We were invited to present our new AI4D Network of Excellence in AI in Africa at the Forum on Artificial Intelligence in Africa, organized by UNESCO and Mohamed VI Polytechnic University from 12 to 13 December in Benguérir (Morocco). This was a great opportunity to understand more about AI developments and explore the opportunities and challenges of technological innovations relating to AI in Africa.
Last week we were among the 300+ international speakers and project presenters at the 2018 edition of Online Educa Berlin. Our role was to present AI and Open Educational Resources at the panel Algorithms, Analytics, AI and Personalisation, with the presentation X5GON Project on AI and OER Building a Netflix for Open Education.
We are very happy to announce the launch of the AI for Development Africa project wth IDRC, to support a network of excellence in AI in sub-Saharan Africa to strengthen and develop community scientific and technological excellence in a range of AI-related issue areas.
AI4D Africa is aiming to undertake four interrelated activities and will run for 18 months and result in the establishment of the network, research roadmap, portfolio of innovation projects, and recommendations for capacity building for ethical and locally relevant AI research around the African continent.
The project will draw from the recent IDRC and UNESCO supported mapping and facilitate a bottom-up network/community of researchers who will investigate and recommend how the network/community should shape its research agenda and actions.
At the Mozzilla Foundation offices in Paris we attended a great workshop and witnessed two great keynotes, from the drone delivery start-up Zipline showcasing the use of AI in logistics in Rwanda, and Bruno Lanvin, Executive Director for Global Indices, INSEAD, touching on a new report on AI global indexes to be presented at the 2019 World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos.
The first official review of the X5GON project at the European Commission in Brussels was successful. The project delivering an Artificial Intelligence platform for Open Educational Resources was pronounced as highly innovative and its platform one with great potential. X5GON can help us make a case for the role of OER in achieving Sustainable Development Goal 4.
We shared the idea of opening the platform and its APIs to the OER community and start-ups, and invite them to use our data and tools. This pleased the reviewers who suggested we should think about it as “…like you’re digging a tunnel into a mountain, not knowing what’s behind it – until you let them come to you. It’s a case of letting the community open your eyes to the possibilities.” Congrats to our partners!
VIP tickets in our pockets! This was our first AI World Summit, and it didn’t disappoint. The world’s leading AI summit for the entire AI ecosystem, Enterprise, Big Tech and Research, presented not just a great mix of players, but also the not-for-profit players in the field.
The hype surrounding AI is spreading rapidly across sectors and around the globe, but more research is needed to explore the potential benefits and risks, particularly as they relate to the developing world.
For this purpose we have created a map of AI hot spots in emerging economies. The first mapping comprises 33 countries with a total of 617 institutions across 4 regions, ASIA, LAC, MENA, and SSA. The directory has quantitative value, as it presents the first bottom-up mapping of AI entities in the Global South.
Check the online directory for more detailed browsing. Read the blog here.
We are pleased that the UNESCO Selection Committee has favorably evaluated the proposal for the establishment of a UNESCO Chair on Artificial Intelligence at University College of London which is one of the core members of our network.
The standard Agreement between the UNESCO Director-General and UCL to formally establish the Chair will be prepared shortly.
The Chair will study Artificial Intelligence as a driver and component for solutions and strategies to assist the achievement of the SDGs. This makes John Shawe-Taylor (K4A Chairman) the third trustee to become UNESCO Chair.
We sucessfully presented our machine translation platform TransLexy and the “MT 4 Education” initiative to crack the language barrier for education in developing countries that have “fragmentary” or “weak/no” machine translation support, at the Creative Commons Summit 2018.
This is an annual meeting that celebrates the culture of sharing, and provides a space for open communities to collectively grow a vibrant, usable commons, powered by collaboration and gratitude. The 2018 CC Global Summit took place April 13 – 15, 2018, in Toronto and follows the theme “On Common Ground: Collaborate and Participate”.
We presented the notion of AI in education and Machine Translation tools at the Mobile Learning Week, UNESCO’s flagship ICT in education event. The 2018 edition, under the theme “Skills for a connected world”, examined the types of skills needed in and for a connected economy and society, with a focus on digital skills and competencies. It also reviewed strategies and ways in which these skills can be delivered and assessed within the context of Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG 4).
