moustapha Cisse is a co-founder of a number of AI and machine learning African groups including the BlackinAI10 group, which aims at enhancing black people involvement in AI via sharing ideas, collaborations and initiatives.  He was one of the organisers of the 1st ever Black in AI event, which took place at Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS)  2017 in California, USA, with a clear goal to increase the presence of Black people in the field of artificial intelligence, for both diversity and data bias prevention purposes. He co-founded BlackinAI with Timnit Gebru (Microsoft Research, NYC), Rediet Abebe (Cornell PhD), Sarah M. Brown (University of California, Berkeley), Sanmi Koyejo (University of Illinois) and Lyne P. Tchapmi (Stanford University). BlackinAI  is driving capacity building through conferences and mentorship, while also driving better representation of the black community in the emerging global AI community. It has over 600 members from Africa, Latin America, Asia, Europe, and North America. With over 200 women members.

  1. Extensive AI Researcher

As an active AI researcher, Moustapha’s has many publications in respected international journals and conferences11. His research interests the issue of trust in AI, tackling issues of safety, security, fairness and bias12. Recently, he has been working on understanding and generating adversarial models to evaluate the robustness of AI systems. Such models can benefit speech recognition and semantic segmentation in applications such as personal assistants and self-driving cars. Moustapha has also been working on creating defences for adversarial models. Biases in datasets has been another research issue considered by Moustapha. His research findings show that deep learning models based on popular datasets sometimes learn biased decision- making rules. He argues that assuming datasets are balanced is not always right. His work concludes that bias in datasets can be due to various reasons including racial issues.

  1. Self-Learner

Once inspired by an AI project in an undergraduate algorithmic course, Moustapha self-learnt the basics of AI by watching YouTube videos. His interest and belief has made him a top-level expert in the field. He is classicial reference of “YOU CAN”, whose path has dramatized the fact that it does not matter where you start from, every child in Africa can go and become the best in their chosen career.

  1. A True African

Being an African has not always been an advantage in Moustapha’s AI research career. In a recent interview12, Moustapha talked about the lack of diversity he and other non-western AI researchers have been facing in the AI community. He emphasized that major AI events are usually organized in Western countries. Moustapha talked about his personal discrimination experiences, such as being denied a visa to visit Australia. Dr. Cisse explained that this prevented him from attending the major ICML 201713 AI conference to present two papers accepted by the ICML. Having said that, Moustapha has always been a proud African who loves his continent. He always encourages others to visit his country, Senegal, and learn more about the African culture. On the AI front, Moustapha Cisse has a vision for Africa to be actively involved in state of the art AI advancements that will solve the continent’s problems in agriculture, health and education. His vision and AI technical capabilities will sustain his great contribution to the AI movement in Africa.

Data Science Nigeria is very excited to have Dr. Moustapha Cisse lead this project in the sub-region. We consider ourselves privileged to be a ready pipeline that can leverage the Google Lab platform for truly transformational AI innovations tailor-made to address millennium development goals in the continent.

Written by: Bayo Adekanmbi, Convener Data Science Nigeria & Chief Transformation Officer, MTN Nigeria.

 

References:

[1] http://moustaphacisse.com/

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=seHc3QyDDtc

[3] https://www.itu.int/en/ITU-T/AI/Documents/Report/AI_for_Good_Global_Summit_Report_2017.pdf

[4] https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/132696902.pdf

[5] https://www.afdb.org/en/news-and-events/experts-call-for-early-warning-systems-against-malnutrition-in-africa-17333/

[6] https://venturebeat.com/2018/05/02/datasheets-could-be-the-solution-to-biased-ai/

[7] https://www.datascienceafrica.org/dsa2016/

[8] http://www.deeplearningindaba.com/speakers2018.html

[9] https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/a3yxwb/ai-researchers-are-boycotting-natures-new-machine-intelligence-journal

[10] https://blackinai.github.io/

[11] https://dblp.uni-trier.de/pers/hd/c/Ciss=eacute=:Moustapha

[12] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRWV_LGFGy4

[13] http://www.wikicfp.com/cfp/servlet/event.showcfp?eventid=53557


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May 7, 2018 0

Data Science Nigeria member, Zainab Ishaq Musa, a student of the Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria has led her team (Team Egesta)  to win the Hult Prize regional challenge 2018 competition on the use of machine learning to solve energy challenges.

The competition is a rigorous and high-intensity pitch alongside 5 other teams. The regional winners will be invited to a Summer Accelerator at a castle in the UK and the Global Finals will hold in United States for a $1,000,000 prize.

In this post, we have put together 5 amazing facts about the team leader, Zainab Ishaq Musa that will interest you:

1.

Zainab Ishaq Musa was the only female of the top ten participants offered full employment opportunities by KPMG Nigeria following her participation in a challenge at the Data Science Nigeria Bootcamp hackathon held last year.

At the hackathon, participants were provided with data of twenty-three thousand (23,000) retail customers, from over twenty-nine (29) cities across Nigeria.

Their task was to understand the preferences, levels of satisfaction and expectation of these customers. They were asked to identify five (5) to seven (7) distinct customer segments and develop a market targeting approach for a new dollar card product for them.

The KPMG Feedback to the submissions was noted for its superior conceptualisation, its reflection of an extra mile effort and the ability to leverage data to solve the life problems.

2.

Zainab is passionate about knowledge and she is always willing to go the extra mile in her quest to acquire the latest knowledge in her chosen area. This explains why she had to go through the stress of about 15-16 hours road commuting to attend the past Data Science Nigeria Bootcamps held in Lagos. She was among the participants who attended from locations outside Lagos; such as Zaria, Kaduna, Uyo, Abuja, Ilorin, Ibadan, Abeokuta and Benin Republic.

3.

Zainab is one of the only few people that have participated in 4 Data science Nigerian Kaggle competitions. She painstakingly went through the intensive demand of passing all the pre-qualification courses to the Bootcamp and was among the Top 5% in all ranking. Trust me, the process is rigorous. You can check the details here.

4.

Zainab is a postgraduate student. She was recognized at the 2nd Bootcamp and awarded with a special gift for her participation. She has an M.Sc.in Computer Science from Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, a Post Graduate Diploma from Bayero University, Kano and degrees from Abubakar Tafawa Balewa University, Bauchi and Zamani College, Kaduna. She also won a merit award during her NYSC.

5.

Zainab has built data and predictive models using taxpayers’ information. Her broad experience in data analytics and visualisation includes R, Python, Tableau, GraphLab, Alteryx, Elbow Curve, PCA etc.

Here is what she wrote in her appreciation message:

“I feel great receiving all the congratulatory messages…thank you DSN team for all the inspiration, support, team spirit and love. Wouldn’t ve achieved this feat alone. Mr Bayo Adekanmbi has been a pillar of strength to all of us, we will be forever grateful. To our mentors including him, we’ll keep following ur footsteps and guidance to achieve more and attain greater heights…Merci merci much🙏🏾🙏🏾 love😘”.

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Cross section of the bootcamp participants at one of the plenary learning sessions.
About The Hults Prize

The Hults prize was created to challenge young people to solve the world’s toughest issues by empowering them to make money, do good and make life better for millions of people through the creation of good for-profit businesses.

Hult Prize, through its awards, has helped launch startups that actively solve UN SDGs through leveraging human capital, knowledge and the crowd. The focus is to serve the least fortunate, tackle humanity’s greatest challenge, pursue revenue and sustainability, use existing channels, create a market efficiency, and pursue the untapped market.

The competition will include at least 10 student teams across campus, with the winning team advancing directly to one of the fifteen regional finals, bypassing over fifty thousand applications from the general pool.

One winning team from each host city will then advance to an all-expense paid summer business accelerator program at the Ashridge Castle London for eight weeks, where they will receive mentorship, advisory and strategic planning as they create prototypes and set-up to launch their new social business.

The Hult Prize has received the partnership of the Clinton Global Initiative and the United Nations to create a more prosperous world. The competition is referred to as the Nobel Prize for students and President Bill Clinton calls it one of the top five ideas changing the world.